Colours Out of Space

Did you know there exist at least FIVE movie adaptations of this Lovecraft’s short story?

Colour Out of Space is a good story. For one, it doesn’t really delve into Lovecraft’s racism. Plus there is this very humane subplot, not at all common in Lovecraftian work, in which it is the greed of man that actually may bring his downfall. You remember the mayor in Jaws ultimately wanting to reopen the beaches despite warnings and common sense? There’s a bit of that in Colour out of Space. Sure, it’s mainly about a meteorite falling on an estranged farm and the mutation it will bring to the flora all around, then to the cattle and with definite precision to each and every family member. What did the space rock bring? In distinctive Lovecraftian fashion, a colour. Nothing else than a colour.

Recently I introduced a colleague of mine to Lovecraft, to the concept of cosmic horror he created. One has to always keep in mind that Lovecraft was a racist, and there’s a definite possibility you might stumble upon some very offensive lines if you were to read his complete bibliography, yet we still have to remind ourselves that before Lovecraft horror tended to be real Christian-like. Most of the arcane writers would picture their unknown menace as demons, type of creature which could be repelled by either God or faith.

Lovecraft threw all of this out the window, wrote that the universe was big and void and didn’t care about the human race. Lo vecraft stated there were beings that were hurting us from across the veil of dimension but it was not because of simple malice, we, as a species, were so insignificant to them, they could simply destroy us as we step on ants. The mere thoughts of their grandeur could turn one man mad, imagine if one were to witness such entities.

Colour out of Space is a perfect example of such an idea. A short story through which a piece of rock contaminates the soil and everything around it. To a recent day reader, there might even be a slight ecological overtone with authorities refusing to acknowledge the terror and wanting to drown everything while constructing a dam.

In Lovecraftian fashion — well in Poe’s fashion to be precise — the tale is told through the eye of a protagonist who witnessed those very events of madness. A farmer that lives afar but still close to the farm and would worry once the alienated family had disappeared. This particular situation would make him a witness but not the entirety of the events.

It’s really no wonder that in 1965, a first film adaptation was shot in just two months under the working title The House at the End of the World. Die Monster Die! is a horror film directed by Daniel Haller. Haller was first a set decorator for Roger Corman before moving on to directing thanks to Die Monster Die. He would then make two biker movies before returning one last time to Lovecraft with an adaptation of the Dunwich horror.

Many would tell you that this particular movie is just a low-budget horror flick as Corman used to put out one after the other throughout his entire career. This would be a valid opinion against which I would argue that there’s some interest in seeing this adaptation of the Lovecraftian tale. In fact, it’s the same I would provide to you concerning watching all those movies.

By watching every adaptation of the Colour out of space you get a glimpse of every horror trend there ever was.

Meaning Haller’s movie sure does not follow the original short story. For one, our hero is a guy coming back to his hometown to ask his fiancée to marry him. In typical old horror fashion, as soon as he gets off the train, everyone in the village tries to warn him that he shouldn’t approach the Witley’s abode “for strange things are a-happening ‘round here”.

Man decides to go in, and gets attacked by a black figure. His mate’s father refused him to marry her, in fact he wants the guy to get out as soon as possible. And well, we never see a meteorite. Yes there’s this strange rock but it’s only light coming out of the well, and it has allegedly turned the Witley’s mad. Except for the love interest.

Watching this, you sort of begin to understand why such recipes fell into oblivion. It was shot in a studio, but what certainly appeared classy in the 30s when cinema was in black and white seems really cheap under more effective projectors. There’s the love interest, the warning signs, a murder to solve, everything ends in fucking fire as it should be. I mean look at any Universal monsters classic and count how many do not end with a bright fire.

Remnants of a past era but interesting nonetheless for its genuine archaic yet distinctive taste.

It seems a remake of Die Monster Die was planned in 70 but got canned. But then in the 80s, a new adaptation was planned. It was first announced as The Well, then, through production, it earned the working title of The Farm and finally was released in 1987 with its definitive title The Curse. According to Wikipedia, the movie was mainly short in the filmmaker’s, David Keith, residence in Tennessee, before interiors were shot in studios in Italy. To cover this fact, the studio gave the technician American names and it appears even Lucio Fulci worked on said film.

While the Curse is considered a more faithful adaptation of the original short story, it is set in the 80S and does not adopt the point of view of an outsider looking in but follows more closely the son of the family.

In this very 80s flick, a meteor crashes in the backyard of a newly found family. Meaning our hero is a teenage boy whose mom just remarried after his father’s death? Of course he has problems with his stepfamily. Although his stepfather isn’t really a bad one, his stepbrother is definitely a mean one.

The fall of the meteor brings growth to the flora they’re cultivating on the farm and since the alien entity has contaminated the well, every member of the family soon turns rabid. A deep focus is put on the mother growing more ugly and insane by the moment. While this could be a very distinct nod to the first adaptation, it shall be noted that in the original short story, the mother mutates completely into something the main character witnesses but can’t really describe. So this focus on a motherly figure turning batshit crazy could be for either reason.

During the collapse of his life, the young one is nonetheless supported by a local square young male, a doctor which enables the filmmaker to do two things. First to have a tie-in story in which the mayor wants to buy the farm out so he can submerge it with water by building a dam. Also there’s some slight nudity because the doctor’s girlfriend is not very faithful to him. Sorta like the mother. Well, it’s eighties horror, y’all, there’s bound to be some titties.

