46 | Sight&Sound | April 2020
RICHARD STANLEY COLOR OUT OF SPACE(Joely Richardson) – not to mention on the valu-
able alpacas Nathan keeps in the barn.
A bona fide Lovecraft expert, there could be no better
director to venture into the cosmic terrains of the writer’s
supposedly ‘unfilmable’ fiction. With Color out of Space
the first in Stanley’s planned trilogy of Lovecraft adapta-
tions, it seems our lost soul is lost no more.
Michael Blyth: When did you first encounter Lovecraft’s
work?
Richard Stanley: H.P. Lovecraft was my mother’s favourite
writer. She must have read some of those stories to me
when I was about seven or eight, so that put the stamp of
quality on Lovecraft’s tales. By the time I was 13 I’d pretty
much read everything he’d written. I remember thinking
about whether I could adapt Color out of Space into a Super
8 movie when I was a kid. It was mostly because Color
was set on a single farm and involved a single family,
which makes it a little more accessible than some of the
other Lovecraft material, which tends to be set in places
like Antarctica or the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
MB: Lovecraft is a master of existential nihilism, but not
necessarily of crafting emotionally engaging characters.
Yet your film has a really strong emotional core...
RS: My primary motivation throughout was to try to
make the material relevant to a 21st-century audience,
so the initial notion was to bring Lovecraft forward into
Trump-era America and Brexit-era Britain, and to try and
reconnect the mythos to whatever primal fears are lurk-
ing in the present. And the second part of that is to deal
with the fact that 100 years have gone past and there are
inherent issues with the original material, which meant
that we had to deal with the human element.
Lovecraft has no interest in humanity, or human char-
acters, or emotions, so to some extent we tried to set up a
dialogue with the material. I’m not as much of a nihilist
as Lovecraft, so a lot of the movie we are trying to argue
with the sheer bleakness of the basic concept. And, of
course, Lovecraft also had some very negative tenden-
cies – his work displays a degree of racism and misogyny,
both of which needed to be checked and addressed in
some way by this movie.
MB: How much of a challenge was it to inject that human
element into the film while still staying true to Lovecraft’s
nihilistic philosophy?
RS: That was arguably the biggest challenge throughout.
It’s also a challenge we face in everyday life – trying to
find some meaning or validity to our lives in the face of
the potential extinction of the human race or our sheer
smallness in the universe. One of the ways I approached
that was identifying the key characters with my own
family. If one is going to deal with annihilating a nuclear
family, it raises the stakes if you can imagine one’s own
family going through that.
MB: Why do you think Lovecraft’s stories seem to be reso-
nating strongly in today’s cultural and political climate?
RS: For some reason Lovecraft is having a boom, and
that has to be connected to what is going on in the mass
unconscious at the moment. His vision of a world at
the mercy of completely inhuman, inexplicable cosmic
forces seems to be speaking to people’s hearts more than
ever before. We’re sensing that the environment is pull-
ing against us, and also there is a growing lack of faith
in orthodox religion and the notion that an all-wise,
all-kind benevolent creator God is going to bail us out.
As people start to think outside of the box, Lovecraft’s
notion of ultra-dimensional alien deities is starting to
make more sense than it might have done 100 years ago.
MB: Are there any other Lovecraft adaptations that you
think have successfully captured his notions of ‘cosmicism’
[the literary philosophy developed by the writer, rooted
in the absence of a benevolent God, and in the relative
insignificance of humanity within an incomprehensibly
large, indifferent universe]?
RS: As much as I love some of the work of Stuart Gordon
[the director of films such as Re-Animator, 1985; and
From Beyond, 1986], sadly I don’t think any of the official
Lovecraft adaptations have really gone after the core
themes. The notion of man finding his true position in
the cosmos is something Lovecraft himself said all his
stories were driving at. Gordon’s work is fun but it sort of
hedges around the deeper issues. Probably the most Love-
craftian films are not actually adaptations of Lovecraft’s
work. John Carpenter’s The Thing [1982] would be the best
Lovecraft movie ever if only it was from a Lovecraft story.
I’m also very fond of Possession [1981] by Andrzej Zulawski,
which probably has the best tentacle sex on film. There
are also Lovecraftian elements to both Andrei Tarkovsky
and Ingmar Bergman’s films – it’s hard to forget Berg-
man’s view of God as a big spider in Winter Light [1963].
Elements of Stalker [1979] definitely have a Lovecraftian
tinge, mostly in the way that Tarkovsky doesn’t attempt to
explain or give shape to the metaphysical forces at work.
MB: Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness [1994] also feels
very authentically Lovecraftian...
RS: And it tackles the idea of the mythos as a kind of psy-
choactive virus, the way that the concepts have succeed-
ed in getting out of the box and spreading out of control.
MB: Has Lovecraft’s work become easier to adapt over time?
RS: It has become a lot less ‘unfilmable’ because a lot of
the concepts that were purely alien in the 1920s have now
entered into the realms of actual science. He talks about
non-Euclidean geometry. When I used that phrase in an
essay at school, the teacher aggressively red-pencilled it
out and said that all geometry is inherently Euclidean.
We now have chaos science and fractal geometry, which
is precisely non-Euclidean and has become very useful in
generating the VFX and digital animation that we use in
bringing some of Lovecraft’s dreamscapes to the screen.
MB: How has the filmmaking process changed since you
made Hardware and Dust Devil?
RS: I hadn’t shot a movie in two decades and had been
living on a mountain for ten years before Color started.PURPLE HAZE
In adapting Color out of
Space (above) with Scarlett
Amaris, Richard Stanley
introduced the character
of Lavinia, the teenage
daughter of the family
played by Madeleine Arthur
(left), who didn’t appear in
H.P. Lovecraft’s original story