The Color Out of Space - Directed by Richard Stanley and starring Nicolas Cage

No. No, no, just no.

There are Lovecraft stories that can be adapted to film. The Color Out of Space is not one of them. It's probably the worst one possible to try to adapt, because the core gimmick cannot be visually represented, by it's very nature. There are others that probably wouldn't work, like The Music of Erich Zann, but none as bad as A Color out of Space, excepting some of the ones that are just too short to work, and some of the ones that are just too abstract and high-concept, like The Doom that Came to Sarnath... And, ok, let's face it, the whole Dreamlands cycle would be hard to do, unless you did it as an HBO series or something.

But still, there are lots of ones that would work!

We get a shitty-ass version of Herbert West as a B-grade horror-comedy, and we get a bastardized version of The Shadow over Innsmouth retitled as "Dagon", two/three stories that should have been easy to adopt but the directors failed, and now we get this monstrosity... But we don't get Mountains of Madness, which would work easily, and had a top-notch director interested in it. We don't get The Dunwich Horror, or Rats in the Walls, or Whisperer in the Darkness, or The Shadow out of Time, or many others.
 
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Varg Did Nothing Wrong said:
I'm still waiting for them to make a film adaptation out of Horror at Red Hook. Oppress those muslims and chinamen! Make them devil worshippers!
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In the HPLHS radioplay adaptation of "Horror at Red Hook", they added a virtue-signalling written disclaimer that Yazidis are not actually devil-worshippers and you should feel bad for them because they got ethnically cleansed by ISIS.
 
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Your Weird Fetish said:
Herbert West was B-grade horror comedy when Lovecraft wrote it. He knew damn well it wasn't his best work, he was just doing it for money, and ended up edging gradually into deliberate self-parody by the end. Really, it's the only accurate Lovecraft adaptation currently made.
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Eh. I know he was disappointed in it, and I agree the last scene was pretty bad, but it wasn't a terrible story, and it still deserved better than what it got. Although Jeffry Combs was a great Herbert West, conceptually.
 
MembersSchoolPizza said:
No. No, no, just no.

There are Lovecraft stories that can be adapted to film. The Color Out of Space is not one of them. It's probably the worst one possible to try to adapt, because the core gimmick cannot be visually represented, by it's very nature. There are others that probably wouldn't work, like The Music of Erich Zann, but none as bad as A Color out of Space, excepting some of the ones that are just too short to work, and some of the ones that are just too abstract and high-concept, like The Doom that Came to Sarnath... And, ok, let's face it, the whole Dreamlands cycle would be hard to do, unless you did it as an HBO series or something.

But still, there are lots of ones that would work!

We get a shitty-ass version of Herbert West as a B-grade horror-comedy, and we get a bastardized version of The Shadow over Innsmouth retitled as "Dagon", two/three stories that should have been easy to adopt but the directors failed, and now we get this monstrosity... But we don't get Mountains of Madness, which would work easily, and had a top-notch director interested in it. We don't get The Dunwich Horror, or Rats in the Walls, or Whisperer in the Darkness, or The Shadow out of Time, or many others.
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There were two Tales From The Crypt episodes which were inspired by Lovecraft stories: Season 2 episodes Judy You’re Not Yourself Today and Fitting Punishment were loosely based on The Thing At The Doorstep and In The Vault respectively.
 
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Pokemonquistador2 said:
What's next? Are they going to apologize because Lovecraft named his cat "Nigger?"
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I just re-listened to it to see how bad it was. Actually was pretty good. Lots of casual, unapologetic racism against the degenerate Mideastern immigrants of Red Hook, singling out Greeks, Syrians, Kurds, even Yazidis, like in the original short story. They do make a jibe at anti-Irish discrimination, though, I guess as a commentary that "racism bad" without messing with the original story's characterization of the eastern immigrants as evil occultists.

Probably the peak "wokeness" in the HPLHS radioplay series is a fanfic episode they made based on Inspector LeGrasse (from the original Call of Cthulhu short story) investigating a Mythos cult masquerading as a KKK chapter in the Louisiana swamps.
 
