Don’t drink the
water, says Tony.
The Colour Out Of
Space first saw life as a short story by famed master of creepy,
screamy, tentacle-waving leviathan horror, HP Lovecraft.
Since then, it’s been
adapted a few times in various formats, because in its essence it’s
such a terrifyingly straightforward, bleak, nuclear-option horror
premise.
A meteorite arrives
from space, giving off a colour. That’s it – a simple colour,
although the colour’s outside the human visual spectrum. It taints
whatever it touches, and it sinks into the soil. Time passes, and the
life of a rural Boston farmer goes on as normal – his fruit yield
is huge the next year. Huge, but inedible. The colour, the poison, is
in the water table, and has been for some time. Everything that needs
water to survive will be tainted.
And everything needs
water to survive. Plants. Insects. Animals. People. Everything.
It’s almost like a
kind of sci-fi bio-horror version of The Shining – although
Stephen King claims his novel The Tommyknockers was more
directly based on the Lovecraft original.
Here’s a challenge –
imagine a sci-fi bio-horror version of The Shining.
Add Nicholas Cage in
full-on Nicholas Cage mode.
While you’re at it,
just to dial the wildness up to 11, add Tommy Chong as a stoner
squatting in a cabin, dispensing occasional bon mots.
Now you’ve got
yourself a party.
The new movie version,
written and directed by Richard Stanley, sticks more closely to the
original source material than some previous versions, with Cage’s
Nathan Gardner having returned from the city to his father’s farm –
a thing he swore he’d never do – when his wife Theresa (played
with a kind of hollowed-out, weary kindness by Joely Richardson)
discovered she had cancer. The Gardners have three kids – Wiccan
daughter, Lavinia (played frequently with a potency that steals
scenes and glues your eyes to the screen by Madeleine Arthur), who
thinks most people are lame and has taken to doing rituals on their
farmland to kill her mother’s cancer, trainee stoner Bennie
(Brendan Meyer), who fulfils a degree of social stereotyping that
stoners will be more or less useless, aimless and clueless, and the
significantly younger Jack (Julian Hillard), who exists more or less
to be that kid. That kid in creepy movies who can communicate
with unseen forces, and sit or stand silently for long takes,
absorbed in something we can’t see. Julian Hillard gives excellent
That Kid vibes in this movie, like the kid from the original
Poltergeist movie, only more isolated and slightly less cute.
He delivers plenty of unnerving energy to a movie keen to show the
slow, toxic degradation of everything the colourful meteor touches.
That’s important to
say – there are three or four jump scares in this movie. That’s
it. The rest of its run-time is devoted to creeeeeeeeping horror.
Crawling horror. Scuttling horror. And eventually, the kind of ‘Daddy
doesn’t live here any more’ human horror of Jack Nicholson’s
performance in The Shining – but with added wild-eyed Nick
Cage. More swearing and shouting and punching inanimate objects, but
then you see Cage’s eyes unfocus and he becomes an avatar of the
colour, swinging in and out of his humanity as the scene demands.
It’s like sitting in a room with an angry, simmering drunk –
you’re never sure what the next moment is going to contain, and
that’s a pretty edgy energy for a movie of infiltration, poisoning
and destruction.
A word on the visuals:
impressive. That’s one of the key things about Lovecraft – his
visions, like Blake’s before him, are notoriously difficult to get
right, because if you only get them half right, they look
wholly wrong, and the scare-factor collapses. Here though, there’s
a whole bagful of clever techniques deployed to ensure the movie gets
it enough right to build the scares – the creeping increase
in the use of purple in nature to show the colonisation of the
natural environment by the colour from space, the flecking of purple
in running water, in ice cubes etc. The use of unfocused light,
infused by the purple, which stands in here for the ‘invisible’
colour from space, to show without showing, to suggest and let your
mind do the rest of the work. One of the smaller jump-scares takes
place in the shower, and while the scale of its effect is small,
rather than schlocky, it stays with you, and will make you leery to
unclog your plughole ever again. And for instance, one of the first
examples of ‘Well, that ain’t right’ animals is an insect, a
complex insect, which is given quite a moment of close-up
screen-time. If the movie had only gotten that half-right, it would
have looked schlocky and the whole suspense of the piece would have
collapsed under the weight of poor realisation. It gets it so
right that not only do you suspend your disbelief and accept it as a
real creature, but you also get multiple squirms out of it as various
aspects of its physiognomy are shown moving with a perfectly natural
but somehow additionally creepy motion, as though what’s in front
of you is actually a real insect, but one that’s been
horribly mutated by something with only a passing understanding of
the limitations of life on Earth.
Of course, Lovecraft
was a master of creeping, suggested horror, but he knew there has to
be a threshold, a tipping point, if you’re to turn a
shiver-down-the-spine piece of work into a
run-away-screaming-in-horror piece of work, and that sensibility is
something Stanley embraces in his movie adaptation of the story –
there’s lots of high-quality creepy stuff in this movie, but
once the tipping point is reached, things go properly tonto as the
colour from space conquers more and more land, more animals, more
people, and even some of those who aren’t entirely conquered
by it flit from sanity to madness and back as the battle continues
for control.
Ultimately – well,
ultimately, it would be a shame to spoiler you about how the movie
ends, but let’s say it’s less ‘Happy Ever After,’ more
‘Bleakly, For The Moment,’ and the climax of the movie is a
visual pay-off that gets more than acceptably close both to
Lovecraft’s intense, creepy visual sense of his evil from space,
and to his emotional sense of the stakes getting higher and higher on
the run-up to the end. It’s a movie you should absolutely see, and
Cage, Richardson, Arthur and Hillard all act their ever-loving socks
off to keep you biting your nails all the way through. Shlocky only
in one or two places, this is a high-quality nerve-twanger that
repays your time, your energy and your interest. You can absolutely
read it as an allegory for anything you like – the movie version is
without particular slant or commentary, so you can see the colour out
of space as whatever you dislike and think is infecting the safety of
your world, or you can read it as straight visual sci-fi horror and
get just as much, if not more from that reading. If you’re any kind
of horror fan, a Lovecraft adaptation that comes close to the source
material has got to make your hairs stand up. When it does it as well
as this, it’s a must-see. If you’re not a horror fan,
there are some bits that will be too strong for your stomach, but in
terms of a tense, creeping, claustrophobic invasion thriller, you’ll
be hard pressed to do better in 2020.
Tony lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly
nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who,
Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the
70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By
day, he
runs an editing house, largely as an
excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book.
With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk
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