Richard Stanley has always been an outsider. Fans of the director know him best for his cult classic films Hardware and Dust Devil, and more recently the documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau showed us just how strange and interesting his work behind the camera really is.
The next project from the renegade filmmaker is an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s horrifying and unsettling story The Colour Out of Space. The original press release has been around for nearly a year now, and thanks to the folks at Blumhouse we now know that work on the film is well under way.
In H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, a family living in the rural farmlands near Arkham is affected by a meteor that lands on their property. Strange occurrences begin to happen and the land, plant life, and wildlife all begin to transform in very unnatural ways. This is a tale that is ripe with body horror and very disturbing sequences, and the development sketches produced by Stanley’s team show us that this may be a horror film that could easily be just as intense as John Carpenter’s The Thing.
The Colour Out of Space is one of the best examples of Lovecraft at his finest. The story features themes and ideas present in much of the author’s writings and is a well-structured narrative that rivals any one of the tales that comprise the Cthulhu Mythos. There have been many attempts at adapting Colour for the big screen but none have been nearly as exciting or interesting as this one.
Richard Stanley is currently working with Elijah Wood’s production company SpectreVision, and thanks to the recent episode of the Blumhouse Shock Waves podcast we now know that production is still in development. Richard Stanley has also chimed in, “COLOR coming – slow but sure as a summer storm…what rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” That sounds amazing.