Color Out of Space (Richard Stanley, 2019) (Patreon)

The Fuschia is Now....

One of the most interesting things about Color Out of Space, for me, is reading what others have to say about it. I have never been an aficionado of horror fiction, so I have never read H.P. Lovecraft. But one of the things that seems to come up again and again in reviews of this film is the degree to which Richard Stanley has successfully adapted some of the more difficult aspects of Lovecraft's prose. In his fiction, Lovecraft was an innovator with respect to the unseen or indescribable menace, the inter-dimensional or otherworldly kinds of horror that surpassed the capabilities of human comprehension. (For instance, his "great old ones," like Chthulu, whose very presence was enough to drive people insane.) So here, we are dealing with an alien "form" that exists as a light that, per the story itself, does not correspond to our understanding of the visible spectrum.

Of course, this poses certain problems for cinema. You can't show a light that cannot be seen, although Annihilation sort of tried, using warped transparency and shimmering to imply a disruption in the visual field. But here, Stanley simply goes with an electric purple that is at odds with its natural surroundings. In this respect, the alien fuschia is a kind of cinematic limit, since we can see that it is digitally generated. It has "invaded" the mise-en-scène from outside the given confines of Bazinian reality.

So in a way, Color Out of Space can be read as an allegory for the takeover of a conventional cinematic realism by special effects. The family, as the basic unit of bourgeois storytelling, is ripped apart and reassembled according to the whims of new visual technologies. People are hybridized, everybody is forced to go "galaxy brain," like it or not. Contemporary cinema is a mutation of what was once a recognizable world. So if we stare down the well, like young Jack (Julian Hilliard), what do we see? It's a bit like returning to Plato's cave. The shadows have become sentient, and they possess the power and the will to bend our senses around them.

Also, alpacas. The animal of the future!