Despite Lovecraft's (HPL) immense popularity for his innovations in horror, there really haven't been many good adaptations of his work. Sure, plenty of horror has definitely been influenced by him, but most adaptations thus far have been either poorly made, low-budget b-movie trash, or just fairly average. The best examples are probably a few Stuart Gordon films and perhaps even Color Out of Space. While The West Records (TWR) is not an adaptation, it is very clearly influenced by HPL's work. The main character is named Randall Carter, similar to Randolph Carter in HPL's Dreamcycle stories, with certain segments in TWR resembling the surreal, dreamlike nature of those stories. There's a reference to "The Black One," several other names are similar to characters in some of his stories, TWR's title seems to be a reference to Herbert West, and there is a scene with seaweed that seems eerily out of place, possibly alluding to the oceanic nature of some of HPL's Great Old Ones. So this is a found footage series, similar to films like Blair Witch Project (BWP), where an unwitting person finds the footage and presents it to the public. In more recent years the footage tends to be more chopped up, distorted, possessing artifacts, etc, and this is no exception. Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be other web series that further developed ideas began popularly with BWP and other lesser known precursors, such as Marble Hornets (MH), which has many of the same tropes, with a camera man who seems to film everything, even when his life is in danger, digital distortion and noise to disorient the viewer and create tension, the naturalism of a handheld cameraman/commentator, their mental deterioration, etc, and TWR has all of that. The most important difference between something like MH and TWR is that the former engages in the established mythology of the creature feature, like you would see with the vampire, werewolf, mummy, Frankenstein's monster, etc, which is so done to death and falls into standard horror film cliches, lacking any real mystery. MH does have a winding and mysterious plot, but the main creature is the now tiresome internet urban legend known as Slender Man. TWR on the other hand is all around mysterious. There never seems to be one truly tangible creature, and what is shown is usually distorted or unclear, and there is certainly the cosmic horror of HPL present in this story, which usually entails a phenomenon or being beyond human understanding--thus an entity can't be shown, or if it is shown, it's shown in a piecemeal fashion, so the form is unclear and left to the imagination to some extent. In HPL's work, creatures usually can't be described or the unreliable narrator goes mad from any attempt to understand its nature. This is obviously more conducive to GOOD horror more so than something like Frankenstein, no matter how "classic" it may be perceived as. The story of TWR begins with a framing device where a man finds a bunch of corrupted tapes, cleans them up, and puts them on Youtube. The actual story involves a cameraman, Randall, his boss, Parker, and a third wheel who quickly gets dropped from the story, named Emma (I suspect they wrote her out of the series for some reason), who are investigating an abandoned military base where thousands of people disappeared and were never accounted for, kind of like a modern day Roanoke (though, tbh, the historical account of Roanoke is actually pretty clear, and modern history textbooks make it into a huge mystery half of the time). Strange experiments being carried out on the base are sometimes alluded to, and even from early incidents it appears there's something not quite right about the location. Most horror web series are quite amateurish and silly, and while this series does have moments like that, there is a plausible excuse for the character filming what is happening. The roughly edited raw footage of a cameraman lumbering around with a camera is kind of a double-edged sword for works like these. It gives it a natural feeling and the lack of polish and distinct style seems well-tailored to horror, but it also often results in lots of long slow, and, frankly, boring takes. For the most part, this series did a pretty good job with pacing and includes more edits, while maintaining the naturalism this style is known for. It's actually fairly cinematic, often playing with mixed lighting and focus effectively, though still providing some camera goofs to make it feel more realistic. Wandering through the woods and abandoned locales has rarely been so atmospheric, and the sound design becomes amazing as the series develops. Some of the sound design in later segments is easily top tier within the horror genre. It becomes a wild, hallucinatory ride of what seems like alternate dimensions and either time loops or time distortion and strange creatures and people that lurk in the woods near the base, especially beyond the river. But, unfortunately, the series has been in limbo for a long time--it's been about three years since the last episode was released, so it's possible the series won't be finished. I'd like to rate it above a 6, but being unfinished prevents me from doing so. It's easily the best web series I've seen, other than the amazing Petscop and the odd Cat Ghost animation. Other notable series to try would be This House Has People in It, and other Wham City Comedy projects.