Directed by Richard Stanley, written by Scarlett Amaris and Richard Stanley, starring Nicolas Cage
This review of the recent movie Color Out of Space is biased. Here’s why:
a. I have made four short indie movies based on or inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and one by Robert Chambers.
b. John Strysik and I had a small but electrifying role that catalyzed Andrew Migliore to launch the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival®, now entering its 25th year in Portland, Oregon. John and I were the first two filmmaker guests, with Jeffrey Combs introducing the horror anthology movie Necronomicon: Book of the Dead, which he starred in as H.P. Lovecraft.
c. I founded and ran the Los Angeles franchise of the HPLFF for its entire 7-year lifespan.
d. I was awarded the “Howie” from the HPLFF for my contributions to Lovecraft cinema.
e. I have an MFA in cinema directing from Columbia College Chicago, but that’s only relevant if you’re the kind of person who believes graduate degrees in the arts is a prerequisite for art criticism.
Next are my sour grapes:
a. Strange aeons ago I co-wrote, with Ken Lobb, a feature film screenplay adaptation of Lovecraft’s original story, The Colour Out of Space. You can read it here.
a. It won first place for a student script competition from Columbia College.
b. Director Stuart Gordon read it and asked for a rewrite which we never finished.
c. The script was submitted to an HPLFF screenplay contest but failed to show.
b. The Colour Out of Space is one of my favorite Lovecraft tales.
c. Richard Stanley was a featured guest at a Los Angeles HPLFF, but there were some problems, one being not screening his movie The Otherworld. Long story, ask me later.
Richard Stanley has accomplished far more than I could ever do in an industry I hope(d) to establish myself in. I am envious of his talent and success. I believe this critique is punching up.
I watched Color Out of Space (COS) at the Arclight Santa Monica, Friday Jan 24, at 10:15pm. There were six or maybe seven other people in the audience, one being my wife whose biases are similar to, but not as deep, as mine.
Overview
I am extremely pleased this movie exists. Untold ages have crumbled since a straight Lovecraft adaptation came out of Hollywood. (COS is an independently financed — about $6M USD reported — and produced picture which was bought and distributed theatrically by RLJE Films for a low-mid seven-figure sum, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It is arguably not a Hollywood movie, but I am slapping that label on it anyways. If you want to call me out for that term, do, but I hope that doesn’t invalidate the remainder of my review.)
Sure, hundreds of indie features and shorts have been screening at the HPLFF for a quarter-century, but the last big(ger) budget ones are merely “Lovecraftian” in tone and feel, and not taken from the original texts. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Stuart Gordon’s Dagon, adapting “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” from 2001, was the last.
I hope COS triggers* more big(ger) budget adaptations, because it pleases me to see HPL’s work on a big screen. Stanley told The Hollywood Reporter:
All of Lovecraft’s work is in the public domain, so over the next few years, anyone could go forward and make their own Call of Cthulhu. I’m intrigued to see what the next two to three years will bring with Jordan Peele’s Lovecraft Country and other upcoming projects. It seems to me that Lovecraft’s time has come.
I concur. This is a good thing. Next from Stanley will be an adaptation of The Dunwich Horror, which I feel is a more ready-made action horror plot than the slow burn of The Colour Out of Space, and I can’t wait to see it.
However, Color Out of Space was not made the way I would have made it, and I find this variant inferior to what Lovecraft’s words evoked in my mind’s eye. I feel COS missed a great opportunity to create something remarkable.
It’s a decent horror movie, but it’s not a cosmic horror movie.
The film’s plot, besides modernizing the setting, mostly followed the original, including using original text in a wraparound narration. It’s a good translation of ink to pixel more than an adaptation, like Kubrick’s The Shining is more adaptation than a medium translation of Stephen King’s book. But there were changes from The Colour Out of Space to Color Out of Space, and I believe those changes diluted the dread embedded in print.
Here be the spoilers.
Specifics
One of the biggest differences was the timing of events. The source material features a water surveyor (the hydrologist in the movie, played by Elliott Knight) investigating a “blasted heath” outside Arkham, Lovecraft’s fictional Massachusetts town. He manages to get Ammi Pierce, a neighbor, to recount the yarn of the “strange days” that began when a meteorite struck the farm of Nahum Gardner and his family more than forty years prior. In Ammi’s flashback, more than a year passes between the rock’s impact and the final, horrifying climax at the well. The movie apparently condenses this to two, maybe three days. Stanley created the stereotypical problem of white people in horror movies — why don’t they just leave — that Lovecraft avoided as the monstrous color’s influence only slowly seeped into the farm. Ammi noticed because weeks or months would pass between his visits to the Gardners, and he wasn’t under the alien’s constant influence. Like man-made global climate change, by the time we notice the worst effects, it’s too late.
