Continuing my theme of things you can rent for streaming while cooped up at home and not spreading the gad damn virus last weekend a couple of friends and me watched Richard Stanley’s The Color Out of Space.

Based upon the short story by H.P. Lovecraft, Stanley, whose last feature directorial credit was Hardware in 1990 and perhaps best known for his involvement with the disastrous production of 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreauwith this feature has turned in a haunting, luminous, and hallucinogenic horror film.

When a meteor crashing onto the alpaca farm of the Gardner family it brings trouble and other-worldly horrors to a family always dealing with the intense person horror of cancer. Utilizing Lovecraft’s technique of having the story told by a narrator, Stanley as director and screenwriter adds a more personal and emotional through line to the story that was lacking in the source material. Starring Nicholas Cage as Nathan Gardner, a man desperately not wanting to be his father and struggling to keep his family afloat with the farm, The Color Out of Space is a film about dissolution, but emotionally and, though ample body horror segments, physically. While the practical effects are not gory, they are disturbing and well suited for a horror film that derives itself from more conceptual material.

Stanley and his cinematographer Steve Annis make excellent use of fog and misty not to obscure and hide horror but to refract and diffuse light giving the frame a luminous quality enhancing the concept of an unknow color. The film’s  color pallet is excellent, restricting magenta and reds to the unearthly force making that color stand out as alien among the greens and earth tones of the farm.

The Color out of Space a perhaps the best adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s work and well worth watching. Stanley has been signed to make a trilogy of movies inspired from Lovecraft’s stories with the next being The Dunwich Horror.