Richard Stanley
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Other than director Stuart Gordon, who delivered Lovecraft adaptations Re-Animator and From Beyond, filmmakers have failed to capture the essence of the author's work, with Stanley pulling off the seemingly impossible task of turning a story about colors emanating from a meteorite that fall outside conventional description into a cohesive and riveting experience.
Stanley realizes this effect via some digital imagery, but mostly goes the practical route, crafting strange creatures inspired in equal parts by John Carpenter’s The Thing and Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond , another Lovecraft adaptation that finds ways to depict the author’s sense of unspeakable cosmic horror using movie tools.
It’s often said that Lovecraft is among the most difficult of authors to adapt for a visual medium — hell, half his schtick is telling his readers that a specific monster is simply too horrific to describe — but, much like Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, From Beyond), Stanley and co-writer Scarlett Amaris have anticipated this problem from the beginning, and the more surreal material is balanced nicely with the essentials required for a traditional horror film.
Once you’ve seen Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator , From Beyond , and Dagon , and a couple other stragglers, you’re at a bit of a loss for decently budgeted, faithful takes on the cosmic horror pioneer.
Color Out of Space, director Richard Stanley's first narrative feature in almost 25 years, is the best Lovecraft adaptation since From Beyond in 1986.
Later, when the colorful force starts taking a toll on human and animal bodies, Stanley switches into high gear, giving us ickiness on a level commensurate with one of the all-time great Lovecraft adaptations, Stuart Gordon's From Beyond .
The visual effects are often beautiful; the nods to Poltergeist and The Thing less inspiring.
Ward appears brandishing a Miskatonic University t-shirt as the Lovecraft mythos starts namedropping, but when creatures worthy of John Carpenter’s The Thing begin crawling out of dark places, nothing and no one is safe.
As the effects of the asteroid begin to warp lifeforms, the gross-out FX really rise to the occasion, with Stanley displaying a clear adoration for Robin Bottin’s work in projects like The Thing and Total Recall and leaning into the benefits of layers of makeup over humdrum computer animation.
What seems like an exciting discovery soon liquefies into a bloody cocktail with splashes of John Carpenter’s The Thing and Alex Garland’s Annihilation (works that were likely inspired by Lovecraft).
Creatures here resemble a cross between Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Carpenter’s The Thing, the latter almost shockingly so during a scene involving alpacas.
As a director reborn, Stanley still has the eye for everything from spectrum to slaughter, and although the pacing drops here and there, Color Out of Space should delight anybody who wore out the videos of Prophecy (ironically directed by Frankenheimer) and The Thing way back when.
Other than director Stuart Gordon, who delivered Lovecraft adaptations Re-Animator and From Beyond, filmmakers have failed to capture the essence of the author's work, with Stanley pulling off the seemingly impossible task of turning a story about colors emanating from a meteorite that fall outside conventional description into a cohesive and riveting experience.
It’s often said that Lovecraft is among the most difficult of authors to adapt for a visual medium — hell, half his schtick is telling his readers that a specific monster is simply too horrific to describe — but, much like Stuart Gordon ( Re-Animator , From Beyond ), Stanley and co-writer Scarlett Amaris have anticipated this problem from the beginning, and the more surreal material is balanced nicely with the essentials required for a traditional horror film.
Once you’ve seen Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator , From Beyond , and Dagon , and a couple other stragglers, you’re at a bit of a loss for decently budgeted, faithful takes on the cosmic horror pioneer.
The best film based on Lovecraft-penned source material remains Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985), a feature the completely reconfigures one of the author’s short stories as a campy, transgressive horror-comedy.
Like Begos’ previous feature Bliss , VFW was shot on film, and the celluloid grain combines nicely with the stark, colorful lighting for a visual flair that recalls ‘80s splatter movies, particularly Street Trash (1987).
In the Mouth of Madness (1995)
Directed by John Carpenter
influenced Color Out of Space (2020)
Themes
Even with a low budget and material from a writer often described as “unfilmable” (though films such as In the Mouth of Madness and Re-Animator can clearly say otherwise), Stanley has done a fine job walking the line between campy fun and nightmarish anxiety.
That said, John Carpenter’s still-underrated In the Mouth of Madness (1994) remains the most on-the-nose cinematic realization of the writer’s recurrent themes, even if that film’s tone can be somewhat campy.
Re-Animator , from director Stuart Gordon, and In the Mouth of Madness , from John Carpenter, are among the most well-known and beloved Lovecraft adaptations, but their history stretches back even farther, to The Haunted Palace , a Roger Corman film with Vincent Price that’s a loose adaptation of the novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and The Dunwich Horror , a 1970s schlock-fest starring Dean Stockwell, to name two.
Once you narrow the field down to Lovecraft films that are actually any good (an act similar to flipping down 90% of the Guess Who tiles), you’re left with films which use Lovecraft’s basic plots as a jumping-off point for something altogether different (Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and From Beyond), a handful of impressively reverent but necessarily niche-y fan films (2005’s silent short The Call of Cthulhu), and a number of titles which adopt the author’s aesthetic and mythos without actually adapting a specific work (John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, and arguably The Thing).
