Die Farbe

I like this more than any other Lovecraft story brought to film yet. Matter of fact I like it just fine. Crazy good tension, crazy good grasp on my attention - like an iron grip. I couldn't look away. The lovely dark b&w look served nicely to darken the mood mightily and also to set off the color out of space dramatically. I do have feelings about the color, though. I would have liked to see something a little more exotic. Are we to believe that Bavarian yokels never heard of purple before? Could be. To quote my dearly departed daddy, could be. My only other beef is with the epilogue. Those Lovecraftian stories always have a logue, whether pro or epi, that seems to me to serve no purpose but to date the story - what?

This one should be on the list of anyone who loves Lovecraft. While this one doesn't have any of the more well known Mythos in it...it's a measured telling of what is actually a Tale of the Unknown more than it is a Horror Story.

The use of Black & White may look cheap, but it fits with the tone and tenor of the era that it was set in. Color TV did not exist then. The CGI may look simple...but the focus of the story is the people and the 'Colour'. Sometimes when the FX is stunning...you only see the FX and not the story. And Good Horror is more than simply good CGI.

The Telling of the story as a mix of English and German with Subtitles was a different experience, but it didn't subtract from the tale, because the story moves slowly enough that the subtitles are there long enough to be read and become pseudo-invisible. Besides, a hallmark of Lovecraft is that most of the stories are a RE-TELLING of past events thru the witness's eyes and memory Again-- this one is a slower, langourous story. Told through the eyes of the German farmboy who grew up when the meteor came down. And I dare say, the film makers polished and filled in some of the blanks of the original short story. There is no scientific explication by any of the characters here, but you will see that what happened was the intersection of the Earthly with the UN-Earthly...and unfortunately and tragically for the people in the valley...the presence of the Unearthly is just simply inimical to earthbound Life.

This one is good for a Late, after midnight viewing on Saturday night.

Although the script is not entirely original but taken from a Lovecraft script, the work of directing and photography make this product excellent. The film on which hovers a veil of mystery along its entire length attracts the viewer hypnotically through the inclined and caledoscopic eye of the camera. Interesting the chemical and geological elements present as well as the psychological cues analyzed by the director, depression, madness and catalepsy are optimally interpreted by the protagonists. Perhaps the only slightly out of tune is the slow pace and the absence of twists that subdue slightly. Beautiful use of black and white and excellent stereophony as well as good music. A strongly recommended film.

H. P. Lovecraft's tales and novels have been adapted into pedestrian motion pictures. I have liked very few of them, especially «Re-Animator», for its exacerbated irreverence in 1985 and the iconoclastic direction by Stuart Gordon, who was taking his first step in cinema; and two fine low-budget but stylish productions by the H. P. Lovecraft Historic Society, «The Call of Cthulhu» and «The Whisperer in Darkness»

Lovecraft's adaptations often fail, not only because the writers and directors are mediocre, but because, to find a narrative line in stories like, say, "The Shadow over Innsmouth," you have to overlook pages and pages of descriptions of buildings, bell towers, sidewalks and docks, of ugly mutants, of tiaras, lineages and tenures, and, in the end, in the inventory of significant incidents you make for your adaptation, much of the author's best is lost. However, I recently found a little gem that is by far the best film that I have ever seen based on a Lovecraftian text: «Die Farbe», based on «The Color Out of Space».

Lovecraft fans have rejected it, maybe because it is not American, possibly because it was made in Germany with German actors and the action relocated to the Swabian-Franconian Forest, or maybe because it was directed by a Vietnamese man raised in Brecht's land and financed through crowd funding. You can even think that they are annoyed because Huan Vu did it so well.

Lovecraft's tale is a story about a color. It can be a symbol, a metaphor, but in any case, this color is unknown on planet Earth. It arrives with a meteorite that falls in a splendid valley near Stuttgart. The meteorite is subject to investigation, but the object - which is getting smaller and smaller - gradually gains in strangeness, manifested in trees that bear enormous and rotten fruits, on the farm of a family whose members are losing their sanity, announcing the impending tragedy. Director Huan Vu decided to make the film in black and white, so that when the color finally manifests itself, it seems new but also strange, terrifying, and devastating.

The tragedy in «Die Farbe» directly affects few persons... First, the family made up of the parents and three boys; then the American young man who comes to the forest looking for his father, a soldier who served in the area during World War II; and finally, a witness to the events, a neighbor of the infected farm, who narrates the film. The resolution suggests that eight people were affected by a color that in the end flew away from Earth... But in the final shots, during the end credits, something larger is hinted at, something that will spread like a pandemic, just like in «Invasion of the Body Snatchers» by Siegel, Kaufman, or Ferrara; or Polanski's «Dance of the Vampires»... "It's all over", repeats one of the characters, but no, that is not so... The devastation will continue.

THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE is a German film adaptation of the short story by H. P. Lovecraft. Filmed in black and white, the atmosphere is wonderfully bleak and foreboding.

The story follows a man in search of his missing father, who may not get the joyous reunion he hopes for. Along the way, he meets a man in a pub who tells him a ghastly tale about his father and the strange occurrences he witnessed.

Tension and dread build until the final act, when the inescapable truth is revealed.

While this is not an HPLHS production, if you're a Lovecraft fanatic, and you enjoyed the HPLHS versions of THE CALL OF CTHULHU and / or WHISPERER IN DARKNESS, then you'll probably love this!