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millais said:
In the HPLHS radioplay adaptation of "Horror at Red Hook", they added a virtue-signalling written disclaimer that Yazidis are not actually devil-worshippers and you should feel bad for them because they got ethnically cleansed by ISIS.
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They don't worship the Devil, they worship Satan. Important distinction. Also their version of Satan is reformed and nice. Touching little story. God apologizes for stifling him, Satan apologizes for rebelling. All a happy family again.
 
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Bunny Tracks said:
The only way they could've possibly worked around this is if they filmed the movie in black and white. They clearly haven't, and they're going to pay for it.
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My boyfriend and I were discussing this trailer and how you could possibly have a movie with something we have to use our imagination to properly illustrate. Black and white was an idea I pitched, but I also suggested never showing the audience anything and letting them try to imagine what’s being seen.

I remember one of the scariest movies I watched as a kid was the old (OOOOLD) 1940s adaptation of The Uninvited. They didn’t have the tech or budget to create an aparition wandering around the house every night and crying. The way they worked around it was to have the two characters talk about how the air was cold and how they can hear the sobbing in the stairwell, all while the crying gets progressively louder as the ghost is walking closer. And then it just stops... and the whole movie goes dead quiet; no instrumental cues, no ambient noise, no talking. Just dead silence as you just wait alongside the characters for something to happen. It’s kind of campy in retrospect, but I appreciate the subtlety of how the hauntings are handled and how most of the tension comes from the audiences own fear of what’s walking around the house completely unseen.

For some reason film-makers are unable to leave any kind of mystery to the audience, so subtlety is dead. Which is a shame because with the right direction, sound design, and delivery, this could possibly be somewhat adaptable to film.
 
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Fuck this CGI nightmare and fuck me for reading the YouTube comments thinking anyone would have any taste.
 
Basketball Jones said:
My boyfriend and I were discussing this trailer and how you could possibly have a movie with something we have to use our imagination to properly illustrate. Black and white was an idea I pitched, but I also suggested never showing the audience anything and letting them try to imagine what’s being seen.

I remember one of the scariest movies I watched as a kid was the old (OOOOLD) 1940s adaptation of The Uninvited. They didn’t have the tech or budget to create an aparition wandering around the house every night and crying. The way they worked around it was to have the two characters talk about how the air was cold and how they can hear the sobbing in the stairwell, all while the crying gets progressively louder as the ghost is walking closer. And then it just stops... and the whole movie goes dead quiet; no instrumental cues, no ambient noise, no talking. Just dead silence as you just wait alongside the characters for something to happen. It’s kind of campy in retrospect, but I appreciate the subtlety of how the hauntings are handled and how most of the tension comes from the audiences own fear of what’s walking around the house completely unseen.

For some reason film-makers are unable to leave any kind of mystery to the audience, so subtlety is dead. Which is a shame because with the right direction, sound design, and delivery, this could possibly be somewhat adaptable to film.
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Kubrick's "The Shining" indulged in ghostly hijinks now and then, but its most effective scenes involved the characters silently walking through the haunted hotel. The hotel itself was like a labyrinth, with confusion around every corner. Kubrick also designed it to be uncanny - with windows and doors located in places that wouldn't match with the exterior of the hotel, and chairs subtly moving between shots. The typewriter Jack Nicholson is working on starts out a bright white, then turns a dark gray as the events of the movie grow "darker" and more dangerous.

The movie "Hereditary" displays horrors that are not just based on an external, supernatural threat to the family, but on the deep terrors of family dysfunction. It's not the fact that a demon is trying to possess the son that's the true horror of the film - it's the fact that a woman would willingly torture and destroy her own children in order to gain wealth and power. The film also does a good job playing on people's worst, most primal fears - the death of a child due to one's own carelessness, sitting alone in a dark, silent house where evil might be lurking in the shadows just beyond your line of sight, watching a loved one break down with a mental illness and being powerless to help them, etc.

