Catch-Up Review: Color Out of Space (No Spoilers)

Color Out of Space is a small horror movie that was first shown at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, but it was given a limited theatrical release in January of this year.  It's based on a short story by H. P. Lovecraft called "The Colour Out of Space," and it's a good mix of faithful adaptation and modern updating.  It tells the same basic story that Lovecraft wrote almost 100 years ago, but it's set in the present day rather than a century ago.

The plot is pretty simple.  One day, a meteorite crashes in a farm owned by the Gardner family, and their life soon takes a very sharp turn for the worse.  The meteorite quickly disappears, but in its wake it leaves the titular monster: the color out of space.  If you've never read the story or seen the movie, it's tough to describe just what this thing is, but I'll try my best.  There's no tangible monster in this movie; instead, it's exactly what it sounds like.  It's literally just a color.  You see a purplish/pinkish color throughout the film, sometimes in the things it affects and sometimes in the lighting of the scenes, and every time you do, you know something bad either will happen or already has.  It affects the Gardners themselves by eating away at their minds and bodies, and it messes up their plants, animals, and even their technology like phones and cars.

On the surface, that may seem kind of silly.  Why would you want to watch a movie about an evil color?  I understand why you might be skeptical, but it's actually way better than it sounds.  In particular, this film captures arguably the best thing about H. P. Lovecraft's fiction: the fear of the unknown.  Lovecraft understood that what you don't know is scarier than what you do know.  If we can pin something down and explain it, then we can limit it.  But if we can't explain it, if we don't know what its limits are, then it can be just about anything our minds can come up with, and nothing can scare us like our own imaginations.  In fact, it can be even worse than that.  We know that reality isn't bound by our limited intellects, so an unexplained monster might very well be beyond what we can imagine or even comprehend.  It can literally be anything, so there's no limit to how scary it might really be.  Lovecraft understood this, so he always gave his readers just enough information to make his stories coherent and then left the rest to their imaginations. 

And Color Out of Space captures that characteristic Lovecraftian mystery flawlessly.  Like Lovecraft, director Richard Stanley also understands that nothing he can show you on-screen will be as scary as what you can imagine in your own head, so he wisely chooses not to explain what the color actually is, where it came from, or how exactly it does what it does.  The movie simply shows you what happens, and then it lets your brain stew in its own thoughts about what the color might be, giving your imagination free rein to scare you like nothing else can.

Along similar lines, this film also makes us realize how small and insignificant we really are in the grand scheme of things.  We like to think we're the pinnacle of the natural world, the big boys at the top of the cosmic food chain, but this movie lays bare the truth: we're just weak and feeble creatures living on a tiny speck of dust in the great vastness of space.  The color rips through the Gardners without even breaking a sweat, showing us that there are things out there that are way stronger than we could ever hope to be.  Some of them are already here on earth (like certain diseases and natural disasters), and others might very well lie in outer space, beyond the reaches of our rockets and telescopes.  That's a sobering realization, and it should kindle in us a sense of humility and wonder at the incredible power of the world around us.

In particular, this film highlights a deadly enemy we face all too often here on earth.  It mentions cancer a few times, and one character even likens the smell of the meteorite to the smell of a cancer ward, making it clear to observant viewers that the movie is supposed to be a metaphor for that terrible disease.  Cancer eats away at people just like the color in this movie, and all too often the only thing we can do is watch as the people we love deteriorate day by day.

In fact, Richard Stanley used to read H. P. Lovecraft stories to his mother as she was dying from cancer, so this movie is like a personal message from the director himself that he's gone through the same things many of us have.  It's like he's telling us that we're not the only ones who've ever felt that way, that we're not the only ones who've ever gone through that agony, and there's a certain comfort in that.  It's comforting to know that we're not alone in our pain.  If other people have suffered through it and have been able to keep on living their lives, so can we.

So, if you're a fan of horror, I highly recommend Color Out of Space.  It's not the best horror movie of the year (so far that's The Invisible Man), but it's still really good.  It will tap into some of our species' deepest, darkest fears as well as some of the greatest suffering we can ever experience.  It will remind you of humanity's true place in the universe, and it will incite in you a sense of wonder at what may be out there, patiently waiting for the day when it can finally show us just how awesome (either in a good way or a bad way) it truly is.