While the influence of H.P. Lovecraft is evident in a number of films and projects over the years—think the cosmic horror in movies like The Thing, Prometheus, Alien, or Pacific Rim—adaptations of the author’s stories are pretty scarce, especially outside of independent and short films. That seems to be poised to change with the trailer for director Richard Stanley’s film Color Out of Space, featuring Nicholas Cage contending with an otherworldly threat.
The film is based off of Lovecraft’s short story “The Colour Out of Space“, which first appeared in pulp magazine Amazing Stories in 1927. It’s narrated by a surveyor who recounts some strange happenings near the town of Arkham, Massachusetts. Years before, a meteorite crashed down near the town, casting off strange, undefinable colors, and poisoning the land, which has a detrimental impact on the local crops, wildlife, and citizens.
The trailer for the film shows off a story that’s been updated a bit, but which otherwise looks pretty close to the original story. It stars Nicolas Cage as Nathan Gardner, who moves to Arkham, when his family inherits a rural estate. When a meteor falls from the sky, the plants in the area start changing, and the family begins to experience other strange phenomena. The film also stars Madeleine Arthur (The Magicians), Tommy Chong (Zootopia), Julian Hilliard (The Haunting of Hill House), Q’orianka Kilcher (Yellowstone), Elliot Knight (Titans) , Brendan Meyer (The OA), Joely Richardson (The Rook), and Josh C. Waller.
According to S.T. Joshi in his book A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft, Lovecraft wanted to present aliens as something different from the humanoid depictions seen in pulp stories. The story is also one of several that visit the town of Arkham, including “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Whisperer in Darkness”, and others, making up an early sort of shared universe for Lovecraft to play in.
Despite the general lack of feature adaptations of Lovecraft’s work, there have been a handful of adaptations of this particular story before: the first was 1965’s, Die, Monster, Die!, which loosely adapted the story. Audiences and critics received 1987’s The Curse and 2008’s Colour from the Dark slightly better, and a crowdfunded German film Die Farbe (The Color) earned praise from H.P. Lovecraft scholars.
Color Out of Space first premiered at The Toronto Film Festival in September, and the film will get a wider release on January 24th, 2020.
According to the not-necessarily authoritative IMDb, there are 66 full-length movies adapted (to one degree or another) from Lovecraft’s writings.
Will this finally be the flick that causes the Academy to revoke his Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas (1995)?
I admit I can’t wait to watch this movie
Made in Adobe AfterEffects on an i5?
(One day, Howard. ONE. Day.)
The important parts of this movie have to be (1) everyone dies (no last minute Nic Cage heroics) (2) without ever knowing for sure if the color is alive, much less (3) whether it is malevolent or simply indifferent —indeed, not so much indifferent to us as so different from us that we don’t register as a thing that affects its existence. 1 could be done if the filmmakers have the guts, but 2/3 could be really hard to make work without having someone whose job is exposition. It looks at least interesting at this point.
Stanley. Cage. MOREAU.
That Is The Law.
Make It Happen – 2022
@1: The phrase “to one degree or another” is doing a lot of work there (as is the phrase “full-length movies”; there’s plenty of ultra-low-budget stuff on that list that maybe five people ever saw). There are still quite a few, but these days they’re relatively scarce— the heyday of vaguely HPL-based B-movies was the ’60s through ’80s.
One of the segments of Creepshow, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill”, was based on the Stephen King short story “Weeds”, which was based on “The Colour out of Space”, in that it dealt with a meteor bringing an alien doom upon a New England farmer.
I love all this stuff …
Only that us mortals are still into shooting up the problems with guns.
The gun aspect does not work it just looks lame.
I just dose nit work.
We, on planet Earth are not read yet for alien invasion.
Hm… I want to like it, but then I keep thinking they gentryfied the quintesential rural horor tale. To me, at least, tCooS was fascinating in part because it wasn’t urban, it wasn’t posh, it wasn’t a setting where your familiar way of making sense of social, territorial, and even temporal structures were of any help. The rural world was the spinn… here I see a couple of horses and lamas, but everyone looks pretty posh. Where are the farmers, where are the farms?
Even so, I think it looks like they want to really bring the Lovefcraftian ethos of horror into this (unlike most of the HP films out there, which only ever go for monster, bodyhorror or jumpscares). So, yeah, I hope they do it right.
The chance to see a classic Lovecraftian freakout acted* by Mr Nicolas Cage has to be practically worth the price of admission by itself!
*Should that be ‘acted out’ I wonder?
It is based on Lovecraft’s story, not “based off of.”
Bizarrely enough, whoever designed the look of this movie apparently imagined the color looking almost exactly the same as I imagined it looking, which is a little weird considering it’s supposed to be a color that doesn’t exist on Earth and is never really described in the source material.
Maybe they imagined it looking a bit like the kind of light you get from a UV lamp or black light, like I did–kind of a weird, purplish color that doesn’t really occur in nature.