Halloween Lovecraft! We begin with “The Colour Out of Space”

“West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight.”

The Colour Out of Space, Lovecraft’s 1927 short story has been adapted as a feature five times, I believe. Equally as much if not more so as a short film or a TV adaptation. It is likely his most highly regarded short work and one he himself favored. 

It’s easy to see why. There is a pervasive sense of dread that grows in the telling and an even worse sense of how little human beings matter in a universe where a meteorite can just land in someone’s backyard, bringing with it blight, pestilence, and madness.

Each of the films I’ve watched has something to commend them. The 1965 American International Pictures’ Die, Monster, Die! is a nice try. It’s the second known feature adaptation of a Lovecraft work and given the period, perhaps is as good as it was going to get. It leans more heavily into the science fiction aspects of the tale but has some effective moments.

The 2010 Die Farbe/The Color Out of Space is closer to the book, if updated to the 1970s in post-war Germany (though starting out in Arkham) and is drenched in atmosphere but not as heavily miasmatic as one might like. 

The most recent adaptation by Richard Stanley, starring Nicolas Cage and Joely Richardson ticks off all the elements that make Lovecraft required reading. There is that pervasive sense of dread and impending doom and the senes of awe that anyone might have before a being or a force to whom human well-being is just plain inconsequential. It’s this last point that a lot of adaptations miss. We live in a universe that is ultimately hostile to us, but not in the sense of any personal hostility; we’re just abject food for the play of forces that have deep primordial origins either deep within the Earth or from the furthest reaches of interstellar space. 

We don’t matter except as vessels for invoking these forces, at most. Otherwise, we’re just meat sacks.

In this series, I’m only going to mention where or how the films deviate from the source material as a matter of interest for people who have read the work. I find it pointless to judge a film because it departs from the written word. Films and literature are two different media. “Film has notihing to do with literature”, as Bergman once said and while I don’t completely agree with that statement, I get the sentiment.

What I’m more interested here is to what degree this or that film captured Lovecraft’s distinct sense of humanity’s insignificance in the grander scheme of the cosmos as he saw it and from our perspective how quickly physical and mental deterioration sets in and drives the narrative. 

Of course, I’m mostly going to judge the film on its own merits, but if I’m honest, most Lovecraft adaptations aren’t really all that good. Unlike, say, Corman’s Poe adaptations, Lovecraft’s voice proves more elusive. To be sure, there are very strong films based on his work, but it’s an uphill battle in most instances.

The Tale in Brief

Essentially, The Colour of Space centers on a family on the outskirts of Arkham, Massachusetts in the western part of the state. Arkham, for the uninitiated, is one of Lovecraft’s fictional towns and as with all his hamlets, is afflicted with more than the usual potholes or a lackadaisical chamber of commerce. 

The tale is passed along by a narrator, a surveyor who is part of the project to flood the valley to create a reservoir and who meets with cold shoulders from the villagers when he asks where the Gardners live. It isn’t until he meets Annim, a neighbor of the family, that he learns of the reason for his rejection. 

A meteorite fell on the Garderner’s property and was possessed of strange properties. Pieces that were broken off and analyzed at Miskatonic University were impervious to various stress tests and eventually vanished. So, too, did the meteorite itself. 

Soon enough, the Gardners saw their harvest grow massive vegetables and fruits that proved inedible. They looked beautiful but tasted of rot. Animal life mutated, the trees behaved in a strange manner, moving even without wind. 

Anxiety flourished within the family as Mrs. Gardner’s sanity seemed to slip away and the once avuncular Nahum grew withdrawn. 

Plus, there was an odd light that was seen like St. Elmo’s Fire. An indescribably color that neither the Gardneners nor the scientists at Miskatonic had a name for. 

Before long, each of Nahum’s sons either died or vanished. His wife was gone, long gone and had become something altogether different.

Ammi had already alerted Nahum that the well-water had turned but this didn’t sway him and the family had continued using the water. Indeed, it was Ammi who saw what Mrs. Gardner had become.