“Color Out of Space” is at best a workable adaptation of Lovecraft’s influential tale, which has been adapted before in such films as “Die, Monster, Die!” (1965) and “The Curse” (1987).
Stanley’s Color Out of Space was predated by a number of alternate, more explicit attempts to bring this particular Lovecraft story to the screen, in movies such as Daniel Haller’s Die, Monster Die! from 1965 with Boris Karloff, David Keith’s The Curse from 1987, frequent Lovecraft adapter Ivan Zuccon’s Colour from the Dark from 2008 starring b-grade scream queen Debbie Rochon, and Huan Vu’s impressively effective microbudget reimagining, the German film Die Farbe .
Annihilation (2018)
Directed by Alex Garland
influenced Color Out of Space (2020)
Visuals Plot Themes
Made for a scant $6 million, it looks like so much more, akin to what you’d see from a summer tent-pole flick; think the Natalie Portman’s 2018 film Annihilation which was made for ten times more.
The 2018 Natalie Portman vehicle “Annihilation” borrows plot elements from Lovecraft’s story.
What seems like an exciting discovery soon liquefies into a bloody cocktail with splashes of John Carpenter’s The Thing and Alex Garland’s Annihilation (works that were likely inspired by Lovecraft).
For the record I know there are comparisons to Alex Garland’s Annihilation , but to be honest, I prefer Color Out of Space because although it’s also a visual spectacle and an environmental morality tale of sorts, it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Alex Garland, who is undoubtedly the most Lovecraftian of the elevated horror directors due to his slant toward sci-fi, adapted Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation in 2018.
For as fine as the cast is, and as well realized the strange and disgusting visuals are, it feels a touch like re-litigation after 2018’s Annihilation.
In works like The Call of Cthulhu and The Colour Out of Space, the writer conjures unfathomable terrors, with madness as the only logical recourse for the characters who encounter them.
Once you narrow the field down to Lovecraft films that are actually any good (an act similar to flipping down 90% of the Guess Who tiles), you’re left with films which use Lovecraft’s basic plots as a jumping-off point for something altogether different (Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and From Beyond), a handful of impressively reverent but necessarily niche-y fan films (2005’s silent short The Call of Cthulhu), and a number of titles which adopt the author’s aesthetic and mythos without actually adapting a specific work (John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, and arguably The Thing).
The Shining (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Color Out of Space (2020)
Characters Themes Plot Visuals
In Color Out of Space , he dons Jack Torrance’s madness from The Shining , but with the voice of Donald Trump.
Not unlike Jack Nicholson in The Shining , Cage takes a character originally conceived as a normal man gradually descending into madness and portrays him as someone whose madness is already there, barely restrained and ready to explode at the slightest spark.
Great horror films like The Shining or Cronenberg's The Fly also double as tragedies.
It's structured kind of like The Shining, in which isolation combines with other, supernatural factors to cause a patriarch to slowly grow mad.
They’re a normal-ish American family (or as normal as you can be when Nicolas Cage is playing your dad — see also: Nicholson, Jack, in The Shining), with kids dabbling in Wicca and weed and the specter of anomalous growth looming even before the iridescent silvery-magenta menace collides with their plot of land.
Mingling aesthetic and stylistic DNA from The Thing, Poltergeist, Annihilation and The Shining, among others, Richard Stanley’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Colour Out of Space manages to mutate into its own legitimately creepy, and at times quite terrifying, beast.
The film stars Nicolas Cage, who has clearly been asked to Mandy it up, and he obliges (the films share a production company, SpectreVision, and it is extremely clear that "we need this year's Mandy " was part of the calculation in a lot of this film's creative choices).
With some of the same production team involved with Mandy, Cage seems right at home here.
Directed by Richard Stanley from a Scarlett Amaris screenplay based upon the H.P. Lovecraft story “The Color Out of Space,” this eldritch tale seems ready-made for a Nic Cage vehicle, up to and including stealing the color palette from his previous movie Mandy.
Much like he did with 2018's Mandy, Cage found the perfect balance of outlandish and endearing in a character we both care for yet revel in seeing become a complete mad man.
So if Cage isn’t really living up to any B-movie fantasies here like he did with Mandy, then what about the other actors?
Well, here’s the deal: After a meteorite lands in the front yard of their isolated farm, New Age hippie Nathan Gardner (Cage, Mandy) and his family find themselves battling a mutant extraterrestrial organism as it infects their minds and bodies, transforming their quiet rural life into a technicolor tizzy.
The 21st century has seen a mini-boom in such spiritual cousins: The Mist (2007), Upstream Color (2013), The Void (2016), The Endless (2017), and Annihilation (2018) all come to mind as films that “get” Lovecraft in a manner that is not evident in more explicit adaptations of his work.
