Of all the prolific horror author’s short stories, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space is often considered his best. Not only is it the author’s personal favorite, but it’s one of the most popular tales among readers and critics alike. It tells of a family farm ravaged by an alien meteorite that spreads its indescribable iridescent-like color across the land, corrupting the flora and fauna into horrific things. It’s a story that’s been adapted for screen many times before, but for Richard Stanley, the release of Color Out of Space on January 24, 2020 marks the conclusion of a seven-year journey in getting this film made. What was it about Lovecraft’s story that made Stanley fight so hard and long to see his vision through?
It turns out that it’s very personal.
Stanley tells us, “HPL is my mom’s favorite writer. She read me his stuff when I was a child. Then my mom died of cancer very slowly over a period of 10 years. During which time, I read most of Lovecraft’s material back to her and got to see firsthand how different parts of her personality shut down as she mutated and died. Eventually, it stopped hydrating and feeding her. Which is something that’s again reflected in the arc within Color. She knew we were making the film before she died, but a typical Lovecraftian way, she was very skeptical of the whole thing. I wanted to have a posthumous conversation with HPL because obviously it’s been as a sort of negative father figure whose been looking over my shoulder since I was about seven.”
“I’ve been intrigued at how Lovecraft’s more popular now than ever before. What it is about the early 21st century that’s caused this really strange cranky writer from the 1920s to suddenly be as hugely popular as he is, despite the fact he’s a racist, he’s a misogynist, there’s all kinds of terrible things about his personality. Lovecraft’s bigger than ever.” Stanley says, “I think that is partially because we’re all living in a world where we are no longer certain that the humanity really will still be around in a couple of hundred years’ time, or what sort of world our children will be living in.”
Stanley continues, “There’s also something there to do with the slow but irrevocable collapse of mainstream religion. Most people these days are not converting to orthodoxies like Catholicism or Orthodox Judaism, or Orthodox Islam. That raises issues about if something did create us and whether those created deities are human-friendly or whether they created us by accident or whether they’re completely unaware of us; which pushes us into a kind of a Lovecraftian frame of mind.”
Nicolas Cage stars in Color Out of Space as Nathan Gardner, Alpaca farmer and Gardner family patriarch. Interestingly, Cage very nearly appeared in Stanley’s Dust Devil, released back in 1992. It was while working on Mandy that the producers behind SpectreVision handed Cage the script for Color Out of Space, thinking he might be an ideal candidate for the central part. Stanley shares that without this casting, the film would’ve played out very differently.
“In the original draft of the movie, it was a British family set it in France, which is where I’m currently living. So, it was a retired British accountant,” Stanley explains. “His family took over a French farm to try and farm Alpacas and [were] destroyed by the threat from the outer space. There were a lot of gags over them being unable to explain their pain and their problems to their neighbors because of the language barrier. I originally had Hugh Grant in mind, weirdly enough. I thought Hugh Grant would’ve been fun for Nathan. But then once Nic came aboard, the decision was made to move it back to its place of origin – to move it back to new England – which I think was the best decision.”
Fans of Lovecraft should also keep an eye out for the many Easter eggs Stanley strategically placed throughout, such as “the weather forecasts, the brief appearance of the Native American Mayor, the Necronomicon, to show that it’s part of a wider Lovecraftian Universe.” He adds, “I’d love to do another Lovecraft movie further down the pike.”
As for what that would be? “I’m tempted to have a go at the Dunwich Horror. I’d love to do that. I think the Whateley family have been really hard done by, and I’d love to see the Whateley’s carnated on screen properly. Just the idea of some kind of working-class New England backwoods family that have interbred with ultra-dimensional demons from beyond space.”
It looks like Stanley will be getting his wish, as SpectreVision has “basically greenlit” an adaptation of The Dunwich Horror, the director revealed in another interview this week.
Color Out of Space crashes into theaters on January 24, 2020.
