[Film] Color Out of Space

[Isgrimnur]

Gizmodo

One of Lovecraft’s most beloved short stories is being turned into a movie—and Nicolas Cage is on board to star.

The Hollywood Reporter has word that Cage has re-teamed with Mandy producer SpectreVision for a new adaptation of Lovecraft’s 1927 short story. Directed by Hardware and Island of Dr. Moreau’s Richard Stanley, Color Out of Space revolves around the family of Nahum Gardner, after a mysterious meteorite seeping the titular colorful emissions crash lands on their farmlands and starts mutating the flora and fauna around it...and driving anyone who comes near it insane.

[Paingod]

Cage does do gibbering madness pretty well.

[Freyland]

"drives them insane"

I'm unclear... Do the actors or the audience wear the blindfolds for this one?

[Lordnine]

Cage is such a wildcard in movies I am not sure what to make of this. I have loved him in some movies while others are a complete train wreck.

[Jaymann]

I understand Mark Wahlberg will be playing the meteorite.

[YellowKing]

Well I absolutely loved Cage in MANDY so I have high hopes. The downside is they're attempting to adapt Lovecraft and that almost never ends well.

[ImLawBoy]

Well I absolutely loved Cage in MANDY so I have high hopes. The downside is they're attempting to adapt Lovecraft and that almost never ends well.

It's going to be a failure, but it's going to be GLORIOUS.

[LordMortis]

Well I absolutely loved Cage in MANDY so I have high hopes. The downside is they're attempting to adapt Lovecraft and that almost never ends well.

This is what the third time of this story at least. The only version of it I remember seeing had Sheriff Lobo from BJ and the Bear, and it was pretty forgettable. So much so, all I remember is it had Sherriff Lobo from BJ and the Bear.

IMDB says.... it also had Wesley Crusher

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092809/?r ... lmg_act_16

OtOH, I love Darkest Dungeon, even if I haven't explored the DLC analog to the story much yet.

[Holman]

The plot of the HPL story would support a movie of about 40 minutes.

I assume this will be an expanded, modernized version where Nick Cage winds up fighting off the colour entity, following it into the Plane of HorrorMadness, and killing Azathoth in a 20-minute final CGI battle.

[Isgrimnur]

Better call dbt to get enough goats if they bring in Shub-Niggurath.

[gameoverman]

Someone needs to make a Lovecraft Cinematic Universe, using whatever stories and characters are in public domain combined with other writers' stories and characters that might fit in. Stuff like King in Yellow/Machen's works/etc. Nic Cage could be the Robert Downey Jr of the LCU.

[Holman]

Problem is there are really no real heroes in HPL. Humans are weak and powerless and nearly always lose.

(Come to think of it, an HPL cinematic universe would be the perfect antidote to Marvel/DC overload...)

[Paingod]

I understand Mark Wahlberg will be playing the meteorite.

I think he was born to play that role.

[Gryndyl]

The plot of the HPL story would support a movie of about 40 minutes.

I assume this will be an expanded, modernized version where Nick Cage winds up fighting off the colour entity, following it into the Plane of HorrorMadness, and killing Azathoth in a 20-minute final CGI battle.

There was a Delta Green/Call of Cthulhu RPG scenario based on Color Out of Space that was a pretty well done modernized version. Involved one of the space shuttles crash landing due to a color encounter and the players sent out as part of the ultra-secret government response/cover-up.

[hepcat]

Someone needs to make a Lovecraft Cinematic Universe, using whatever stories and characters are in public domain combined with other writers' stories and characters that might fit in.

Although we should probably avoid the wildly racist, white supremacy aspects of his writings.

[GreenGoo]

(almost) Every author in the history of mankind needs the same treatment.

Shakespeare seems to have had some modern success.

DC and Marvel (since we're talking about universes) aren't exactly shining beacons of equality either, at least not in their early days, and *when* they finally got around to non-white heroes, they were pretty stereotypical. It took a civil rights movement and decades of change.

I guess I'm saying we can use Lovecraft's good and throw away his bad and still walk away with something worthwhile.

That doesn't mean we have to give him a pass or ignore it. It just means we don't have to let it keep us from the good.

[gameoverman]

It should be punishment enough for Lovecraft that his works will be used for a cinematic universe starring Nic Cage, and Lovecraft won't receive a penny for it. It should be super easy to use his themes of the importance of family bloodlines without bringing racism into it.

[Holman]

(almost) Every author in the history of mankind needs the same treatment.

Shakespeare seems to have had some modern success.

DC and Marvel (since we're talking about universes) aren't exactly shining beacons of equality either, at least not in their early days, and *when* they finally got around to non-white heroes, they were pretty stereotypical. It took a civil rights movement and decades of change.

I guess I'm saying we can use Lovecraft's good and throw away his bad and still walk away with something worthwhile.

That doesn't mean we have to give him a pass or ignore it. It just means we don't have to let it keep us from the good.

I love and delight in HPL's vivid cosmic pessimism and storytelling, but his racism was overt and thematic, not passive or tacit.

