Co-written by the director and Scarlett Amaris, Color Out of Shape focuses on a family in retreat. Maybe that’s why Color Out of Space’s fevered second half plays like the work of a director who has decades of pent-up ideas, and is determined to get them all on screen.īut first, Stanley spends time setting up the characters who will be going mad. The film marks the comeback of Richard Stanley, director of the 1990 cult classic Hardware, who’s largely focused on short films and documentaries since his doomed 1996 attempt to direct the film The Island of Dr. Largely set on an initially peaceful farm, Color Out of Space lets unsettling developments mount slowly, then quickens the pace to the point of madness. That works well enough, in part because the hue envelops a film that stays true to the spirit of the Lovecraft story while bringing it into the 21st century. (Or, as Lovecraft phrases it, “hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth.”)Ĭolor Out of Space, a new take on Lovecraft’s story, wisely doesn’t even try to solve the problem of creating an impossible color: it settles for a sickly pink-purple. The event has many consequences for the region’s vegetation, livestock, and eventually, its human population, and those consequences all bear the same shade - a color unknown to human eyes. That’s more of a problem than usual when it comes to Lovecraft’s 1927 story “The Colour Out of Space,” in which a remote corner of New England becomes deadly and strange after a meteorite crashes on an unfortunate farm. His stories walk readers up to the cliff of an abyss, then insist they take the last steps themselves - an approach that generally works better on the page than on the screen. Much of Lovecraft’s fiction involves compiling the details surrounding some awful happening, or some madness-provoking creature, without staring either directly in the face. Lovecraft is that at some point, you have to depict the indescribable.

Lovecraft the color