Richard Stanley to direct H.P. Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

After making a name for himself in the horror genre with HARDWARE (pictured above) and DUST DEVIL (below), both of which received 10/10 scores from The Arrow, director Richard Stanley ran into some major trouble on his 1996 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, getting fired from that film early in production and replaced by John Frankenheimer. Stanley hasn’t been completely absent from the genre since then, he has co-written the screenplays for IMAGO MORTIS and 2006’s THE ABANDONED, and he directed segments of the anthologies THE THEATRE BIZARRE and THE PROFANE EXHIBIT, but he hasn’t directed a narrative feature in over twenty years.

That’s about to change. In early 2016, Stanley will be getting back into the director’s chair for the horror feature COLOR OUT OF SPACE, based on a story by one of the genre’s masters, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space.

In the tale, an unnamed narrator pieces together the story of an area known by the locals as the “blasted heath” in the wild hills west of Arkham, Massachusetts. The narrator discovers that many years ago a meteorite crashed there, draining the life force from anything living nearby; vegetation grows large, but tasteless, animals are driven mad and deformed into grotesque shapes, and the people go insane or die one by one.

Stanley has been trying to get COLOR OUT OF SPACE made for a couple years, but it’s now moving forward with SpectreVision, the company founded by Elijah Wood, Josh C. Waller, and Daniel Noah, coming on board to produce.

Stanley and Noah had this to say about the project –

STANLEY: “There needs to be a scary Lovecraft movie. I want to make a bad trip film and The Colour definitely has what it takes to be a very, very bad trip indeed.”

NOAH: “H.P. Lovecraft is the undisputed father of literary horror, and yet, bafflingly, there has yet to be a cinematic treatment that captures the dark beauty of the man’s oeuvre. Richard Stanley’s note perfect adaptation of Color Out of Space represents an epiphany for me — as it no doubt will be for legions of Lovecraft devotees around the world.”

While those quotes seem to be a bit too dismissive of the awesome movies Stuart Gordon has made based on Lovecraft stories, I’ll brush that aside, as I’m very glad to see Stanley making a new horror movie, and the works of Lovecraft are always a good place to start from.