When Ammi later comes to call, Nahum is hallucinating. Seeing his wife sitting with them and declaring that the younges, Zenas, “lives in the well.”

Unlkke the films, Ammi leads the local police to the Gaadners to witness a cosmic crime scene. The Gardners, their livestock, all, all dead. The color that sucked “the life out of everything” was still there, though, and more. The decay and rot of the vegetables, the sickening stuff at the bottom of the well, the utter desiccation that seemed to manifest as the vapor surrounding the evnivrons, and the pervasive death that seemed to seep through the very atmosphere expressed itself in the movement of the trees on an airless night, “twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds.”

Drawn heavenward, the eyes of the men sequestered in the Garnder hosue decied a constellation of globules of lights in the sky, But in the house already, a sickening phosphorescence obtained, “infecting the very doors and furniture.” It was obvious to Ammi and the men that they best flee and Ammi led them out, through the twisting and undulating trees to the open meadows. 

They looked back and saw the farm, its buildings and the surrounding vegetation - even that which hadn’t been turned to a brittle grayness - lit up by this glowing, indescribable color. “Then without warning the hideous thins shot vertically up toward the sky like a rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man could gasp or cry out.”

The desolation that is left in the wake of the thng’s departure is signaled in the films by an explosions but Lovecraft’s description is weirder than that.

”Ammi had looked back an instant at the shadowed valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred friend. And from that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down again upon the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was just a colour — but ot any colour of our earth or heavens….Ammi recognized that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk down there in the well.”

Lovecraft spends the remainder of the tale with the narrator describing the conditions of the “blasted heath” and the tales and suspicions of the villagers. He’s seen for himself the blight and the rot that seems to grow about an inche a year into the healthier areas. Horses grow skittish and refuse to go near the area. And soon it will be flooded, but the narrator says he’ll never drink the water.

In addition to the physical deterioration , there were mental repercussions : “Numbers went queer in the years after Nahum’s taking and always lacked the power to get away.”The stronger-willed were able to leave and successive waves of immigrants would come to try their hand and luck. At living in the area, but leave just as quickly.

Our narrator shares the unease he had when examining the area and admitted that he didn’t doubt Ammi’s tale. He puts out a theory or two about what the “colour” was; a gas, perhaps. But not one that obeyed the laws of our physics, our universe.

It’s a masterful work and like the remainder of stories I’ll use, well worth reading. In a short amount of time and space, HPL could conjure a creepy, inhospitable world that leeches deep into the bones of the reader. 

As for cinematic adaptations? Let’s take a look.

Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

As mentioned earlier, this one from AIP is a nice try, and while it does emphasize the sci-fi elements of the story and Nahum is a mad scientist as opposed to a farmer (and Arkham has been relocated to Olde England from New England). Director Daniel Haller was one of Roger Corman’s earliest collaborators and on this, his first directorial effort, he capitalizes on atmosphere and a saturated color scheme not all that far removed from the work he did as art director on The Tomb of Ligeia and The Masqu of the Red Death for Corman.

Jerry Sohl’s script, however, is pretty bland. There’s no getting around the clunky dialog, though Karloff, Nick Adams and Suzan Farmer do the best they can. As it is, despite the significant sense of foreboding Haller sets up early on and given Karloff selling his character’s distrustful nature and ominous warning to leave, once it’s established that Farmer is Adams’ love interest, the assumption is that all will be well that ends well and any possiblity of dramatic tension seeps out.

That said, there are some genuinely game moments in here which for the time, aren’t bad and give some idea of the pernicious quality of the “radiation” as the “colour” is reduced to. The massive fruits and vegetables are relocated to a greenhouse that glows, well, green, at night. And there is a menagerie of misshapen animals in a room in the greenhouse. It’s a good bit of distortion and compositing that actually works since the camera doesn’t linger too long.

