Film Review: Color Out of Space
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Nicolas Cage is ideal choice for Lovecraft story adaptation
There is an episode of the TV comedy Community where Greendale College’s resident drama professor tells his class it is impossible to say if Nicolas Cage is a good actor or a bad one. Film student Abed, who has obsessive-compulsive tendencies, nearly breaks his brain seeking a definitive answer to the impossible conundrum. “This question has no answer,” the professor warns him.
Oscar-winner Cage, of course, has delivered powerful performances in many excellent films. He has also delivered bizarre antics in some famously bad ones. He can deliver an over-the-top interpretation of a role that seems more like a surreal parody of acting. He is not, typically, a naturalistic or realistic actor. I love him in Joel and Ethan Cohen’s Raising Arizona and David Lynch’s Wild At Heart. The surreal, black comedy universes of Lynch or the Cohen brothers are perfect for Cage’s style of performance.
Cage may be the ideal choice to star in a film adaptation of horror author H.P. Lovecraft’s story The Color Out of Space. Indeed, Cage and Lovecraft share a key similarity: I believe it is similarly difficult to say whether the influential horror author is a good writer or a bad one.
Lovecraft is a writer of enormous creativity and originality, with some glaring shortcomings. Rereading Lovecraft recently around the same time I was grading student papers, I had the feeling that if I were to grade his writing on a rubric, he would get a lot of 5s as well as a lot of 1s: top marks for some things, failing on others.
Consider the question of Lovecraft’s originality. The fictional universe he depicts in his works is one of the most singular creations ever put to paper, populated with bizarre, ancient, inscrutable, alien beings of terrible power who probably created life on Earth as a jest. But writing in the 1920s and 1930s, his writing style is awkwardly derivative of earlier Victorian Gothic writers, especially Poe. Lovecraft seems to double down on some of the worst excesses of Victorian literature. His overwrought writing style arguably veers into ‘so bad it’s good’ territory. The same thing may be said about some of Nicolas Cage’s over-the-top performances.
