The Harrowing 2019 H.P. Lovecraft Adaptation Color Out of Space is a Malevolent Masterpiece
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Hollywood loves a comeback. Richard Stanley had a doozy. The South African filmmaker with the witchy aura graduated from short films and music videos with his 1990 cult classic debut Hardware.
The low-budget 1992 fright flick Dust Devil followed before Stanley got what could have been his big break: getting hired to write and direct an adaptation of H.G Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer.
Things fell apart very quickly, however. There was just too much goddamned eccentricity for any one film to handle. So, after a disastrous week, Stanley was fired and replaced by John Frankenheimer, a steady old pro who, needless to say, delivered one of the biggest and most notorious flops in film history.
Rather than go home and lick his wounds Stanley was made up as one of Dr. Moreau’s mutants so that he could watch the madness that ensued firsthand.
It’s a development chronicled in the wonderful, juicy documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau.
Stanley spent the next few decades in development hell, working on projects that would never get made before he began work on the 2019 H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space.
Color Out of Space was widely and rightly deemed a masterpiece of cosmic horror that more than made good on the abundant promise of Hardware.
The film got ecstatic reviews and deafening buzz, though it bewilderingly didn’t do much at the box-office and was largely overlooked during awards time.
It did not matter. Stanley was back and seemingly better than ever. It was one hell of a comeback. Stanley announced plans to follow up Color Out of Space with two more Lovecraft adaptations, beginning with The Dunwich Horror.
Stanley suddenly had heat. He had acclaim. He had an amazing comeback movie.
Then things took a turn. Scarlett Amaris, an ex-partner of the filmmaker and the co-screenwriter of Color Out of Space went public with allegations of horrendous physical and psychological abuse. Stanley went from red hot to ice cold.
Spectrevision, Elijah Wood’s production company, produced Color Out of Space. Spectrevision announced that it would no longer work with Stanley and donated money from the film to anti-domestic violence charities.
Stanley filed a libel suit against Amaris in France, but he remained cancelled. Stanley’s fall was as dramatic as his rise and his comeback.
Amaris’ allegations cast a dark shadow over a movie that’s an unearthly shade of magenta visually and every shade of black thematically. Back at The A.V. Club we had a popular list of great movies too intense and grim to see more than once.
Color Out of Space belongs on the list. It wrecked me. It was everything that I had hoped and feared that it would be and more.
The adaptation of Lovecraft’s short story of the same name stars Nicolas Cage as Nathan Gardner, a father and husband who moves to his late father’s farm with his hard-charging businesswoman wife Theresa (Joely Richardson), his rebellious Wiccan daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), stoner son Benny (Brendan Meyer) and spooky younger son Jack (Julian Hilliard).
It’s a beautiful, wild, pastoral paradise filled with Alpacas and trees until a meteorite arrives and transforms the family’s heaven into hell.
Color Out of Space makes us believe in the embattled family at its center. We care about these characters because they are crafted with depth and nuance and performed with sensitivity and empathy. This extends to a squatter named Ezra (Tommy Chong), who has a nifty set-up in a cozy little spot on the farm. Ezra is tuned to a frequency all his own. His body might be on earth, but his mind and spirit are somewhere in the stars.
This is not a sentence I’ve ever written before but Color Out of Space features a tremendous dramatic performance from noted marijuana enthusiast Tommy Chong.
Everything changes after the ominous arrival of that cursed rock from outer space. The vegetables that Nathan grows are massive but inedible. The mother and daughter find themselves ruled by strange, masochistic compulsions to hurt themselves.
When Nathan calls his children, the connection is so riddled with sinister static that he’s indecipherable. But it’s not just the phone that has been hopelessly tainted by their unexpected, unwanted visitor from outer space; everything has been corrupted down to a molecular level.
There’s something in the water, literally and figuratively, something alien and evil and terrifyingly powerful and vast.
I’ve written extensively about two of Nicolas Cage’s primary late-period modes: Dorky Dad Cage and Crazy Cage. Mom and Dad brilliantly uses both aspects of Cage’s larger-than-life persona. He begins the film as a Dorky Dad and ends it in a place of madness, violence, and despair.
The same is true of Color Out of Space. The titular evil changes the unfortunate life form it encounters on a physical and biological level. It gets inside their bodies and deep inside their minds.
As the evil spreads, Nathan’s behavior begins to change along with it. His voice goes up an octave so that he sounds upset and angry, which is a wholly natural response to the situation.
Cage’s mannerisms change along with them. At first, there is fun and pleasure to be had from this most entertaining of actors spectacularly losing his shit, but there comes a point in its third act where the film ceases to be entertaining or pleasurable.
That’s not because Color Out of Space stops being a masterful exercise in virtuoso filmmaking. On the contrary, it’s precisely because Color Out of Space represents such a masterful exercise in virtuoso filmmaking that it’s damn near impossible to derive pleasure from a vision so evisceratingly dark and unrelentingly bleak.
I’ve also written about how one of Cage’s late-period strengths is his strong chemistry with age-appropriate female leads. That is very much in effect here. The entire cast is outstanding, but Richardson is horrifying and heartbreaking as a strong-willed would-be survivor who begins the film a lost and broken woman and ends it an inhuman ghoul almost beyond imagination.
In scenes that are hard to watch and painful to remember, Jack, the youngest child, re-enters his mother’s body under the malevolent influence of the titular evil. It’s body horror on par with the best of David Cronenberg or Stuart Gordon, our preeminent adapter of Lovecraft’s work.
Stanley might have mounted a challenge to him on that front, but we’ll probably never know because Stanley, the person, destroyed the career of Stanley, the filmmaker. That’s a shame because while I have nothing but contempt for Stanley as a person, he did a magnificent job writing and directing Color Out of Space.
The disgraced writer-director realized an ambitious and exhaustive vision. It’s the work of a true auteur operating at the apex of his abilities.
Color Out of Space does not linger on the hideousness of the Theresa/Jack mutation. We see just enough of it to be disgusted and horrified but also deeply moved.
The color transforms animals as well as people. The family dog becomes a hell hound, and the Alpacas stop being cute and cuddly and become creatures of Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
I tend to grade late-period Cage movies on a curve because he makes so many movies, and so many are terrible. But Color Out of Space is a real-ass movie, just as Mom and Dad and Mandy were films of quality and vision, not just work Cage grudgingly accepted to pay for castles and ex-wives.
Cage embraces pure madness in Color Out of Space, but he never stops being achingly human and real, even when his body is at least partially alien.
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