It’s Just a Color, but it Burns: Discussing Color Out of Space (2019) in Film and Text
Image courtesy of SpectreVision
By Trevor Ruth
Most readers have a H.P. Lovecraft phase. Not all of them, mind you, but anyone who has dabbled in the realms of contemporary genre fiction has picked up Lovecraft at least once; it’s an inevitability. In my experience, the majority of readers don’t peak until junior college, when reading is no longer a chore but rather a necessity and—because it becomes a necessity—students look more towards exciting, experimental science fiction to wet their creative thirst. For me, it was middle-to-late high school when science fiction was at the forefront of my interests and, thus, the lore behind the mythos of Lovecraft’s longer works were of great interest to me.
Over the years, however, I have come to be more inspired by his—for lack of a better term—secular works: his short fiction that utilizes the macabre in a more self-contained, seminal fashion without the reliance of a made-up pantheon of deities or occult creations. Stories like “The White Ship” (1919), “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919), and “From Beyond” (1934) began to pique my interest and led me to focus on Lovecraft as more of a literary creative than as just a harbinger for the weird.
One of the most famous of Lovecraft’s shorter writings is “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), an enthralling narrative that chronicles the ultimate deconstruction of the farm-bound Gardner family following the fall of a mysterious meteorite on their property. The amount of cult references and re-imaginings to this Lovecraft story are numerous (and for good reason, the story is fantastic): Stephen King wrote his own version, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” (1976), which was portrayed in George A. Romero’s Creepshow (1982); an adaptation was produced in the form of David Keith’s The Curse, in 1987; Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, published in 2014, no doubt took a great deal of inspiration from Lovecraft’s yarn. Most recently, however, is Richard Stanley’s stylistic Color Out of Space (2019), produced by independent film studio SpectreVision (owned by Elijah Wood, apparently). Recently, the company has chosen to stop working with Stanley for legitimate concerns, but luckily there isn’t much to go off of with regards to directorial ideology—mostly because I haven’t actually seen the rest of Stanley’s work, so I have nothing to compare it to. Nevertheless, the film does well as an adaptation of Lovecraft’s story, though it leaves the viewer wanting more in certain aspects.
The plot itself is stripped almost directly from the text in terms of structure, though the film alters the character names and is set in present day: a narrator comes to us in the form of hydrologist Ward Phillips (played by Elliot Knight), who is surveying the development of a dam in West Arkham. As he surveys the surrounding woodland he comes across the Gardners, a family living in their secluded farmhouse, raising alpacas and keeping to themselves. One night, a meteor crashes into their yard and begins to affect the surrounding biosphere with its cosmic influence, infecting the water supply and twisting the minds of each of the family members as their reality is altered around them. The main difference between the two narratives is Ward’s role prior to the meteoric blast. In the film, Ward plays the part of an observer to the events leading up to the “blasted heath,” while in the original Lovecraft story, Ward chronicles the lore the other Arkham residents conjure in regard to the formation of the incursion. In fact, the film takes great pains to physically isolate the Gardners from the rest of the community, possibly to create more of a paranoid atmosphere. One might argue that the original narrative invites the possibility for an unreliable narrator—especially given Lovecraft’s track record for creating main characters who have less-than-adequate sanity levels and giving them lines like, “I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more to troubling my sleep” (“The Colour Out of Space”)—and the script eliminates the lack of logic that amplifies the cosmic horror of the prose. However, when it comes to the filmmaking, the pacing flows much more smoothly with our narrator acting as a contributing member of the Gardners’ ultimate demise.
Image courtesy of SpectreVision
While the cinematography and production value are quite modern, the visual aesthetic is beautifully retro. Soft filters on the lens recall the meditative quality of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color (2013), while equivocal angles that capture the looming gothic threat of swaying pines or the bland interior rooms of the Gardners’ house are picturesque, though quite simplistic. The cinematography does not take any strides towards being experimental and, for the most part, this is beneficial: while the script certainly hints at separate underlying themes through each member of the Gardner family, the film is very straightforward in its intent. Beneath its languid surface, Color Out of Space acts as a fine homage to other Lovecraft film adaptations of its caliber. It’s obvious that Stanley wanted to look towards mirroring Stuart Gordon; the dichotomy of light and dark draws on the dramatic, eccentric hues of From Beyond (1986) and assaults the senses with excited neon visuals that are certainly impressive (both films even utilize the same color palate). It’s worth mentioning that Lovecraft’s original story doesn’t specifically tell the reader what the color from space is; it only describes it as something beyond anything known in the visible spectrum. In the film, it is a kind of pink or magenta hue. Supposedly this is on purpose, not because it wants to look like a cult film, but because magenta most closely resembles ultraviolet or infrared; the only possible way for a cosmic entity to interact with our current mode of perception would have to be through magenta, or pink. Whether or not this is factual, one cannot help but admire the cryptic logic in adapting the color for a human audience.