Nahum’s wife Letitia, played Freya Jackson who had strong theatre career in England and Europe), is suffering from an undiagnosed fatigue and undergoes a deterioration that transforms her into a particularly robust creature. Marwin is no longer Nahum’s son, but his servant who tends to Nahum’s needs (Karloff was in excruciating pain at the time and performed from a wheelchair) until he dies. 

When Adams’ character says they should call the police, Nahum shuts him down and by then, it’s obvious that he and Susan (yes, Suzan Jackson’s character is named Susan…that often strikes me as a frightening lack of imagination) need to get out of there. 

As for the finale, well, let’s just say that the green whatever locked in the cellar below the hosue escapes and as Helga (a servant who had fled, went mad, and returned to do some stabbin’ showed up in the last act} body catches fires and catches the main floors alight, Stephen (Adams). and Susan flee as the massive mansion is consumed in flames behind them.

We learn that Nahum had originally envisioned the meteorite to be a solution for providing abundant crops and being a boon to mankind. There’s also references that hint that Nahum’s father Corbin had something to do with drawing down the meteorite from the heavens by invoking the Old Ones and perpetuating some kind of malevolences on the land. It’s all pretty much strung together with coat hangers and gum.

Not much of the movie quite holds. together beyond the standard creature-feature fare of the time. I will say that Karloff’s transformation into a glowing monster after exposure to the Green Out of Space is actually kind of cool. His stunt double doesn’t look much like him, but chalk that up to radiation poisoning (see also The Invisible Ray from 30 years earlier, also starring. Karloff meeting a similar fate)..

At the end, this is a fairly standard mid-sixties AIP production attempting to recreate the magic of Corman’s Poe cycle, but hamstrung by a clunky, pedestrian script. Both Adams and Jackson are reduced to stock characters who met at college (though Adams is a bit old for a college kid; grad school,  then?), but Karloff brings his magic, particularly in his scenes where Nahum pleads (and in some cases, argues) with Letitia. 

However, there’s little in here to recommend this as a strong or even very good, Lovecraft adaptation. There are nods to the source material and a kind of sense of foreboding but no real sense of tension or impending doom that one would associate with or expect from such an adaptation.

Die Farbe/The Color Out of Space (2010)

Set in the 1970s in post-war Germany (in the Swabian region), Huan Vu’s efffort is a pretty faithful adaptation of the short story. It’s shot in beautiful black and white to accentuate The Color when it appears and has a slow-build quality as if to match the gradual dissolution of the characters as The Color’s power grows. 

It’s a curious film as it feels like a far more successful adaptation than Die, Monster, Die! but at the same time, doesn’t quite make that source material its. own. 

The film begins in Arkham, but is transferred to Germany when Jonathan Davis goes in search of his father who had disappeared two weeks earlier and hadn’t been heard from. After learning that the road to the village is closed, he eventually arrives to find the HPL Cold Shoulder ™. He inquires after his father, whom no one recalls seeing, but bumps into Armin Pierske, literally, who recognizes a picture of the elder Davis in uniform from the end of the war. 

Turns out Davis had been part of a medical unit going from house to house and came upon the Pierske’s just as Armine was coming across the field. The film jumps back and forth between the elder Armine tellling the tale (played by Michael Kausch) and his younger self played by Marco Leibnitz in the pre-war years. Armine begins the story over beers in the Franconian pub and this pretty much mirrors Lovecraft’s tale to a tee. Gardner becomes Gärtener and we lose Zenas, the youngest child but keep Thaddeus (Thasddäus) and Samuel. Mrs. Gärtener is still with us and follows the same arc as in Lovecraft’s tale. 

Less emphasis is placed on the family’s relationship to the rest of the village, but what there is, is telling. When Thasddäus joins some village men around a table, it’s obvious that he’s under some strain. He’s concerned about his mother, but the men just cajole him and tell him all will be well. After he leaves, their glances betray them, but there’s no derision in their faces. Something, perhaps, like unease. Or perhaps, by now, it’s all one can see.

