Color Out of Space (2019)

[runningscared]

Movie: Color Out of Space (2019), directed by Richard Stanley

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.09 miles, 8’47”/mile, 01:02:13 (recovery run)

 

I was wondering what I should watch tonight when a friend sent me a photo of some baguettes that got weirdly misshapen upon removal from the oven, which, if taken as a directive from on high, narrowed the field nicely:  should I cue up some classic Cronenberg, or go full Lovecraftian by checking out last year’s adaptation of “The Colour Out of Space,” which had just shown up on Shudder? After a brief moment’s consideration, I opted for the latter via the following logic: since this planet is undeniably a raging dumpster fire right now, wouldn’t it be nice to take some time to consider that everything that lies beyond might be incomprehensibly worse?

 

And speaking of “incomprehensibly worse,” let’s talk about Color Out of Space!

 

Ha ha, no, actually it’s not half bad, but I can’t just throw away good segues—haven’t you heard there’s a war on? So here’s the thing about Lovecraft adaptations in general and Color Out of Space in particular: the whole point of H.P.’s brand of cosmic horror is that godlike nightmares lurk just beyond the fragile veil that separates our mundane world from the next—horrors that beggar the capacity of human comprehension. And while that concept works (arguably) well in written prose, where you can describe something as being a color no one’s ever seen before, it’s a bit trickier when you’re making a movie and have to stick that impossible color on a screen for people to look at. (In this case, they apparently just kinda shrugged and said, “let’s go with magenta.”)

 

The other problem with cosmic horror is that, practically by definition, it has to take itself too seriously. It relies on selling you the idea that, listen, if you actually saw the thing we’re telling you about, you would lose your mind. Again, tricky to pull off in a visual medium: “Here’s the thing! See? Isn’t it scary on an existential level? YOU ARE LOSING YOUR MIND RIGHT NOW, I CAN TELL.” And this is why I think so many film adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories wind up being funny, either intentionally (because the filmmakers took the easy way out) or not (because they made a valiant effort to be genuinely terrifying and missed the mark). Color Out of Space sort of tries for a hybrid approach; it certainly feels like it’s trying to be deeply unsettling (and sometimes it succeeds), but it undermines its own efforts by hedging its bets. For example, they named a cat “G-Spot” and, when said pussy goes missing, its owner says “you probably won’t recognize it if you find it.” So much for mood.

 

To that end, let’s talk about casting: if you’re trying to lend your cosmic horror film some gravitas and keep it from wandering into the realm of self-parody, you probably don’t cast Nicolas Cage in the lead role like these folks did. And even if they made that casting decision in good faith and told Mr. Cage—who is actually a fine actor capable of nuanced, understated performances—to rein in the crazy (spoiler: they didn’t; they actually told him to go all-out), they probably shouldn’t have also cast Tommy Chong as an acid casualty aging hippie squatter. Who named his cat “G-Spot.”

 

It may be worth noting, while we’re at it, that while I admit it has been a while since I read Lovecraft’s story, I do not recall it having an acid casualty aging hippie squatter among the dramatis personae, and so it’s safe to say that as an adaptation, Color Out of Space wanders a bit from its source material. That isn’t necessarily at all a bad thing. After all, the bones of the story are simple enough: a meteorite strikes the Gardner family farm, it releases a crazy magenta INDESCRIBABLY-COLORED light show, it gets struck by a whole lotta lightning and disappears, and then weird changes start happening to the local flora and fauna before the Gardners descend into madness and everything is ruined forever—and on that level, Color Out of Space is a faithful adaptation. Its story has been modernized, to be sure, and spends more time on characterization: Nelson just wants to milk his expensive alpacas; his wife Theresa is a cancer survivor and finance whiz; their daughter Lavinia is a junk-food-loving Wiccan who misses the city; teen son Benny likes space and gets stoned a lot; and little Jack likes dinosaurs. All that makes you care a bit more once the bad stuff starts kicking in after a slow twenty minutes, but maybe not enough to sell the cosmic horror angle.

 

But! Color Out of Space DOES work very effectively as a Cronenbergian body horror death march. It starts out relatively slow—a horrible odor that only Nelson can smell, attacks of catatonia and lost time, inexplicable headaches and the like. But before too long, Theresa is cutting off her own fingers, Lavinia is carving runes into her flesh with a box-cutter and bleeding into her mass-paperback edition of Necronomicon, and the alpacas have gone skinless and slimy and shoot magenta IMPOSSIBLY-HUED lightning at family members, which leads to a development which I won’t spoil, but which was the single thing in this movie that genuinely horrified me. Meanwhile, Nelson is going full Cage and he has a shotgun, so you know this can only end well.

 

So, yes, it’s scary, or at least deeply unsettling, but maybe not in the way the best Lovecraftian horror is scary. If you go into it with tempered expectations, there’s a fair bit to like; the performances are solid and the effects are decent. As long as you’re prepared for a slow start, horror that’s more body and less cosmic, and Nic Cage being Nic Cage and Tommy Chong being Tommy Chong, this can be a pretty enjoyable ride.

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