I was awed by a great horror movie on Monday, and I've been wondering since if it's not the greatest horror movie I've ever seen. The film is an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's 1922 novella The Colour out of Space that greatly improves the story in every way. It keeps the genius of the basic plot: a strange meteor crashes on a farm and has a horrific influence on the unlucky family nearest to it. It warps their minds and disfigures them. (A warning for animal lovers: it also affects all living things in the vicinity.
Crucial to this movie's success is the way director Richard Stanley and screenwriter Scarlett Amaris concentrate the action. In Lovecraft's pages, the story unfolds like cancer over two years. In this movie, it spans maybe four days. After a brief narration lifted from Lovecraft to set the mood, the film takes fifteen minutes to establish the characters. After that, buckle in, because the plot careens through crises with the speed and force of an avalanche. The mood is fevered, and the horror is nonstop. The characters are so well-established and acted their ordeal always seems real and urgent, even in moments of humor.
How else does the script and director Richard Stanley improve this story? Anyone who has read Lovecraft is familiar with the weaknesses of his writing: i.e. his two-dimensional characters; the shortage of dialog, with only brief passages of speech so badly depicted they make you wish Lovecraft didn't try at all.
Stanley has upgraded the story in every way. Where the characters in Lovecraft feel remote, he's retrofitted the tale with revised characters, armed it with great dialog, and put the best actors in the roles. The setting is completely modern-day. The visual effects combined with the cinematography are first-rate and rise to meet a spectacular ending, exactly the one Lovecraft described.
Also, they fix Lovecraft's complicated, convoluted archaic, story-telling structure, in which a narrator tells a third-hand story of an inexplicable disaster that happened forty years prior. The inciting incident is the presence of a dead zone called "the blasted heath" in the middle of a New England forest. That approach seems to squeeze all tension and suspense from the tale.
Although Lovecraft wrote his story a century ago, it has influenced many films since. You might recognize it as being very similar to 2017's Annihilation. Instead of "The Shimmer," this meteor has "The Color," a quality that Lovecraft describes as "like no earthly colour." This makes it a psychic tint instead of a visual one, suggesting the presence of an entity that's both powerful and malevolent. The Color ends up being absorbed in everything. The water, the plants, the animals, and the people. The movie has to fudge on Lovecraft's "like no earthly color" concept, choosing a pink-purple, and showing it in mist whenever possible. Nicolas Cage gives a line that it wasn't like any color he'd ever seen. Also like Annihilation, the nature of the entity never gets any clearer by the end. As similar as the plot concepts are, the stories diverge so much that nothing in Annihilation spoils anything in this film. They are both worth seeing.
Nicolas Cage plays Nathan Gardner, the father and husband, and a hopelessly impractical romantic. He's transferred his family from city living to the remote country. His wife, Theresa (Joely Richardson) is a day-trader, a cancer survivor, and is the practical influence. They've moved from the city to the country with their three children. Nathan is comical at first, then gets serious as he goes insane. Nicolas Cage seems to be channeling every famous actor who ever played a psycho. The fate of two family members is indescribable. Here, the practical effects have none of the campiness of previous Lovecraft adaptations, such as From Beyond. The pity and helplessness the actors perform comes off as almost too authentic.
Yet, the parents are not the protagonists. Instead, the story begins and ends with their oldest child, Lavinia a late teen, played by Madeleine Arthur. Her character, a Wiccan, tries to protect herself with magic. In my opinion, it works. She seems least affected at first by the madness that seizes everyone else, but at a painful cost. She's also most aware of the danger and knows her parents can't be reasoned with about it. As the events overtake the characters, you can miss her character arc, but it's explicit.
For all of his flaws, Lovecraft was a savant who wrote poetry starting at 3-years-old, a visionary whose work opened up whole new avenues for the horror genre. He freed it from dependence on traditional religions and myths. Also, he originated the subgenre of cosmic horror. In tales such as The Colour out of Space, the spiritual and material overlap or are one, and the universe is fundamentally incomprehensible, dashing all human assumptions and hopes. It's also inhabited by monstrous impersonal gods and creatures of immense power, as unaware of humankind as they are impossible to influence or reason with. Lovecraftian gods are worshipped, not because they'll help or save their believers, but because the believers have no will about it. Horror writers continue to develop these tropes today.
While watching, I never asked why the characters don't flee when things got weird, a common complaint of horror movies. In Color, it all happens so fast, with the characters' sanity undermined first. In their lucid moments when they try to leave, all of their plans are dashed. Oh, and the Color also jams cell phone reception, a touch necessary in every horror story today.
I'm pretty jaded but I was actually as scared during this film as I was during Alien forty years ago. For anyone whose eye's glaze over reading a dense paragraph of a Lovecraft story, who then asks me what could possibly be so worthwhile beneath the granite, I can now just point them to this movie. I couldn't do that before because no movie prior ever truly captured a Lovecraft story and played it without any camp or irony.
The epilogue, like the beginning, ends with a narration that's mostly lifted from Lovecraft; a deserved tribute to a writer who originated this captivating story a century ago.