48 | Sight&Sound | April 2020
RICHARD STANLEY COLOR OUT OF SPACEFor a pulp horror writer, seeking to create
what he called “a certain atmosphere of
breathless and unexplainable dread”, H.P.
Lovecraft (1890-1937) had perhaps surprising
tastes in cinema. His letters are littered with
references to early silent stars such as Henry
Walthall, Mary Pickford, and his favourite,
Charlie Chaplin. In 1917, he won a prize
from his local cinema for a scathing review
of a biblical epic. Later, he called Universal’s
The Invisible Man (1933) “genuinely sinister”
and one of his very last letters praised the
“elusively weird photographic effects”
of Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935).
Lovecraft watched the cinema emerge from
vaudeville and went to the first dedicated
cinema in his hometown, Providence, in- He admired the silents, but worried
the talkies were vulgarising language.
Despite lifelong cinema-going, he told
a friend he “never took it seriously”.
How cinema felt about Lovecraft has
been rather different. For more than 25 years
after his death Lovecraft fell into obscurity,
dismissed as a pulp hack, cherished by
only a few readers. Then, in 1963, he crept
surreptitiously into American cinema, hidden
inside Roger Corman’s legendary series of
Poe adaptations for American International
Pictures. Although titled Edgar Allen Poe’s The
Haunted Castle, this sixth film in the series was
actually an adaptation by Charles Beaumont
of Lovecraft’s story ‘The Case of Charles
Dexter Ward’. Topped and tailed with quotes
from Poe, the film shoehorns the Lovecraft
tale into Corman’s familiar psychodrama
of neurotic compulsions and doom-laden
repetitions, played out as always by his
regular star, Vincent Price. Corman never
mentioned this cuckoo in the nest again
(the choice of material had been imposed
by AIP), but he had injected something
potent into the veins of B-movie horror.
The popularity of Lovecraft exploded in
the late 1960s once his tales were released
in mass market paperbacks. Daniel Haller,
LOVECRAFT
WAITS
DREAMING
Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft first
emerged as a cinematic force in the
1960s, but his tales of metaphysical
dread have found increasing favour
with a new generation of filmmakers,
writes Roger Luckhurstdown to Nic [Cage], the man who single-handedly
restored my faith in Hollywood and the process.
MB: Thank god for Nic! How did he come on board?
RS: We were very fortunate that Nic is a huge Lovecraft
fan. We had been hoping to do a movie together since
our paths initially crossed back in the 1990s, but the
stars didn’t align. When Nic was on board we basically
had six weeks to hunt down the rest of the cast. Casting
the two female leads was probably the trickiest. The-
resa, the mother, has an extremely nightmarish arc, so
we were super lucky with Joely [Richardson]. Joely had
never done a part like this and had to go back and read
the Lovecraft story a couple of times and think it through
carefully, but much to her delight it was something she
had a huge amount of fun with. I’d like to see Joely play
a few more creatures. She’s definitely got the chops for it.
MB: And how was it working with the alpacas?
RS: The alpacas were a complete dream. I don’t know
why people don’t use them more in movies. The only
problem was we couldn’t get them to scream or freak
out as they are so docile. None of us wanted to attack the
alpacas or scare them to try to produce the appropriate
response, so in the end we had to fake most of that in
post-production.
MB: So no alpacas were harmed during filming?
RS: No [laughs]. Although the alpacas were accidentally
dyed purple at one point thanks to a miscommunication.
It was known on set as the ‘alpacalypse’. We had to have
them sent back and cleaned and returned to their normal
state. But beyond that it was smooth sailing.
Color out of Space is out now in UK cinemas and was
reviewed in our last issue. Richard Stanley’s Hardware
screens at BFI Southbank, London, at the end of AprilFARMED AND DANGEROUS
Joely Richardson and Nicolas
Cage play Theresa and
Nathan Gardner, a married
couple who move with their
family to a rural farm, where
a meteorite crash-lands, in
Color out of Space