The Unnamable gives the appearance of having been slung together by student filmmakers looking for a big break and feels amateurishly made. Most of the performances seem to be given by non-professionals. There is not much to the film – the bulk of it consists of people wandering around the house and being killed. The plot that holds all this together is exceedingly slim. There is little explanation of what is going on – it is never explained why Winthrop’s daughter is a demon, for instance. (The original 1923 Lovecraft story is almost as slight. It is actually more of a ghost story and is very vague about the presence in the house. As a result, the film has to invent the entire backdrop about the Winthrop family).

Director Jean-Paul Ouellette does a fair job at times – some of the attacks are okay – but fails to pump up the atmosphere much elsewhere. One thing to be said in Jean-Paul Oullette’s favour is that he makes a moderate stab at taking his H.P. Lovecraft seriously – which would make The Unnamable one of the few films of the whole post-Re-Animator cycle to do so. There is some effort made to attain a Lovecraftian mood by keeping the demon in the house unseen until right up to the end. In the end though, it is hard to swallow a contemporary Miskatonic University that has been taken over by fraternities, Ivy League snobs and jocks on the prowl.

Jean-Paul Oullette and star Mark Kinsey Stephenson returned for a sequel The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter (1993). The only other film Jean-Paul Oullette has made is an obscure martial arts film Chinatown Connection (1990).

Other films based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft include:- The Haunted Palace (1963), Die, Monster, Die/Monster of Terror (1965), The Shuttered Room (1966) and The Dunwich Horror (1969). The big success in the modern era was Stuart Gordon’s splattery black comedy version of Re-Animator (1985), which popularised Lovecraft on film. This led to a host of B-budget Lovecraft adaptations, including Stuart Gordon’s subsequent From Beyond (1986), The Curse (1987), The Resurrected (1992), Necronomicon (1993), Lurking Fear (1994), Gordon’s Dagon (2001), and other works such as The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (2003), Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2006), Cool Air (2006), Chill (2007), Cthulu (2007), The Tomb (2007), Colour from the Dark (2008), The Dunwich Horror (2009), Pickman’s Muse (2010) and The Whisperer in Darkness (2011). Also of interest is Cast a Deadly Spell (tv movie, 1991), a tv movie set in an alternate world where magic works and where the central character is a detective named H.P. Lovecraft; Juan Piquer Simon’s cheap and loosely inspired Cthulu Mansion (1992); John Carpenter’s Lovecraft homage In the Mouth of Madness (1995); and the fanboy comedy The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulu (2009). Lovecraft’s key work of demonic lore The Necronomicon also makes appearances in films such as Equinox (1970), The Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992), and was also borrowed as an alternate retitling for Jesus Franco’s surreal and otherwise unrelated Succubus/Necronomicon (1969) about a BDSM dancer.