Nicolas Cage starring in movie adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’ which is perfect madness
Nic Cage does madness very fucking well. For the most recent example, check out Mandy. With that in mind, I’m pretty stoked to watch him unravel in a movie adaptation of Lovecraft’s haunting-ass The Colour Out of Space.
/Film:
Fresh off his rave reviews in Mandy, Nicolas Cage is joining forces with frequently foiled filmmaker Richard Stanley for an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. One of Lovecraft’s most terrifying stories, The Colour Out of Space follows a surveyor trying to uncover the cause of mysterious events terrorizing a patch of land in the wilds of Massachusetts.
According to Production Weekly (via Bloody Disgusting), Mandy production company SpectreVision is re-teaming with Nicolas Cage for The Colour Out of Space, based on the short story by H.P. Lovecraft. Nicolas Cage starring in an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation is exciting enough on its own – but there’s more. The film will be helmed by none other than Richard Stanley. Stanley was, at one point, a hot up-and-coming genre filmmaker, catching attention with his 1990 British sci-fi film Hardwire. Stanely was set to break into Hollywood with the 1996 adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau – but things went horribly wrong. The producers lost faith in Stanley’s vision, and also felt the filmmaker had lost control of the set. As a result, they fired Stanley, replacing him with John Frankenheimer.
This event (which is chronicled in the documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau) effectively sabotaged Stanley’s career, and while he’s directed several shorts and documentaries, he hasn’t helmed a feature film since. But now that’s apparently about to change with The Colour Out of Space. And that’s pretty damn exciting.
Written in 1927, Lovecraft’s Colour has gone on to influence writers and filmmakers for years to come. You can see traces of Colour Out of Space in everything from Creepshow to the 2018 film Annihilation. In the story, an unnamed surveyor “attempts to uncover the secrets behind a shunned place referred to by the locals of Arkham as the ‘blasted heath.’” The narrator eventually learns that the region’s problems began when a meteorite crashed in the area, poisoning the land, deforming animals, and driving human beings insane.
Like most Lovecraft stories, Colour deals with forces beyond human understanding or comprehension. The author wanted to create something truly alien – the type of alien life that the human mind can’t even begin to process. It’ll be interesting to see how such a story gets adapted to the screen by Stanley, a highly inventive filmmaker. Throwing Cage into the mix certainly makes this whole thing extra enticing.