Earlier in the movie, Armine had approached Mrs. Gärtener and sees an extremely large wasp resting on her head. It’s one of many of the cleverer special effects we see in the film. She is despondent, and Armine is concerned, as is Nahum.

The meteorite has fallen by this point, by the way,  it’s intriguing that Hu spends a certain amount of time already showing how uneasy people are about the family and where they live and how, prior to the crash, he zooms in on the well-water; we’re left wondering if there was some earlier event that happened or if this is simply a lapse in narrative judgement to establish a greater sense of foreboding. Afterward, it becomes clear to Armine that the water is contaminated and he warns Nahum to not drink it. By which time, it’s too late; the vegetation has begun growing to excessive size and inediility; animals have begun mutating; the boys have grown as despondent as their mother who is eventually consigned to a room upstairs.

Nahum himself has begun to be absorbed into The Color’s influence and at one point, Arimine in contemporary times, declares he was happy when the war began so he could leave the place.

We also have the plot points of scientists coming out to examine the meteorite and who are baffled by the successive disappearance of the fragments they chip off to examine. They give up when they return to find the meteorite has vanished and recognize that they can’t even write a report or use their work for something that no longer exists.

Jonathan’s father is a medical doctor. An establishing shot with the older Dr. Davis show him standing in a glade before a body of water at the water’s edge, reaching out until we see him falling in  toward it. 

Jonathan and Armine move to Armine’s house to continue the conversation and Armine picks up on the day where he met Jonathan’s father. Dr. Davis (he’s wearing a Red Cross on his helmet; we can assume he’s a doctor by this point) and his soldiers begin heading toward the valley,  but younger Armine asks them to stop. They obviously think he’s pullling something or is unwell and take him with them.

Once they arrive at the Gärtener’s farm, we see more or less the same sequence as is described in the book. The major difference is that the spread of The Color’s blight is visualized earlier in the film; we see it graying out the valley in time-lapse photography on the day Armine leaves to go to the war.

By this point, it’s clear to Armine that Jonathan doesn’t believe him. As Jonathan takes his leave, Armine calls after him to tell him that Dr. Davis saw it, too. He saw The Color, too!

We return to Armine, Davis, and the troops at the Gärtener property. They do a walk-through of the house and find nothing but dust, and are about to move on when Dr. Davis spies the well. They go to investigate and as they peer into the well, they can see The Color rising. The three GIs drop grenades into the well, but The Color takes no mind and begins to rise into the sky. From all around, globules of magenta rise up, hover and join the largest mass, a writhing tentacular seething mass of orbs that eventuallly exits Earth’s atmosphere and flies further out into space.

Armine asks Dr. Davis, “Is it over?” and the doctor just kind of grins an “I don’t know” in return. 

Eventually, Jonathan finds his dad, standing catatonic (in a callback to the beginning of the film, he is remainder by one of his professors - a friend of his father’s - to always marke the latitude and longitude when he finds a Celtic headstone. After waking up in his car, he sees one and nearby sees his father’s hat. Looking up, there’s dad.

As Jonathan ferries his dad back to the car, there’s a cut to Armine feeling perhaps Dr. Davis slipping from the bonds of this earth, and more cuts that reverse some of the plot points in Armine’s telling. Instead of him tellling Nahum about the water, it’s the other way around and instead of him offering to help Nahum out, it’s Nahum suggesting that to him. This is a strange and counterproductive twist. It calls into question, of course, Armine as a reliable narrator, but to what end? 

We end with the waters having flooded the valley and a peculiar sense of unease, less because of anything in the film than the distraction of wondering why Armine reversed the narrative. 

I have to say that as faithful to the source material as it is, and as effective as the photography and even the special effects (a lot of names associated with the MCU show up in the credits) are, and while there is a sense of dread from this Other world throughout, it’s not as unnerving as one might expect. 