Lovecraft wasn't just a casual participant in the racist assumptions of his time; over and over he makes the point that the "inferior" races are the conduit by which evil enters the world, and he delights in describing the physiognomy of minor characters or whole populations as evidence of their inferiority.

Shakespeare (e.g.) was the kind of artist who took popular prejudices and complicated them because he knew caricature was inadequate (see Othello, Shylock, Caliban). HPL is the kind who took those caricatures as license to treat whole categories as less than fully human. It's really impossible to overlook.

[GreenGoo]

So was Twain and yet he's taught in schools. The last thing I want is for his racism to be overlooked.

I actually don't give two shits if lovecraft's stuff ever sees the light of day in modern times.

Have at it, or not.

[YellowKing]

If you want to read a really great response to Lovecraft's racism, check out LOVECRAFT COUNTRY by Matt Ruff (soon to be an HBO series). It's Lovecraftian tales populated by African-American protagonists, with characters intertwining throughout each separate story. Fascinating book, and I can't wait for the series.

That said, I have no problem separating art from the artist. Making sure each product we consume comes from an artist who passes a moral litmus test would be exhausting. We can enjoy the fantastical aspects of Lovecraft's writing and imagination without subscribing to his view of minorities.

[GreenGoo]

That said, I have no problem separating art from the artist. Making sure each product we consume comes from an artist who passes a moral litmus test would be exhausting. We can enjoy the fantastical aspects of Lovecraft's writing and imagination without subscribing to his view of minorities.

I think if the artist is contemporary I have a much larger problem with them. I can't stand Cruise any longer, which is disappointing because his movies are quite a bit of fun, usually.

[Holman]

That said, I have no problem separating art from the artist. Making sure each product we consume comes from an artist who passes a moral litmus test would be exhausting. We can enjoy the fantastical aspects of Lovecraft's writing and imagination without subscribing to his view of minorities.

Not to belabor it this too much (I read HPL regularly and have had to learn to navigate my feelings about his racism) but the racism is slathered all over the art itself, not just HPL's private life. He adores pointing out the "degenerate" racial qualities of non-WASP characters, and some of the stories come very close to suggesting that the ugliness of cosmic evil manifests itself in everything that makes non-whites non-white.

It's been pointed out that the single constant theme in Lovecraft isn't "fear of the unknown" so much as fear of miscegenation. Think of how many of the stories turn towards the horror of breeding with monsters.

[YellowKing]

I guess it just depends on your tolerance for it. I'm a huge Conan fan and Robert E. Howard's original stories are rife with descriptions of dark-skinned ape-like savages. It's cringe-worthy when I run across it, but it doesn't dampen my love of the character and the fantasy world that he built.

[Isgrimnur]

Relevant: AVClub reviews direct-to-video animated feature Howard Lovecraft And The Frozen Kingdom (2016)

As a counterpoint, allow me to cite a passage from one of Lovecraft’s letters to a friend, the horror author Belknap Long, in which he describes living in New York City and having to encounter the immigrant population passing him in the streets:

The organic things—Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid—inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguley moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnameabilities.

What a cool guy! Definitely someone worthy of being turned into the star of a 21st-century version of Mr. Peabody And Sherman! Not at all disturbing! It turns out the reason Lovecraft didn’t have to look far to describe the monsters in his writing was because he used the exact same language to describe people of a different racial background. As Michel Houllebecq points out in his biography/assessment of Lovecraft, the author’s “descriptions of the nightmare entities that populate the Cthulhu cycle spring directly from this hallucinatory vision:” In short, his racial hatred went hand-in-hand with his imagination. So just as it would probably be unwise to launch a series of animated films called Little David Duke And The Truth Behind Reconstruction, maybe we don’t want to be making Howard Phillips Lovecraft the poster boy for our Funtime Adventures In Monsterland. Just a thought.

[Holman]

I guess it just depends on your tolerance for it. I'm a huge Conan fan and Robert E. Howard's original stories are rife with descriptions of dark-skinned ape-like savages. It's cringe-worthy when I run across it, but it doesn't dampen my love of the character and the fantasy world that he built.

Yep. I still love reading HPL. It's not necessary to turn off the critic/historian when enjoying the story. At this point the cringing is part of the experience.

[YellowKing]

I agree with GreenGoo's point about it being easier to overlook when the author has been dead for 80 years. There's no way I'd read a series of David Duke novels and not feel guilty about doing so.

And that's not to excuse away Lovecraft's racism as a product of his time, because I think historians have shown that he was REALLY racist even for a time when that was much more common and explicit than today. It's just that the guy is dead, his works are historic pieces frozen in time, and he has no more say so in what they mean.

[hitbyambulance]

one could also expand their horizons to the works from H.P. Lovecraft's inspirations and contemporaries: Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, W.F. Harvey, H. Russell Wakefield, Walter de la Mare, A.E. Coppard...

[Jaymann]

Lord Dunsany sounds like one of HPL's characters.