Mainstream horror/sci-fi movies like Alien, The Thing, and The Mist borrow heavily from Lovecraftian design but it’s modern filmmakers like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead who have most dedicated their craft to a Lovecraftian tilt, with films like Resolution, Spring, and, most notably, The Endless, all playing with huge cosmic truths and the fragility of humanity sanity when confronted with these larger-than-life ideas.
Stanley is by no means the first filmmaker to tackle a short story by the notoriously difficult-to-adapt Lovecraft; indeed, the more successful Lovecraft adaptations are less direct book-to-screen translations than they are much more loosely inspired by the broader sensibility of his Cthulhu Mythos, such as films like Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 Isabelle Adjani-fronted Possession (the only film to win a major award at Cannes and be listed as a Video Nasty), Federico Greco’s 2005 found-footage horror film Il mistero di Lovecraft – Road to L. , and Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s exquisite 2014 horror-romance Spring .
Mainstream horror/sci-fi movies like Alien, The Thing, and The Mist borrow heavily from Lovecraftian design but it’s modern filmmakers like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead who have most dedicated their craft to a Lovecraftian tilt, with films like Resolution, Spring, and, most notably, The Endless, all playing with huge cosmic truths and the fragility of humanity sanity when confronted with these larger-than-life ideas.
Ridley Scott has often cited that Alien and Prometheus are a venture into Lovecraft territory.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Directed by Philip Kaufman
influenced Color Out of Space (2020)
Music
It reminded me of 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which we find as the movie goes along the sound design begins to remove any natural or organic sounds, replacing them with the mechanical.
Once you’ve seen Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator , From Beyond , and Dagon , and a couple other stragglers, you’re at a bit of a loss for decently budgeted, faithful takes on the cosmic horror pioneer.
Gordon returned to the well several times with diminishing results in From Beyond (1986), Castle Freak (1995), and Dagon (2001).
For fans of Lovecraft, this may well be the most successful attempt to bring his warped writings to the screen, and is definitely up there with Stuart Gordon's Dagon and Dreams in the Witch House –the most loyal conversions to date (it's thrilling news indeed that Stanley gets to do this again with a new take on Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror).
It is unfortunate timing that the film is being released near the recent death of director Stuart Gordon, whose made a name for himself with his own run of Lovecraft projects ( Re-Animator , From Beyond , Dagon ) which layered Lovecraft stories with a very contemporary perversity that made them modern horror classics.
Mainstream horror/sci-fi movies like Alien, The Thing, and The Mist borrow heavily from Lovecraftian design but it’s modern filmmakers like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead who have most dedicated their craft to a Lovecraftian tilt, with films like Resolution, Spring, and, most notably, The Endless, all playing with huge cosmic truths and the fragility of humanity sanity when confronted with these larger-than-life ideas.
The 21st century has seen a mini-boom in such spiritual cousins: The Mist (2007), Upstream Color (2013), The Void (2016), The Endless (2017), and Annihilation (2018) all come to mind as films that “get” Lovecraft in a manner that is not evident in more explicit adaptations of his work.
Pushing beyond Lovecraft, Stanley folds in elements that appear plucked from cinematic inspirations like Tobe Hooper’s haunted house classic Poltergeist, Alex Garland’s divisive invasion drama Annihilation, John Carpenter’s iconic creature-feature The Thing, Panos Cosmatos’s frenzied horror-fantasy Mandy, and Andrew Fleming’s witchy teen-drama The Craft .
Jodorowsky's Dune (2013)
Directed by Frank Pavich
influenced Hardware (1990), Color Out of Space (2020)
Having pioneered in the cyberpunk genre with Hardware years ago, the South African director was soon fired off of his next project, The Island of Dr. Moreau, because he feuded with the film’s star and alienated its producers with his wild and out-there concepts for the film (this story is better recounted in the film Lost Soul than I can do here, and it’s an essential watch for those curious about Stanley’s legacy and for fans of movies like Hearts of Darkness or Jodorowsky’s Dune).
Given the energy and talent poured into the project, and Jodorowsky's undiminished passion for it, we can almost accept, on faith if not in fact, the estimation of Hardware director Richard Stanley: "Dune is probably the greatest movie never made."
The movie looks great; the design work by Joseph Bennett (who cut his teeth on Richard Stanley’s maligned Hardware and Dust Devil ) combines the ominous atmosphere of a looming cathedral with dark art deco.
Other efforts have included the late-model B-picture The Dunwich Horror (1970), the clunky anthology film Necronomicon (1993), and the earnest low-budget indie Cthulhu (2008).
Re-Animator , from director Stuart Gordon, and In the Mouth of Madness , from John Carpenter, are among the most well-known and beloved Lovecraft adaptations, but their history stretches back even farther, to The Haunted Palace , a Roger Corman film with Vincent Price that’s a loose adaptation of the novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and The Dunwich Horror , a 1970s schlock-fest starring Dean Stockwell, to name two.