So this is it. The culmination of, and reason for, my Richard Stanley Retrospective. Color Out of Space, released on VOD last week, marks the South African director’s return to large scale filmmaking since his disastrous experience making 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (as captured in the documentary Lost Soul). Is it a return to the form of his 90’s heyday or a total horror-show (not the good kind)?
The Gardner family live in a rural idyll on their farm near Arkham, Maine. The mother, Theresa (Joely Richardson), trades online from the attic while Dad, Nathan (Cage), and son, Benny (Brendan Meyer), raise Alpacas on the farm. Jack-Jack (Julian Hilliard), the youngest son, wanders the wilds surrounding the farmhouse, while daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur – Christine from All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) performs teenage witchcraft in the woods. Her attempts to stave off the return of her mother’s cancer. This relative serenity is disturbed when a strange meteorite strikes the farm, emanating a strange new “color” that defies description.
The Old Folk Have Gone Away, and Foreigners Do Not Like To Live There
Look, lets get this out of the way: this is based upon the short story by H.P. Lovecraft and he’s not exactly known for his happy endings. The expectation shouldn’t be “what could possibly go wrong?” or “how will our plucky heroes escape?” but “just how bad are things going to get?”.
The tension comes less from what’s going to happen and more from how it’s going to be depicted. The power of Lovecraft’s original short story is its unnerving vagueness. The events surrounding the meteor’s arrival and mysterious effects on the Gardner family are relayed to the narrator via third person, old Ammi Pierce, who doesn’t appear in this adaptation. The invasive colour itself and its unknowable influence are described in ambiguous terms, leaving the true horror up to the readers imagination. It’s an approach that’s impossible for the “show, don’t tell” medium of film, so Stanley adapts the story liberally to make it work, and for the most part, it does.
Even before the strange visitor from another world arrives, Stanley perfectly captures the eerie atmosphere of the deep woods at night, the lonesomeness of the Gardner’s isolated farmhouse. He creates a new family for the Gardners, basing characters on himself and his own family, to flesh out the bare-bones cast from the original story. The unknowable “color” itself is locked down (a kind of purple/puice) and he adds a soupçon of body horror from John Carpenter’s The Thing. Visions of eldritch nightmare-worlds from other Lovecraftian works are also added to give the formless terror some form.
Horror Beyond Imagination?
Even with all this rich detail however, Color Out of Space is not a terribly frightening film. I hadn’t been expecting actual unspeakable-horrors-that-would-drive-a-man-insane to appear on screen, but I was hoping for something close. Some of what happens to certain members of the family is horrifying, but this sets certain expectations early on that the rest of the film doesn’t follow through on.
Nicolas Cage provides a relatively subdued (for him) performance. Don’t expect a performance on the scale of Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy. He only unleashes his trademark arsenal of twitches and verbal tics when needed; when the worst of the “color” overcomes him. Both Cage and Joely Richardson are primarily in supporting roles however, with Madeleine Arthur’s Lavinia and Elliot Knight’s Ward, a hydrologist surveying the region for an upcoming reservoir, acting as engaging leads as they try to find out whats going on.
While the physical creature effects are pretty effective, the “video” effects used for some of the trippier sequences do come off as feeling a little like a 1980’s music video.
“Nothing Could Bribe Me To Drink the New City Water of Arkham”
Stanley sprinkles the film with wry references to his past. “No flesh shall be spared”, an important line from Hardware, is displayed in one of the kid’s rooms on the wall. Stanley seems to be over his experience on the The Island of Dr. Moreau, even using clips from a Marlon Brando film on the Gardner’s TV.
Cleverly opening and closing the movie with sections from the short story, even referencing the Necronomicon, Color Out of Space might possibly be the most faithful adaptation of Lovecraft’s work, at least in spirit. It’s not quite the terrifying Lovecraftian vision I had quite been hoping for – the cosmic horror still peaks a little to early for me. It’s a good start for Stanley’s proposed trilogy of Lovecraft adaptations, however, with The Dunwich Horror slated to be produced next.
After these past few weeks, I’m still looking forward to whatever Richard Stanley does next. Hopefully it won’t take another 25 years to find out.
Color Out of Space
111 minutes
Director: Richard Stanley
Writer: Scarlett Amaris and Richard Stanley
Story: H.P. Lovecraft
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Elliot Knight, Brendan Meyer, Julian Hilliard, and Tommy Chong