The soundtrack by Colin Stetson is sinisterly foreboding; synths exist not to elevate a pastiche eighties style but to mimic the dreadful horns of Stetson’s prior score for Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), along with post-rock inspired wind arrangements peppered throughout. Meanwhile, I could not imagine a better spiritual successor to Jeffery Combs (in either of the Gordon productions) than Nicolas Cage as Nathan Gardner. He’s playfully hokey as a family man but quickly devolves into comical fits of rage and savage mockery of his wife and daughter as his sanity deteriorates; a result of the color’s infection of his farm. The rest of the family is serviceable as side characters, but only to the extent that they are side characters. Very little plays to the psychology or overall interplay between members of the family. Gardner’s wife, Theresa, is the actual breadwinner of the family and apparently is suffering from cancer, though this only comes up twice, and their children seem caught up in the disarray of typical family awkwardness. Their daughter, Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), is a wanna-blessed-be who is easily the most insufferable character of the film, but also is so naïve that you almost feel bad for her. Their older son, Benny (Brendan Mayer)—a conspiracy fiend who spends his free time with a random squatter on the family’s property named Ezra (Tommy Chong)—is honestly the most normal person in the family. There’s also the youngest child, Jack (Julian Hillard), who shares some kind of telepathic connection to the roaming color of the fallen meteor in the Gardners’ yard, though not to much avail, unfortunately. There were moments where Jack would seem to commune with the color—possibly referring to Lovecraft’s original story where the color acts more as an alien creature rather than a blight to scourge the landscape—but it merely comes off as amateur horror film writing instead. To be fair, with a film like this there is no need to look for the human condition in any of these performances, because quite frankly, Lovecraft’s fiction is about the underlying terrors of the imagination rather than the characters. They exist merely as pawns—literal representations of community members for the storyteller to manipulate for the sake of the story—which has always been the case in Lovecraft stories, as far as I can tell (case in point: the surname of our main characters is Gardner and their jobs are gardeners). If there’s any true outlier to the character writing for the film, however, it has to be Ezra’s involvement. Supposedly, the man records weird sounds beneath his shack at night and influences Benny’s conspiracy fascination, but beyond this, it’s hard to find a purpose for the character’s existence. Who just allows some random squatter to hang out on their property and give weed to their son? Apparently, the Gardners.
Image courtesy of SpectreVision
In terms of performance, the cast does well enough, despite the melodramatic script. I personally found the ridiculous dialogue to be purposeful in its comedy because it further recalls the surreal atmosphere of an eighties science fiction film. For one reason or another, Lovecraft’s storytelling works well in this vein; a sense of playfulness is necessary to offset the overall dismal tone as our characters slowly lose their sanity over time. It’s unfortunate that the body horror doesn’t quite meet that same level of immersion. At least, not fully. There are some arresting visuals in Color Out of Space, and even with a budget of nearly $6-12 million, the effects are impressive. Unfortunately, a majority of them are digital, which takes the viewer out of the tactile nature of the film’s true terror. There is one sequence where the reality-altering color conjoins the physical matter between Theresa and Jack, resulting in one of the few instances of practical effects work to a harrowing degree. It’s cruel and brutal; the prosthetic is a lifeless grey that meets the color of a soulless corpse and draws on the empathy of the viewer. Meanwhile, the rest of the visuals are largely in darkness—possibly to hide the lower quality of the digital effects—or are products of editing techniques that obscure the reimagined lifeforms. An altered cat creature flashes past the screen for a fraction of a second with purple eyes before sending a vehicle swerving towards the roadside, while a mass of conjoined alpacas is first viewed through extreme, out-of-focus close-ups before finally becoming rendered in a Carpenteresque monstrosity of computer-generated flesh. A part of me wanted to know how the rest of the Theresa/Jack hybrid functioned and appeared in its oblong, spider form, but the lighting was too dark to appreciate the creature design. Other times, the digital effects are used well: after becoming consumed with the color’s energy, Lavinia shows Ward a vision of what is presumably Yuggoth, in all of its many-tentacled abstract repulsion. Similarly, as Ward travels through the Gardner house in the film’s climax, his body elongates and contorts in response to the color distorting time.
Beyond all of this, one aspect remains true: despite its ultra-neon exterior, the film does its best to be a Lovecraft story above anything else. It’s fortunate that filmmakers who are inspired by Lovecraftian fiction choose to make their films as true to the text as possible by adhering carefully to the evolving macabre. The result might not be perfect, but the effort remains evident, nonetheless. So long as it carries that sense of foreboding, cerebral weirdness all the way to the end, there will always be something to fall in love with in films like Color Out of Space.
Trevor Ruth is a writer from Livermore, California, whose work has previously appeared in Occam’s Razor, The Southampton Review, and other literary journals. He writes fiction and poetry that utilizes slipstream to subvert genre ideals, as well as critical essays on film and art.