Let’s face it, it’s difficult enough to create a pervasive sense of unease at the best of times. I’m not talking about Hitchcokian suspense, but more the continual sense of doom throughout a movie that leaves you shaken at the end. A kind of unease that stays with you a good while after the credits roll. 

As much as I do like this film and I genuinely do - it’s inventive, subtle, and not without some genuinely disturbing moments - it doesn’t quite sell the sense of this completely other being or force from a different world or universe. I don’t even know if it’s fair to blame the film for that: it’s a tall order and very few have been able to convey such a sense.

There are some great sequences and much of Vu’s crew have worked with him on other films. I think the lot of them are all from the same film schoo. 

It’s also instructive that this is one of those instances where fidelity to the text doesn’t hamper the narrative. That said, the update makes for a more relatable approach to the material than had it been set in the 1920s and told in flashback from there. 

However, maintaining the third person narration keeps our sympathies with the Gärteners at a remove. Again, that’s why I take issue with that reversal in Arimine’s telling. 

Altogether, though, it does demonstrate how a good Lovecraft adaptation can be made. 

Our next adaptation shows how a near-great one can be made.

Color Out of Space (2019)

Richard Stanley’s return to feature filmmaking in over 30 years is a promising one. Moreover, he’s delivered a Lovecraft adaptation that can rest proudly alongside Stuart Gordon’s works.

It is by turns, funny, terrifying, intense, silly, thought provoking (though, maybe not of provoking deep thought), and as good an adaptation as one could hope for. 

He also assembled a tight cast led by Nic Cage in his late Cage Era where he commits to a role, finds the humanity in the character and effortlessly goes off the rails in all the best senses. Joely Richardson is on hand as his wife Theresa and Madeleine Arthur as their daughter Lavinia. The second oldest is Ben (Brendan Meyer) and the youngest is Jack (Julian Hilliard). On hand to take the place of the outsider is hydrologist Ward Philips (plays by Elliot Knight).

The story is very much the Lovecraft narrative, updated to the twenty-first century and told over a much shorter period of time.

We see the family’s travails from inside, not at the aforementioned remove, and the issues they deal with are far more immediate. It’s established at the outset that Lavinia is practicing Wicca, Ben is a stoner, Theresa is a broker or financial advisor, and Jack is a little kid. Oh, and there are alpacas.

We glean that the family upped and moved from the big city to Nathan’s dad’s place in the boonies and we learn that he upgraded the building, and even has a thriving orchid. 

Ward Philips shows up to survey the land and encounters Lavinia who tells him he’s. on private property and to leave. Nathan shows up and reacts like a dad and when he accuses (the tone in his voice is specifically accusatory) Ward of coming from Boston, Philips replies, no, Providence. Lovecraft reference! Ding-ding-ding! Okay, I’ll behave.

Over the course of an hour and fifty minutes, Stanley skillfully gives us a day-to-day sense of the family dynamic that we just know is going to go to shit when the meteorite hits. 

It’s arrival is presaged by a strange light (magenta or magenta-ish) and soon enough, we see the local sheriff show up, look at the meteorite and kind of leave it at that, But there’s also local news coverage after the meteorite has vanished and Nathan has been made a fool of.

In the meantime, Theresa’s been in the kitchen unresponsive to Nathan’s pleas to come check out the story, because she’s in something of a fugue state, cutting carrots. When little Jack come up to get her, she slices her index and middle fingers off with barely noticing.

To be sure, all of this happens over a couple of days. We earlier see Theresa talking to clients, discussing investment strategies online over a janky internet. The kids seem like your normal little kid, witchy older sister, and stoner brother who seems to get his ganja from none other than Tommy Chong’s Ezra, who taks over the Ammi role, though he’s now part of the plot and not the narrator. 

To say that things get stranger the farther along we go would be a gross understatement. Suffice it to say, things get stranger.