There’s also some paranoid homage to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Remember that by the time the Curse got made both the Siegel and the Kaufman version had been released. Certainly they left an imprint on the writers or at the least on the producers. For, you see, the film begins right away with cops trying to arrest an armed man who has allegedly taken some hostages.

The whole mayor subplot would remind anyone of Jaws. You have to note that it didn’t exist in previous materials, so, yup, genuine 80s product right there!

The Curse was a failure, gaining only $1,9 million on a $5 millions budget. This may explain why our next two entries do not come from the US. In 2008, Ivan Zuccon, an Italian filmmaker specializing in Lovecraftian adaptation, released Colour From the Dark upon the world for a budget of $100,000.

Yes, this particular adaptation lacks money, but it is supposed to take place in Italy during World War 2 which will become interesting in a bit. It features Debbie Rochon as a main character, because hiring small time horror divas was really common in those days.

In Colour from the Dark, a meteor crashed on a farm, but the family who resides in the building is solely composed of two attractive women — one being mentally disabled — and one guy. Once again the meteor contaminates the well and everybody’s drinking it so everybody’s mutatuting. There’s also this story about the woman’s brother being at war and needing to come back. It is through him that everything will unravel. Sort of like the doctor in the previous iteration, our soldier stumbles upon the decaying family and has to fight his way out of it. So it’s basically the same plot but with different characters, having stilla heavy focus on an attractive lady turning into a monster.

What I really want to talk about is the bleak image, the yellow tint they gave to the picture. In 2008, the whole Matrix trilogy had already come out, and it was not uncommon for filmmakers to apply particular filters on their pictures. The strange shades of grey and yellow found in this movie instantly remind me of the Italian porno movies I watched as a kid. But it also reminded me of another low budget horror movie of the 2000S, Flesh for the Beast. For the decorum appears barren, the lights are both harsh and really bleak.

I tell you, Colour From the Dark is a pretty good example of independent horror feature made during the 2000s.

Aaaaah, Die Farbe or Colour out of Space in the US. It’s a German black and white film directed by Huan Vu, his second film actually before a 10 years hiatus. I must admit it’s because of this movie I began this whole paper, not because I loved it but because it showed me there existed other adaptations of the Lovecraftian short story outside of the Richard Stanley one.

This may be the most faithful of every adaptation ever made. In this one, a guy comes back to Germany to decipher the mystery surrounding what happened to his father in a small village. Most of the film is flashbacks, for his father was a soldier during World War 2, and he wanted to go to a certain farm. On said farm a meteor had crashed into the well turning everyone either insane or monstrous. You know the drill by now.

What’s interesting is this one is retold through the perspective of people involved so as to try and regain this lovecraftian vibe of real-life accounts. Another noticeable thing being the balck and white format, only broken by the purple colour emanating from the well or from diseased body. It shall be noted that in the first movie, the meteorite was green, in the second film, there was no colour and in the third one the contamination was shown by a shade of grey. It’s in Die Farbe that the colour gains its purple tint we all have grown accustomed to.

Also, on an aesthetic level, the movie is always slightly blurry, so as to hide the blend SFX and real images together. A technique that was common at the time in short film such as Batman Ashes to Ashes or Kaydara. You can find those digital flare effects that filmmakers dabbling with digital loved so much at the time.

In 2013, Richard Stanley, the sSouth African director of Dust Devil but his most notorious for having been fired from The Island of Dr Moreau, started showing a homemade trailer as a proof of concept of an adaptation he wanted to do. It was a mishmash of movies including some cited on this list. In 2015 Spectrevision picked the idea and in 2018 Nicolas Cage joined the cast.

In Stanley’s vision a meteorite once again hit a small farm, before poisoning the family well and slowly turning the flora, their apalga cattle and the family itself into abomination. It’s interesting to note that since we’re now in the late 2010s, the production now possesses a diverse cast which was somehow lacking on this list.

There are more modern topics involved, like a hippie talking to the forest, the main character being a female teenager involved in Wiccan rituals and our famous violet colour introduced in a previous entry.

With a budget estimated to be $6 million, it is also the entry where the production value shines the most. Yet, it’s more interesting to note that for once the family is not dysfonctionnel, although the mother is recovering from cancer. There are teenagers smoking weed, moms trying to teach their daughters about seduction, modern topics.

The aesthetic is also very modern with vibrant colour grading we’ve become accustomed to thanks to films like Hereditary or It Follows. As for the mother subplot, for once, her transformation into a monster isn’t really the focus of the movie, despite a scene through the ending definitely worth watching.

It is also the first time any of the movie really attempts to capture the integrality of the short story, with the colour escaping at the end, leaving only a crater behind it. A feat none of the other entry, except for Die Farbe — although the end plays differently with a group of soldiers trying to obfuscate the well with a grenade.

It was rumored to be the first part of a trilogy of Lovecraftian adaptations by Stanley. Kinda like what Stuart Gordon once did, but I take that since the recent allegations thrown at the director we may very well never see his future visions.

Pfiou, this was a long paper, next week we’ll talk about Mathieu Turi’s Hostile in French Frights!