Richard Stanley’s Return to Film Is a Trippy Delight

It is a joy to have Richard Stanley back. The Kate Bush of horror and dark fantasy has been away from cinemas for a long time, working on the occasional documentary and (literally) searching for the Holy Grail. But his work — which blends technology, magick and the mutable spirit (and sometimes body) of the human animal — provides the kind of frisson audiences get only from filmmakers completely committed to their art from the idea up.

One of the recurrent aspects of Stanley’s films involves deconstruction and reconstruction, so it makes a good deal of sense that he would finally, in a grand return to the industry, tackle visionary racist H.P. Lovecraft’s enduring 1927 short story “The Colour Out of Space,” in which an unspeakable extradimensional phenomenon infiltrates our world and begins to remake it from the inside out, leaving a family unmoored as every constant they believed in is unmade. (Devoted UT alumnus David Keith directed a 1987 adaptation, The Curse, set and shot in Tellico Plains, Tenn., with the crew from Italy’s Filmirage, many of whom would craft Troll 2 a couple of years later.)

Stanley’s 1990 film Hardware was one of the most perfectly executed cyberpunk movies, a desolate and dusty postapocalyptic splatter/suspense masterpiece stripped down to its component parts and, like its M.A.R.K. 13 murderbot, reconstituting itself out of everything within reach. Dust Devil, from 1992, is probably best-known as one of the first films the Weinstein brothers tore apart and left in limbo for decades. And his attempt at The Island of Doctor Moreau was finished in 1996 by John Frankenheimer and documented in the captivating 2014 doc Lost Soul — a roller coaster that tears through big-studio politics and pulverizes Stanley’s concepts. So we’re talking about a very thematically unified body of work.

Stanley’s Color Out of Space does that mysterious thing where it feels deeply resonant to the world right now. The Gardner family lives, isolated, in one of those primeval forests where human endeavors like the internet can intrude, but there’s never any certainty about the endurance of manmade institutions and concepts (shades of Joseph Conrad). They’re a normal-ish American family (or as normal as you can be when Nicolas Cage is playing your dad — see also: Nicholson, Jack, in The Shining), with kids dabbling in Wicca and weed and the specter of anomalous growth looming even before the iridescent silvery-magenta menace collides with their plot of land.

If there’s any weakness to be found here, it’s that the continuum of crazy that Cage taps into at times feels at odds with the film around it. Understand, when this film gets going, showing the unshowable and sticking its tendrils into the deepest crevices of the subconscious, all bets are off. Goopy body horror works in conjunction with emotional alienation at its most cruel, and nothing is sacred when illuminated by this unearthly light. And Cage sometimes seems a little out of tune with the horrors around him. But even with that minor caveat, there are so many great performances here. Daughter Lavinia (The Magicians’ Madeleine Arthur) and older son Benny (Brendan Meyer, who was the gay kid who learned how to kick ass in The Guest) do an incredible job at granting us a baseline for normality and then articulating, without overexplaining, its dissolution.

There is something that happens in this film that uses gory insanity as its own metaphor — it leaves the viewer wanting to applaud pulling off such an unexpected gambit, while at the same time struck dumb by the way it makes gore into a physical representation of monstrous violation. Stanley understands the chthonic possibility of the body, never letting you forget that every drip or bent-back joint is more than a signifier of pain — it’s an inescapable concretization of the world abandoning the parameters by which you’ve previously been living. His return to the big screen is a gift for audiences. This film is trippy in a way that both Hieronymus Bosch and Juicy J would dig — maybe you will as well.