The vegetation grows to mammoth proportions, a strange praying mantis comes out of the well with inordinate numbers of compound eyes and peculiar tendrils issuing from between its mandibles. It’s a mesmerizing bit of CGI and Jack is stunned watching it. It flies off, and Jack looks down the well. When he does, we see his face through alien perspective; solarized as seen through a magenta filter.

The well-water is, of course, tainted, and Ward says he’ll run tests on it, but warns Nathan to avoid drinking it. He pays a visit to Ezra to tell him the same. By this point, Ezra has recorded static-y noises on a reel-to-reel tape player and when Ward looks uncomprehending, Ezra says it’s aliens, the ones who came with the meteorite. 

Around the same visit, Ward says hi to Jack who is standing very still gazing at the well. Asked what he’s doing, Jack replies he’s playing with his friends and lets out a very disturbing giggle when Ward walks away. Later, Jack will say that he’s been talking to The Man in the Well. Yep, Danny’s not here, Mrs. Torrance.

Lavinia is well aware by now that something is grossly wrong and tells Ben that they have to leave. This is around the time that Nathan has driven Theresa to Arkham Hospital and things continue to get weirder. Time dilates for Lavinia and Ben. Hours go by like minutes and the damned alpacas keep getting out of the barn. The family dog Sam goes missing after an early encounter with the thing in the well. 

Nathan keeps trying to call the kids from the hospital but all anyone hears is static and perhaps a voice or voices. I should add that all of this is paced beautifully. It’s not rushed but not so much that the slightest hint of boredom or exasperation sets in. Admittedly, when Cage eventually goes into High Cage Antics, and Lavinia tries to cast a protection spell, by that point, you begin to accept that this is as good a response as you could expect from anyone trapped by a Lovecraftian being. 

Nathan and Theresa return from the hospital after a successful operation and narrowly miss hitting a feline with glowing eyes (magenta-hued light) and a gnarly body. This might well be Ezra’s kitty G-Spot, who’d gone missing. Back at home, Nathan yells at the kids for being unresponsive to his calls and at Nathan, in particular, for letting the alpacas out. Again.

Think this is all pretty volatile? Oh, no. No, no, no. Stanley ratchets the disturbing and surreal up to eleven with Lavinia indulging in self-harm, Nathan losing his shit over how awful the tomatoes really are, and poor Theresa’s losing customers by the droves and gives Nathan a piece about it. Okay, well, maybe all this isn’t so bad.

But maybe what Theresa and Jack turn into when struck by a bolt of The Color.. Or what the alpacas become when their bodies fuse together. Or - or - or, well, you kind of get the idea what we’re dealing with here and it’s frankly glorious because despite how hard (impossible) it is, to visualize Lovecraft’s images as described in his works, Stanlley, like Gordon before him, goes whole hog into whatever he can do with special effects and lighting. 

Ben meets his doom when he thinks he hears Sam the family dog in the well and by then, we are in full freak-out mode. Is it Lovecraft? Yes, in one very important sense it is: the film does a swell job of visualizing the incoherent madness that besets the victims of one of Lovecraft’s denizens. Superficially, it’s fun to watch. Give it some thought, it’s hellish.

This is the movie’s strongest element; ramping up things to a fever pitch quickly and efficiently. There are some silly moments, but that’s because there’s nothing else to do at certain junctures with an absurd universe, let alone one that doesn’t really care about you.

The Gardeners are stranded; their tech has failed them and then controls them. The car is as dead as everything else surrounding them and that’s only the most obvious madness inducing element. By the time Ward and the sheriff show up so much shit has hit the fan, it smells as bad as the welll water.

When they arrive at the house, The Color is a-swirling and distorting time and space with every step or so it feels. Lavinia’s upstairs at the mercy of the TheresaJack chimera, Nathan is telling Ward that the family is right there on the sofa together, just as a family is supposed to be. Ward hears Lavinia scream and he and the sheriff head upstairs, seemingly paralyzed by the monster. A shot rings out and it’s Nathan with his smoking shotgun in hand. “They’re not my family.” He smiles and heads downstairs.

