RLJE Films
Here’s a confession: I don’t ‘get’ cosmic horror, or psychedelic horror either. I’ve never read any of the old Lovecraftian stories but of course I’m familiar with the concepts in general just by virtue of being a nerd and reading a few adaptive works by Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. And the funny ‘The Adventures of Lil’ Cthulu’. Of course, any adaptation is tricky of Lovecraft, because much of his horror came from lack of understanding, of sensory experiences beyond explanation.
So how do you show them in a movie?
The 2018 film Mandy, that also starred Nicolas Cage, offered a sort of psychedelic horror, but it used insane imagery, bizarre color choices, and a perfectly nuts soundtrack to draw you into the horror revenge fantasy. I actually quite liked it, but part of that was that it was only inspired by impossible imagery, instead of trying to portray it on screen.
Color Out of Space comes from director Richard Stanley, his first film since the 90s, based on the short story ‘The Colour Out of Space’ by H. P. Lovecraft. The film doesn’t do a straight adaptation, as it’s set in the modern world, and anyway adaptation of word-to-screen should never be exact. We follow the Gardner family on their farm near the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts, a town Lovecraft used often in his works.
Mother Theresa (Joely Richardson) — is it a coincidence of her name? I think it is — is recovering from a bout against cancer, and daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) is way into Wiccan rituals. Both of these subplots aren’t really followed through once the horror part of the movie kicks in. Brother Benny (Brendan Meyer) isn’t that interesting, and Nathan the father (Nicolas Cage) is a frustrated artist wannabe failure and weirdly too intense. Typical Cage.
Near the farm is old hippie squatter Ezra (Tommy Chong), who seems out of place. And then there’s Ward (Elliot Knight), a young hydrologist analyzing the local water for a dam project, and of course he connects with the Gardner family and their daughter. Then a mysterious meteor from space lands in the middle of the night, and weird things start happening, starting with the odd contamination of the water.
Soon we see madness in people, mutations in animals (the family keeps a stable of alpacas), and increasingly crazy situations. The ‘being’ of the meteorite is something of lights, hot pink and neon, oddly tentacled. In the short story, the ‘colour’ is not describable or truly understandable. Here though too it is certainly described by characters as being ‘too beautiful’ or horrifying.
The latter horror half of the movie feels pretty rote, in all honesty. Not particularly inventive from a visual perspective, which is one of the main things you want out of a concept like this. There’s a lot you can do with film to screw with the audience’s heads, but simply showing off-putting pink colors isn’t really one of them. Nicolas Cage is fun as he always is, and Madeleine Arthur is delightfully off-centre in her performance too.
Otherwise, I didn’t really connect with the characters, making it harder to really care when things started to get cosmically horrible. Perhaps if I hadn’t seen the far superior Mandy I’d be more charitable, but ah, there you are. We still don’t have the definitive Lovecraft adaptation (sorry Del Toro). Maybe one day.
Color Out of Space has a run time of 1 hour 51 minutes and is unrated.
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