Six Impossible Colours (Out Of Space)
One of last year’s major comebacks, Color Out of Space heralds the belated return to fiction features for the South African-born director Richard Stanley, who, justly celebrated for his early triumphs Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992), was fired a few days into shooting The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) and, in true maverick spirit, has kept himself busy since with documentaries, shorts, and script work. Apart from giving an indication of which direction his H.G. Wells adaptation might have taken decades ago—the bizarre end result, as finished by John Frankenheimer, is considered one of those notorious late-Marlon Brando follies (I beg to differ, but that’s a subject for another issue)—Stanley’s ostentatiously trippy, enjoyably weird, but also weirdly respectful modernization of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic short story is one of those intriguing cases where the source material fits the sensibility of the director almost like a glove: the eponymous threat originally conjured by the puritan writer from Providence is remarkably close to the bad-trip horror-vibe experiences that, according to Stanley, were the true inspiration for Hardware’s hallucinatory action inferno.
If Stanley has also managed to bend Lovecraft’s dark terror tale about an inexplicable and invincible threat into his preferred mode of apocalyptic black comedy—with no mean assist from fellow Lovecraftian Nicolas Cage, who was encouraged to go gleefully over the top—it shouldn’t be held against him. Color Out of Space still ranks among the finest hours of Lovecraftian cinema, which, inevitably, entails all kinds of strange compromises and idiosyncratic approaches; after all, what makes Lovecraft so special as a writer seems, at first glance, to be strictly antithetical to the dictates of commercial moviemaking. And so, as it took several decades for Lovecraft’s critical reputation and importance as a major innovator of the fantastic to become generally accepted after his premature death, aged 47, in 1937, his legacy wound up sneaking into the popular consciousness in a roundabout way, leaving the movies (and other fields of culture and entertainment, not least gaming) to wrestle with the difficult task of rendering his unsettling and mysterious creations visible.
This, in fact, is the most pressing challenge for filmmakers seeking to adapt Lovecraft, even before they must deal with such touchy subjects as the author’s bizarre private mythology (from the Cthulhu cult of “elder gods” with unspeakable names to that book named ) and his lack of interest in “proper” narrative, common emotions (love does not exist in his universe, which barely contains any female characters anyway), or psychology—actually, anything associated with the tenets of realism, which he abhorred and sternly avoided, thus enabling the purity and overwhelming, Dracula-black misanthropy of his nightmarish vision, which was fuelled by the most unpleasant sentiments (like obsessive racism) that a reactionary but well-behaved gentleman of his time and place could muster. While prodigiously talented in creating and maintaining disturbing atmosphere(s), Lovecraft specialized