Walking ahead of Nathan out the front door, Ward stops as thay see The Color emerging from the well; Nathan raises his rifle but is shot by the sheriff who thought he was going to kill Ward. Lavinia stays with her father as they go off to rescue Ezra, who is quite long gone. We see his somewhat mummified corpse sitting upright as his voice plays. from the tape machine, explaining that The Color, this being, is trying to remake the environment into something familiar to it. We might consider this if we start willy-nilly terraforming other planets. Just sayin’. 

They bolt from Ezra’s after the sheriff has fired another shot into The Color. Alas, poor sheriff; a tree plucks him from the ground and leaves Ward to return to Lavinia alone. And when he finds her?

Lavinia is fully possessed by The Color, her eyes and the sigil she carved into her forehead are aglow. Ward is shown The Color’s planet, perhaps the best depiction of a Lovecraft world ever. It’s beautiful, stunning, psychedelic and not a little horrifying. Lavinia dissolves into The Color and by now,  if it hasn’t already, all hell’s. breaking loose. 

As The Color begins to further warp reality, Ward makes for the basement/wine cellar and we watch as he’s stretched like putty until - boom! - The Color’s heading back and everything is decimated and ashen as Ward comes out of the wreckage.

We learn that few remember the incident but that having experienced it himself, he will never drink the water. 

Whew. It’s a mother of a flick. To be sure, I think it’s a near-great adaptation. As a film, on its own merit, it’s a rock solid tour de force of practical effects, compelling plot, solid performances, and worthy of holding its own with Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator series. It wouldn’t be out of place on a double-feature with any of the greater ‘80s features, though, it would suffer put up against John Carpenter’s The Thing, a work that comes within spitting distance as a Lovecraft homage.

It might be that it doesn’t demand too much of the viewer. This might be another issue with Lovecraft adaptations in general, though; not that Lovecraft is thematically dense or full of semiotic riches, but there is a depth to his best work that no adaptation of his work has quite captured.

The textual riches in cinematic terms are often found in artists like Carpenter or Alex Garland, where the questions their best work raises are of a deeper and profounder nature than just providing a fun ride. That said, I do think there’s more meat on the bones to Stanley’s movie than may at first register.

Most of the allusions and observational work the script does is in questioning the whole escape back to rural life that Nathan takes the family on. This is turned on its head by the reveal in Ezra’s voice at the climax. Nathan wants a place of his own and wants it to reflect his self in a way not so different from The Color’s aim. 

In a wider context, the very idea of flooding a valley to turn it into a reservoir - while perhaps a necessity - is still only another example of humanity gettting nature to bend to our will, to conform to what we want for an inhabitable space. Again, not so very different from The Color.

I don’t think Stanley set out to make an ecological statement, so much as perhaps calling into question the perspective of what happens when we alter an environment and why we consider it our right or a necessity to do so. He may not have done this intentionally, but the questions reside in the film’s text, nevertheless.

Lavinia represents another facet of that as she turns to the Necronomicon (geek out,  now!!! Though it is just the paperback that’s been around since the seventies….) to cast protection spells for her family and herself. Ben just wants to escape and Jack, well, is just the innocent to be corrupted by a cosmic malaise.

Also, very much of note is Colin Stetson’s soundtrack. It’s a remarkable work and stands on its own as a composition. This and his soundtrack for Hereditary are masterpieces.

I’ve read that the movie gets dinged for variable special effects, but I disagree. They did more than what they had to. The CGI is used sparingly and it is used for the more “cosmic” moments, attempting to capture the more abstract desciripsions in Lovecraft’s prose. The practical effects and puppetry are spot-on and the stop-motion works the way it should; like something that could move like this in this world but is definitely not of this world.

I say “near-great” because outside the Lovecraft world, I’m pretty sure Color Out of Space is hardly a work for universal acclaim. No matter; it stands as one of the best adaptations of a Lovecraft work, full stop.

It’s soooo trippy!