[hepcat]

I only brought it up because it was something I never really knew until recently. When I was a kid, I tore through all the Lovecraft horror I could find...and I never once thought of any of it as racist. He was an ugly man, that's for sure, but I think you always have to separate the person from the art. Very few artists (especially those born during times in which racism and other hateful outlooks were the accepted norm) are truly good people.

Does that excuse his racism? Of course not. But as long as we're not celebrating the man, and we're aware that he was wanting as a human being, I don't see the harm in recognizing his work in the field of literary horror.

This is drastically different than the whole confederate flag/monument issue, by the way. Those symbols are inherently racist in and of themselves. Plus, no one is forcing anyone to read Lovecraft. Whereas the symbols of the confederacy were displayed in public venues that made it impossible to avoid them.

[gameoverman]

I learned about Lovecraft from Stephen King's book Danse Macabre and as soon as I read one of his stories I knew he was racist. The name of that one guy's cat, damn! Even so, the stories still worked, still kicked ass in a way that was impossible to deny.

I still don't know where I fall on that scale of separating artist from their art. On one hand, if you showed me a sculpture and I tell you I think it's beautiful, then you tell me it was made by a child molester, does the sculpture suddenly become ugly? It's beautiful or it isn't, right? On the other hand, does treating the art with high regard somehow legitimize the artist? If so, that makes admiring the art an icky proposition.

With Lovecraft I think there are a couple of mitigating factors which cause me to not have a problem with his work. He lead a dreary life and died a nobody. His racism got him nowhere. He did not become a poster boy for racists or racism, he wielded no influence there. Horror fans are basically the only people who know he existed. EA Poe is a somebody, not HP Lovecraft. His work has been a big influence on the horror genre, like it or not. I'd almost feel like I was being petty if I tried to pretend I didn't like reading his work.

[hepcat]

Whoops, forgot about Rats in the Walls. But most of what I read as a kid didn’t register as anything other than scary stories or outright adventure to my young mind.

[Default]

It's been pointed out that the single constant theme in Lovecraft isn't "fear of the unknown" so much as fear of miscegenation. Think of how many of the stories turn towards the horror of breeding with monsters.

Some of us dig chicks with big gill slits.
You got a problem with that?

[Holman]

It was a slow day at the library, so I spent half the day nosing into Lovecraft criticism in academic databases.

Um, yeah. There's quite a lot written on HPL's horror of other races.

He even seems to have been seriously embarrassed about the fact that his family tree had allowed Celtic blood (Welsh, not even Irish) to pollute the pure Nordic strain.

[Default]

Son a of a clyfffyfyffychyllyloughyff!

[GreenGoo]

I'm not sure you understand how much the Welsh suck.

[gameoverman]

His story, as I understand it, is an example of why I don't understand the racist mindset. He looked down his nose at who he considered inferior. But he himself was nothing special. He wasn't wealthy, he wasn't famous, he hadn't made a name for himself that anyone would know. He wasn't personally anything special, it's not like he had women fawning all over him(or men for that matter). He wrote weird stories for a niche audience and wasn't getting paid all that much for it. I've known racists like that in real life. "Dude, if you're so superior why aren't you doing better in life than all those people you look down on?". It just does not compute. What difference would it make how 'pure' his blood was if he's still slogging through life like any random person on the street? I wonder how he would have answered that.

[Holman]

His story, as I understand it, is an example of why I don't understand the racist mindset. He looked down his nose at who he considered inferior. But he himself was nothing special. He wasn't wealthy, he wasn't famous, he hadn't made a name for himself that anyone would know. He wasn't personally anything special, it's not like he had women fawning all over him(or men for that matter). He wrote weird stories for a niche audience and wasn't getting paid all that much for it. I've known racists like that in real life. "Dude, if you're so superior why aren't you doing better in life than all those people you look down on?". It just does not compute. What difference would it make how 'pure' his blood was if he's still slogging through life like any random person on the street? I wonder how he would have answered that.

That's just it. To him, his pure Anglo-Nordic superiority is all he had.

HPL is an interesting case. He was almost certainly neurotic, perhaps especially about sex, and what we most remember is the image of an isolated New England intellectual recluse.

But at one point in his life he moved to bustling 1920s New York and married an attractive independent businesswoman widow and participated in a lively and active literary scene. He had lots of friends and went to lots of parties. (His wife, interestingly given his concern for pure WASP bloodlines, was Jewish. She was also active in the publishing world, supporting several minor publications and writing her own fiction.)

Eventually his wife's business hit a downturn and the relationship fell apart, leading to separation and then divorce. But the point is that HPL was an educated, connected, published, and productive writer in the most cosmopolitan city in the world (after Paris) who nevertheless decided that cosmopolitanism was a threat to everything he held dear. It's weird and pathetic.

[LordMortis]

[MonkeyFinger]

[GreenGoo]

Lovecraft looks like he's one of his hybrids but with more human dna than fish dna. He's sorta barely corrupted, but you can see the taint (god damn world for ruining a perfectly good word) if you look close enough.