“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 opening lines of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story Color out of Space evoke a sense of foreboding before anything other than setting has been established. The film adaptation of the same name which released in February of this year reuses these opening lines word for word. This is a false promise, little of the film will seek to emulate in tone or style Lovecraft’s work. Instead the film begins wrapping itself in earnest with the tropes of low rent horror with a notable dash of Nicolas Cage absurdity. It is a maddeningly poor adaptation but a thoroughly entertaining film in its own right.
Where Lovecraft’s stripped back archaic writing style utilizes a dozen adjectives to tell you just enough to get the shape of the thing that’s making your skin crawl, director Richard Stanley does away with all that ‘less is more nonsense’ and shows you exactly what to be afraid of. Given the subject of the story is a color, this is a natural adjustment for the visual medium of film and the visual style of the film is easily one of its strongest characteristics. The films transitions from the dark eldritch woodlands to a trippy kaleidoscope of murky fluorescent’s that are so pervasive and extreme that they effectively overwhelm the viewer in the same fashion as the characters is a great addition and one that sees the film actually trying to reflect its source material.
Stanley struggles to parse the source material in most other ways though, instead of the quiet horror of an even keeled farmer, Stanley tries match the weirdness of his monster with the weirdness of the family it preys upon. Too little time is spent with the narrator/straight man and too much time with this annoying, unlikeable, and generally ridiculous family the film has chosen for its victims. They are all, to a man, shallow horror tropes with little else to them. A petulant daughter that performs Wiccan rituals, a perpetually high forgetful brother, their shrewish mother and her alcoholic alpaca raising husband.
In retrospect, the alpacas really were the counter note to the opening lines, the true tone setter of the film. Woven into this blatantly artificial absurdity are so many horror tropes that just don’t actually need to be in this story. They absolutely overwhelm any clear sense of theme or purpose to the proceedings. The wife has cancer and is recovering and dealing with intense self confidence issues that cause her to lash out at her teenage daughter who is beginning to reach sexual maturity. The father seems good natured at first if a bit oafish but reveals himself quickly to be a feckless drunk who folds at the first sign of crisis. The daughter is typically standoffish and mean but for no discernible reason other than having shit parents and being a teenager. In contrast the drug addled brother is good natured but painfully dumb and irresponsible, as much of an addict as his father. To cap it all off is the youngest brother who plays the typical horror roll of the unwitting medium, has no real personality and serves only to be quietly aware of the presence of something “other” long before the rest of the family catches on. This incredibly shoehorning in of every character trope the screenwriter’s could think of massively overstuffs an intentionally stripped back and straightforward narrative, it takes focus away from the true subject of interest, the Color out of Space. An incredible amount of screen time is dedicated to making you observe these people, seemingly to get you invested in your characters for their inevitable fall but how could you possibly be invested in such fake people? You don’t and I suspect this is because the film doesn’t want you to care about them at all, in fact you may just find yourself rooting for their deaths. They’re not bad people, not bad enough to wish death on anyway, but they are so obviously fake people that the entire experience is trivialized, what happens to them doesn’t matter, can’t matter. They’re not real, and wouldn’t it be so much more fun for them to die violently than to listen to them prattle on about their fake problems for just one moment longer?
Instead of placing this story in the pre-industrial era with a family of quiet farmers we get a loud dysfunctional modern family of city slickers recently moved into the backwoods, a wholly original idea to be sure but usually done with a few more believable wrinkles and fanfare. Here the family is here for incredibly vague reasons that the father alludes to and everyone else is pretty unhappy about it, particularly the mother and daughter. The phoniness of this set up can only be intentional, for someone as experienced as Richard Stanley to do this by accident would be almost as absurd as the film itself.
Another interesting wrinkle is how the story itself is told. Where the original narrators of the Lovecraft story were nested so that the reader is getting the story secondhand from someone who is merely reporting what they were told in the style of folktale that Lovecraft loved to emulate. Instead the narrator is given not only a role in the story but a pretty major one, and the original tale teller is reduced to tired comic relief, not even really serving as a suitable harbinger.
This film commits virtually every horror film sin there is, including casting Nicolas Cage in the starring role. And yet, well, it’s a hell of a lot of campy fun when you get down to it. Putting aside just how far from the mark this adaptation is, the things that happen which are entirely predictable and rarely convincingly scary are thoroughly and delightfully campy. Every insane line of dialogue from Cage, every horrific monstrosity, every gruesome death. So. Much. Fun. The story tropes go exactly where you know they’re going to every single time and yet, it doesn’t matter. After an admittedly tiresome first act the film really embraces its every silly, ridiculous whim and is all the better for it. As with the opening, the film’s ending again returns to original work and seeks to borrow its conclusion, this time around the cat’s out of the bag and this feels wholly inadequate, a solemn note at the end of a thoroughly silly song.
Color out of Space’s greatest sin is pretending, even for a moment, that it’s going to, at all, emulate the story it purports to be adapting. It is something else entirely and that thing is a mutated, gurgling good time.
6/10 Watch with your inebriated friends.