Nicolas Cage revels in delicious blast of horror
Nicolas Cage, the star of Leaving Las Vegas and Wild at Heart, carries an acting toolkit few of his contemporaries would dare to pry open, and Color Out of Space is the kind of project that finds a use for every last utensil in the box. The director is Richard Stanley, a rising sci-fi/horror star of the early Nineties whose career went down with the disaster-ridden 1996 adaptation of Island of Dr Moreau. It took Spectrevision, the boutique horror studio co-founded by the Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood, to bring Stanley back – and the two are such a perfect fit, I hope they sign him to a 50-film contract.
Why? Because there could hardly be a better way for the director of Hardware and Dust Devil to return than with this extravagantly weird, luxuriously grisly blast of cosmic horror, deftly adapted from a 1927 short story by HP Lovecraft. The cosmic horror genre was effectively founded by Lovecraft himself, whose writings fused an early-20th-century paranoia of ever-broadening scientific horizons with the mysticism of Arthur Machen and creaky-floorboard gothic of Edgar Allan Poe. But cinema has rarely done it justice, least of all in adaptations of Lovecraft’s own work, and the exceptions – films like John The Carpenter’s The Thing, Frank Darabont’s The Mist and Alex Garland’s Annihilation – tend to be Lovecraftian only in spirit.
It’s surely no coincidence that Color Out of Space cherry-picks elements from all three of those. The “thing” in this scenario is a glowing meteorite that lands one night outside a New England farmhouse – the home of Cage’s alpaca farmer Nathan Gardner, his wife Theresa (Joely Richardson) and their three children. The following morning, the light from the rock has subsided; and soon after the rock itself seems to have melted into the earth. Yet whatever it brought with it is working its magic: strange flowers bloom on the lawn, mobile phone signals frizzle and squawk, and the couple’s youngest son Jack (Julian Hillard) spends a lot of time on the porch, talking and whistling to “the man down the well”.
Of course, everything turns odd and revolting, but not before Stanley and his cast take time to make the Gardners stand for something more than victims in waiting. The early family scenes are sincerely and tenderly played, with a fine breakout performance from Madeleine Arthur as the couple’s Wiccan teenage daughter Lavinia – the credits include an “occult, witchcraft and ritual adviser” – and Cage operating in an unexpectedly subdued register before flying off the handle in the second half.
The mayhem wreaked by the meteorite entails a mix of crackly psychedelia and impressive, gloopladen creature effects that is authentically nightmarish, perhaps especially thanks to the film’s unusual rhythm for horror: not a panicky staccato but a fuzzy-edged, narcotic throb. Stanley’s film revels in the lunacy of its convictions, and its laughs and shocks leave behind a delicious tingle of unease.