ARKHAM FIRE

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE BRINGS THE MINDSPLINTERING TERROR OF HP LOVECRAFT TO THE SCREEN. “THE ONLY WAY OUT IS DEATH OR MADNESS. OR BOTH!” DIRECTOR RICHARD STANLEY TELLS SFX

- NICK SETCHFIELD

I’VE GOT A SOFT CTHULHU PLUSH TOY I sleep with upstairs,” confesses Richard Stanley, on the line to SFX from his home in the French Pyrenees. “Somehow we’ve responded to Lovecraft’s terrifying, inhuman cosmic forces by making them cute and quaint, as a way of dealing with them.

“I thought, ‘I’ve got to try and change that.’ We need to reposition the Old Ones as an implacable, potentially extinctive force that one can’t negotiate with. One could say that it was time for the Great Old Ones to have a publicity campaign.”

Key to that promotional strategy for ancient, sanity-crunching horror is Color Out Of Space. Written and directed by Stanley – his first feature film since the legendarily sour circumstances that removed him from the helm of 1996’s The Island Of Dr. Moreau – it’s an adaptation of an HP Lovecraft tale that first saw print in a 1927 issue of Amazing Stories.

Stanley retains the basics, even if the basics are what America’s poet laureate of existential creepiness groped to describe as “unformed realms of reality beyond all Nature as we know it.” As in the original story, a strange meteor strikes the Gardner farmstead in hill country to the west of Arkham, Massachusetts, poisoning the soil, mutating crops and livestock and ultimately cracking the psyches of the farm’s inhabitants. The film moves the events to the 21st century, with Nicolas Cage and Joely Richardson heading the family tormented by this weirdest of invaders.