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I think to TRULY capture the Lovecraftian experience on screen, you'd need a Jokeresque type performance and direction. Nobody has really done that yet.

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For fans of Lovecraft, this may well be the most successful attempt to bring his warped writings to the screen, and is definitely up there with Stuart Gordon's Dagon and Dreams in the Witch House –the most loyal conversions to date (it's thrilling news indeed that Stanley gets to do this again with a new take on Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror). But for audiences who don't know the books, this is a bracing, blasphemous horror that pulls you in and twists your nerves.

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Past the surface flaws of Color Out of Space, there are shiny Cage diamonds to be found, such as a scene in which the actor hovers over the lily white corpse of his wife, who struggles to breathe, having just consumed her youngest child back inside her womb. Cage feels really torn up, so he intermittently points a shotgun at her head between some very sensual open-mouthed kissing, and I guess I will never not be down for that. Sound the gong of transcendent Nicolas Cage weirdness, Color Out of Space gets 3.5 alpacas from me!

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To say that Nicolas Cage seems unhinged in his new movie, “Color Out of Space,” is to give nothing away. Many moons have waxed and waned, after all, since Cage last gave a performance that could accurately be described as hinged. No longer content with alarming us, he now takes himself by surprise, much as Peter Lorre—a previous master of the wild-eyed—used to give himself the shivers. What distinguishes the latest Cage freak-out is the care with which it’s paced; not until halfway through does he start to lose his hinge, and, even when his face is sprayed with blood, he keeps his glasses on, as if hoping to settle down with a book. Oh, and, if you’ve always wanted to watch him milk an alpaca, your time has come.

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H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a writer who casts a giant shadow over horror fiction. Lovecraft led a strange and closeted life. He only once ever moved out of Providence, Rhode Island where he was born. He published in pulp magazines of the day but rarely made any money from his writing and was never recognised outside of certain pulp magazines circles during the period he wrote. He lived on an inheritance for many years before being reduced to poverty and was unable to hold a job. He was a reactionary who hated the 20th Century and industrialisations and a noted Anglophile with some decidedly dubious racial views. And yet he produced a body of work – some 60 short stories and novellas and four novels, plus assorted poetry and a vast volume of correspondence with other authors who in turn borrowed from his mythos and ideas. Most of Lovecraft’s wider recognition comes as a result of his friend August Derleth who launched Arkham House and republished all of Lovecraft’s work.

What comes through Lovecraft’s work is a sense of fear and the uncanny – of scientists and questors after forbidden knowledge; of ancient civilisations fallen due to miscegenation with non-human creatures; narrators who encounter horrors that have broken their minds. Lovecraft described a place in New England and invented towns (Dunwich, Arkham, Innsmouth, The Miskatonic University) that have caught on with readers who other writers who refer to these in their works. Lovecraft’s most important contribution was the invention of the pantheon of Elder Gods with consonant-challenging names like Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlatotep and especially Cthulhu, and a sense of cosmic horror where Earth is a tiny island of ignorance surrounded by vast, all-powerful entities that lie slumbering or waiting to be called and whose very sight alone can drive a man insane. Lovecraft’s work is so distinctive that it has been pastiched and parodied by numerous other writers including Robert Bloch, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore and Stephen King to name but the most famous.

There have been a great number of Lovecraft films made, particularly since the success of Re-Animator (1985) in the 1980s. (See below for a full list of H.P. Lovecraft adaptations). Re-Animator unfortunately stuck Lovecraft adaptations with a particular style – gore-drenched with lots of slime and creature effects. However, this is the antithesis of the actual mood of Lovecraft whose horrors are not all in your face but ‘indescribable’ in their monstrousness. What most of the films miss is the mood of dread and cosmic horror – the few films that capture the essence of Lovecraft have not been direct adaptations but homages like John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1995) and Steven Kostanki’s The Void (2016).

Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space (1927) is a short story that runs to just over 12,000 words. This has been filmed several times – as the staid Die, Monster, Die!/Monster of Terror (1965) with Boris Karloff as the family patriarch and the terrible The Curse (1987) starring Wil Wheaton, which overran the show with cheap goo effects. In more recent years, we have had a couple of indie productions with Colour Out of the Dark (2008) and The Color (2010).

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