For one thing, the filmmakers have said explicitly that they were making their own version of a 50s monster movie. But one of the things I like so much about Cloverfield is that it’s not just a remake or an update or a “re-imagining,” but that they were going for the FEEL of those movies. As told by people who’d SEEN those movies and everything that’s happened in the years since.

But those movies themselves were influenced by Lovecraft to some degree — which is how I think Cloverfield gets all the good bits of post-modernism without being all ironic and self-important. As you already said, Lovecraft’s stories were all about unspeakably horrible things that were OUT THERE and we were powerless to defeat them or even LOOK at them for too long. Monster movies took that aspect, and then filtered that through the optimism of the 50s — you get all the excitement and danger of the horrible monster, plus the promise that technology is going to find some way to beat it.

Cloverfield has all those elements of the 50s monster movies: you’ve got a bland protagonist and love interest, not exactly likeable but not unlikeable, either. You’ve got the monster stomping on buildings. You’ve got the military’s ineffective initial response. And then they add elements of the later zombie movies, and the whole paranoia about the government and the suspicion that they know more than they’re letting on (“She’s been bitten!”).

You’re totally right that the way it’s told (as a “found document”) feels like a Lovecraft story, but I think the psychology is completely different. It’s more a semi-jaded, self-absorbed 2000s take on it than anything else. When they’re describing the monster, they casually say something like “It’s something terrible” and then “Also terrible.” They don’t think in terms of a Lovecraft story, that sense of “what does this mean in terms of our existence in the black void?” but “This sucks, how do I get to my girlfriend?”

And the ending might SEEM nihilistic and hopeless as a Lovecraft story, but I thought it was as “nice” as the cynicism of 2007 will let you get away with without screaming “cop-out!!!” It’s our equivalent of the two leads hugging each other as they look out on the burned out husk of the monster, contemplating where it could have come from. They found each other! And the last shots aren’t of her crying “why is this happening?!?” (which would be the last line of the Lovecraft story), but of her saying, “I had a good day.”

I’m not going anywhere in particular with this… and as mentioned earlier, Lovecraft is pretty super-saturated, especially on the Internet, but the parallels between Cloverfield and Lovecraft’s short stories were so strong when I was watching the movie that it was kind of ridiculous. I hope (and generally assume) it was deliberate, as the tone and structure of the story, and even more specific stuff like the nature and (lack of) origin of the monster seem to have come straight off the page as much as (if more than) off the screen.