The most effective horror movies rely not on jump scares and spactacles, or big CG monsters, but on a deep understanding of human psychology. Alien is terrifying, not just because it has a scary monster, but because that monster is basically rape and violation personified. Poltergeist was terrifying because it plays on a parent's fear of having their children kidnapped. "The Birds" is terrifying because if all of Nature decided to rise up against us, we humans know we'd be pretty screwed. The Colour Out of Space works as a horror story because the trouble that stalks the main family is so subtle in its Nature, so insidious, and gradual in its growth, that the family doesn't notice how doomed they are until it's way too late. Even if they knew how bad things were going to get, they'd still face the horror of having to abandon everything they own and start over somewhere else with virtually nothing to their name. It could work as a movie, but the family has to be the centerpoint of the horror, not just the titular "colour". There are very few directors and writers these days that understand how horror works on a fundamental level. To most, it's all gore and jumpscares.
 
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Next, an adaption of Lovecraft's story "Sweet Ermengarde"

But these tender passages, sacred though their fervour, did not pass unobserved by profane eyes; for crouched in the bushes and gritting his teeth was the dastardly ’Squire Hardman! When the lovers had finally strolled away he leapt out into the lane, viciously twirling his moustache and riding-crop, and kicking an unquestionably innocent cat who was also out strolling.

“Curses!” he cried—Hardman, not the cat—“I am foiled in my plot to get the farm and the girl! But Jack Manly shall never succeed! I am a man of power—and we shall see!”
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BrunoMattei said:
A screener came out. I'm afraid to confirm that it isn't very good. Very hammy expository dialog, slow, and Nicolas Cage just does not give a fuck. Wonder what happened? All in the elements were in place for something great.
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Just watched it. I think they were trying to go for a "Hereditary" vibe with the casting, lighting, music, and family drama, but this film doesn't have nearly the level of subtlety and intricacy that that movie did. And if you just wanted to see Nicholas Cage losing his shit, there are better movies for that.

I think one of the problems with the film is that the timetable has been sped up - instead of taking months for the Colour's effects to occur, everything seemed to happen in less than a week. One of the original story's strengths is that it was a slowly unfolding mystery. You saw horrible changes taking effect over a long period of time and you wanted to read to the end to find out what the hell could be causing the family's misfortunes. It's the kind of story that needs a lot of buildup.

Another big problem with the film is that we spend way too much time with the family. In the original story, once the shit really hit the fan, we panned away from the farm, not figuring out the extent of the horror until the very end, when outsiders finally visited it. In this movie version, we've been following the family's transformation since the beginning, and saw the most shocking moments long before the end, so to make their ending as shocking as the original, the filmmakers had to throw a lot of special effects at it. Granted, there are a lot of cool practical effects in the film, and the CG is mostly fine, but nothing really matched the horror of the original story ending as seen in my imagination.

The film did have some intriguing ideas. The fact that the Colour seemed to warp time and space around itself was mentioned, but the film really didn't seem to do anything with it. I thought that the filmmakers might do something interesting with how they portrayed the Colour, but no. It's just magenta. (One possible solution to this problem might have been to have the color palette slowly draining form the farm as the "infestation" went on, and then portray the Colour as a deep, oversaturated hue, but no. They went with magenta...)
 
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It also wasn't one of Nicolas Cages's best performances. He wasn't horrible, but something about his acting felt off.
But I like the part at the end where it shows that the being that plagued the family sucked up all the color around it. It was neat, at least in visual terms.
 
Mariposa Electrique said:
Cosmic horror films are notoriously difficult to create. Why? Because we have pattern recognition, and we've already discovered almost everything on the planet, so it's hard to be scared or freaked out by things. Until we can travel to another dimension and describe and catalog things there, cosmic horror will remain a difficult genre to execute.
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The Witch did a pretty good job. And, we've barely discovered a grain of sand on the beach of the universe, so it's kind of funny when you say that we've discovered almost everything.

The Witch isn't cosmic horror, but did a pretty good job of making me terrified of what lives in a wood right next to the set of the movie, which is extremely Lovecraftian. Also, plenty of room for cosmic horror out in the cosmos. Even Intersrellar touched on a few points that could be explored for good cosmic horror
 
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