The second change between movie and text was one of character perspective. As mentioned, in the story, Ammi is our guide, Virgil to the water surveyor as Dante. I saw the movie as an ensemble cast, despite Nicolas Cage leading. Screen time slivered between seven characters, fracturing my sympathy for all of them. Worse, cutting between them obfuscated their motivations. I am still unclear as to why Nathan (Cage) acted the way he did. Was it:
· His mind cracked under the strain of facing our true incomprehensible reality?
· The color possessed him?
· The color tried to possess him but he went crazy fighting it off?
· Because Nicolas Cage had a camera pointed at him?
Lavinia (played by Madeleine Arthur) commented to her brother about “Dad acting weird” after swearing at her. OK, so that behavior is not normal. Why is he acting that way? I don’t need to know what the character’s intent is — in fact, it’s scarier if I don’t — but it’s difficult for me to get attached to someone “acing weird” for reasons unknown. Here, too, Stanley misses what I consider to be one of the more terrifying descriptions from Lovecraft:
Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about “the moving colours down there.” Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his mother’s. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth. [emphasis mine]
Knowing that the color prompted their bizarre behavior, but concealing its alien goal is more frightening than trying to figure out why Nathan, in the movie, hallucinates his family happily sitting in the living room.
I also had difficulty willingly suspending my belief. Too many instances didn’t pass my realism filter. These are nitpicks — if there were fewer than a half dozen, I wouldn’t really care. But this many irked my aesthetics and detracted from my enjoyment:
1. Ward the hydrologist is wearing the same shirt on the second day, with no indication he was up all night.
2. Although the family car gave up the ghost, why didn’t they try to leave on the tractor, the horse, or just walk? Twelve miles down a forested highway is a long way, but there’s an alien death color where you are. Start moving.
3. Putting the mom-son monster upstairs was more trouble than covering the windows. Or why not in the wine cellar?
4. The police vehicle lights were blue only, not red and blue as they are in America.
5. The size of the crater on the farm was minuscule compared to what a rock that size would have left. Meteors that we see in the sky are grains of sand. The Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona is almost a mile wide and 570 feet deep, and was created by a rock 30–50 meters diameter. The object seen in the movie was more than a meter in size. The COS crater should have been at least 100 feet wide and over 10 feet deep.
6. In our modern era, a meteor of that size hitting a few miles from civilization (Arkham) would be seen by many people, even late at night. Someone’s security cam would capture the fireball through the atmosphere. Scientists would swarm the alpaca farm. In fact, Lovecraft features learned men in the original story:
Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and had dropped in at Ammi Pierce’s on the way…He and his wife had gone with the three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before…The day after that — all this was in June of ’82 — the professors had trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi’s they told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone’s affinity for silicon. …there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown.
This is another missed opportunity. Lovecraft took great pains to be as realistic as possible about the tests the men performed on the meteorite. What should be terrifying is that they can’t explain what it is nor why it just vanished. But the movie doesn’t have any of this, instead it’s a cringe-worthy “comedic” scene of improper local news making fun of Nathan. Stanley, in his interview, says “With Color, I was keen to confront the audience with that essential Lovecraftian moment, where a lone, wholly inadequate human being is forced to face something they have no hope of dealing with, something indescribably more powerful than themselves.”
Cool. So why not shove humanity’s best and brightest into the maw of “something indescribably more powerful than themselves” instead of a cast of insultingly rich spoiled white people we (or I, at least) sorta kinda wanna see blasted into dust? (See “no sympathetic main character” argument above.)
Maybe this was just me, but it seemed like Benny, the oldest child, was an amateur astronomer or at least interested in outer space, as evidenced by the display on his computer screen. However, he doesn’t explain anything about the meteor or the significance of one reaching us intact. Why didn’t he stand in for the missing Miskatonic scientists? Here’s a recent story about what was found when a meteorite was studied. I feel there is more cosmic horror in that article — material older than Earth itself! — than what was suggested in the movie (because no scientist was there reflecting on the cosmos). I shudder to think about an organism that could survive billions of years in the void reaching our precious, dying planet.
My last nitpick is the “monster cam POV” that is too commonplace in horror movies. A few times in the picture, we “see” what the color sees through its kaleidoscopic perception. While very pretty, it humanizes an inhuman alien, a color, an energy field, or “sentient radiation” as Stuart Gordon called it. In cinema, showing us someone’s POV often evokes empathy or sympathy — for me, it is never frightening. I don’t want to know if the monster is secretly looking at the victim. Not knowing if death awaits is far more dreadful than confirming that it is because it’s looking at a character. Moreover, if the color is so alien, we should not be able to comprehend how it sees, if it sees at all.
