Thursday, May 1, 2014

Short Film: Colour Out of Space



HP Lovecraft's 1927 short novel The Colour Out of Space is a disturbing account of a family's gradual degradation.  The story follows Jonathan Davis, a young American man who sets off from Arkham, Massachusetts in search of his father, a former WWII soldier who disappeared shortly after the war ended.  He tracks his father’s whereabouts to a small farming village in rural Germany where he encounters an old man named Armin Pierske, who seems to be the only person who knows what happened to Jonathan’s father.  Armin proceeds to tell Jonathan an unbelievable tale about the bizarre and horrific events that had befallen the village all those years ago.

Die Farbe is a slow, mournful film, one whose pacing perfectly creates a sense of horrible inevitability as a farming family feels the fallout from a mysterious meteorite.  It's striking that even though Lovecraft wrote The Colour Out of Space in 1927, the story feels like a very modern tale of land poisoned by pollution or radiation, especially as Vu and his team portrays it.

Huan Vu, who directed Die Farbe, is also currently raising money for another Lovecraft adaptation, one of Lovecraft's Dreamlands stories. 


No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...