Lastly, Stanley said in a recent THR interview when asked about another interview with The Austin Chronicle:
I’m not quite ready to cave into Lovecraft’s dark nihilism.
THR: That’s interesting, given Color Out of Space’s necessarily downbeat ending. Without spoiling anything: Does your movie’s ending serve as a jumping-off point for where you’re going to go with your next two Lovecraft adaptations?
Stanley: It does, because Ward [Elliot Knight] will continue on through the next two movies. The Dunwich Horror adaptation that I am working on now will probably take place seven years after the events of Color, or someday in a future version of the Lovecraftian city of Arkham, which is where I’ll continue to explore the concept of the Old Ones returning to Earth. I think these movies will climax with a battle between humanity and the Old Ones.
Sanitizing Lovecraft’s dark nihilism and jangling the shiny spectacle of humanity’s last stand against the Great Old Ones makes for exciting cinema (or at least a thrilling pitch to get millions of dollars to make a movie), but it’s not cosmic horror, which is what Lovecraft created. True cosmic horror tears the scab of ignorance off, revealing “…the Great Old Ones ‘sleep’ or are somehow restrained, but seek freedom; and once released, they will destroy humanity. This will not be some war, just as a man does not war with an anthill, but a complete annihilation. The horrific truth that hovers beyond these theories is this: the Great Old Ones are beyond human classification and conception and forever will be.” (from the Delta Green RPG Handler’s Guide). Perhaps securing an investment of millions for a true Lovecraft cosmic horror feature film is as feasible as an anthill slaying a human.
There were wonderful elements in Color Out of Space: the special effects, both CG and the non-digital creature effects deserve superlative praise, even if some of the latter straddles between homage to or rip-off of Rob Bottin’s work in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Kudos for Color Out of Space’s fan service — the “branch” Elder Sign news logo, the Simonomicon, and Liv Rainey-Smith’s woodcut print image on the lead actress’s shirt, as well as special thanks to Sean Branney and Andrew Leman and the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. I would love to see it again just to find more Easter eggs, and more names of people I know in the credits.
There have been other adaptations (or translations) of Lovecraft’s story throughout the years. These are the five I have seen:
Die, Monster, Die! (1965) — Starring Boris Karloff and distributed by Roger Corman’s AIP. A classic, and the second big screen movies based on Lovecraft. Considering the times, budget, and audiences, this is an enjoyable romp. The climactic scene doesn’t compare to today’s effects, but it is worth viewing. (Trailer)
The Curse (1987) — Starring Wil Wheaton (and featuring Clause Akins!). Unless you’re a completist or have a soft spot for bad 80s horror, skip this. (Trailer)
Colour from the Dark (2008) — Directed by Ivan Zuccon, this is a good indie feature version of the story, possibly the one that’s most comparable to Stanley’s. It was made in Italy but is in accented English. Gory, but what put me off are the elements of Catholicism which infect the plot, ruining Lovecraft’s vast uncaring cosmos which humanity can never understand. (Trailer)
Die Farbe (The Color Out of Space) (2010) — This indie feature directed by Huan Vu and made in Germany (Engish subtitles), is arguably the best COOS adaptation out there. The only feature shot in black and white, it captures the other-worldliness of The Colour extremely well. Highly recommended. (Trailer)
Annihilation (2018) — Big budget Hollywood movie that’s based on James VanderMeer’s best-selling novel (part of the Southern Reach trilogy) is loosely inspired by the “The Colour Out of Space”, but where it differs in plotting it makes up in true alien-ness, which reminded me of the original story enough to include it in the list. This is certainly more an adaptation than a translation. (Trailer)
Although I concur with New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, whose review of COS states “The movie springs from an H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name, which is considerably scarier, stealthier, and more scientifically detailed than what we observe onscreen,” I enjoyed the movie. It was not as good as I think I could have made, and it satisfied the cliché “the book is better.” But the movie was made, while mine was not, and something is better than nothing.
For other reviews of Color Out of Space, see this link or this link.
To watch a Q&A with Richard Stanley at the Portland H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival®, click here.
* I typed “trigger” deliberately so I could acknowledge “H.P. Lovecraft was a racist**” in a footnote and support the Internet of Beefs.
** Publicly calling Lovecraft a racist also triggers his apologists. Now we can play bingo.