Colour From the Dark (2008)

• Directed by Ivan Zuccon
• Written by Ivo Gazzarrini, based on the story “The Colour Out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft
• Starring
  • Debbie Rochon
  • Michael Segal
  • Marisia Key
  • Gerry Shanahan
  • Eleanor James
• Produced by Ivan Zuccon and Roberta Marrelli
• Executive produced by Roberta Marrelli

H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Colour Out of Space” is simultaneously one of his most reprinted and one of his most anomalous, and probably both for the same reason. This story of a mysterious meteorite which falls on a New England farm and subtly pollutes and corrupts the crops, livestock and tenants with an alien radiation isn’t tied in with the interrelated subject matter of his most famous body of stories, posthumously christened the “Cthulhu Mythos.” Thus, if an editor is seeking some example of Lovecraft for inclusion in an anthology, “The Colour Out of Space” is reasonably short, reasonably well written, and independent of any continuity inherent in the Mythos stories. (Not that those stories had much of an internally consistent continuity when Lovecraft wrote them anyway – his mythology was created as a tool to be deployed as necessary in storytelling, not an idol whose explication the stories were meant to serve – but fanboys then were much like fanboys now, and the pastiches and continuations which grew up around the original core of stories is probably one of the first examples of “continuity porn.”)

It also renders itself unable to be faithfully translated for the screen – even measures against the standards of Lovecraft’s other works – by its central gimmick: the meteorite glows in a color (excuse me, “colour”) which is unlike any color heretofore seen by human eyes, and as its influence enters the water table and soil, the infected organism begin to glow with that same unearthly color. It’s a terrific conceit, and it obviously can’t be filmed because, well, we can’t show on screen a color unlike those heretofore seen by human eyes. I suppose that this is the most extreme example of a complaint which could be made against most Lovecraft movie adaptations: whereas the story’s protagonist will aver that perception of the truth he has discovered – normally in the form of seeing some utterly alien entity – would blast the sanity of those reading his account, we viewers of the film versions do indeed see the rubbery creature, and whaddaya know, our sanity remains intact.

Anyway. The adaptation in question is directed and co-produced by Ivan Zuccon, best known to American horror audiences for helming The Shunned House (2003), also a Lovecraft adaptation. He’s also responsible for The Darkness Beyond (2000) and Unknown Beyond (2001), both directly Lovecraft-inspired, which makes four Lovecraft adaptations in a filmography of six movies. This, you might reasonably surmise, is a passion for him. And that’s a shame, because Zuccon’s filmmaking vocabulary is absolutely wrong for adapting Lovecraft.

Pietro haz a bukkit.

Transplanting the story to Italy during the Second World War, Colour From the Dark takes place on the farm which Pietro (Michael segal) owns with his wife Lucia (Debbie Rochon). Also living there is Lucia’s 21-year-old sister Alice (Marisia Kay), a childlike mute who wanders the farm with her ragdoll Rosina. It’s Alice who first runs into the “colour” and what causes it: she accidentally drops the bucket down the well, and when Pietro tries to hook it out, he catches the hook on something deeper and *pop* something bursts down in the well, filling the shaft with a noxious vapor. Pietro tries the water and finds it okay, though, so they continue to drink it and to water their plants.

And for a time, the water’s effect is positive. The tomatoes in their garden ripen almost overnight. Pietro’s bad knee, the reason he hasn’t been conscripted, starts working again. Alice even starts speaking a little. And Lucia turns into a sexual wildcat. (Because why hire Debbie Rochon for a role if you’re not going to have her be seductive?)

Alice and Rosina. Rosina’s thiiiiis close to saying, “Redrum! Redrum!”

But then things start going south. The vegetables which had looked so vibrant wither on the vine within a couple of days. Everyone starts being tormented by odd dreams. And Lucia, more so than the others, begins acting strangely, delighting in pain – both her’s and others’. She also takes a vehement dislike to the cross hung on the wall.

Eventually, the strange glow in the well migrates around, cloaking the area around the house with pulsing mists at night and assaulting Lucia, possessing her. “It’s not me!” Lucia claims after she hurts someone. “It was it!” (Because why hire Debbie Rochon for a role if you’re not going to have her be seductive and/or batshit insane?)

Here we see Lovecraft’s persistent obsession with picking your nose in your sleep.

And what is “it?” We never find out. Just as the reference to space is conspicuously absent from the title, the meteor which caused all this rigmarole is left out. As far as we know, there’s just a “something” that was in the well for no reason. Is it alien? Demonic? Intelligent? Couldn’t tell you. The specific dislike that affected people have for the cross would lead one to believe the demonic hypothesis, but it’s left ambiguous.

Also ambiguous is what a large part of the movie is included for, really. Lucia’s and Alice’s sister Anna (Eleanor James) lives a few miles away with their grandfather Giovanni (Gerry Shanahan). They have apparently been harboring a Jew on the run named Teresa (Alessandra Guerzoni), who leaves in the middle of the night to spare them from danger. She is, alas, shot through the head in the woods that borders Pietro’s and Lucia’s farm, and Alice finds her body there; not knowing enough to be afraid or disgusted, she visits it several times over the next few days as it decomposes. And then… nothing. No contribution to the story.

The Rave From Out of Space.

There are also plenty of talk about Luigi (Emmet Scanlan), Pietro’s brother, who’s been conscripted. People talk all the time about hoping that Luigi is safe and wondering when they’ll hear from him. Then he comes home, and within two minutes he’s dead. Not exactly worth the bother.

Technically, the movie looks great; Zuccon has progressed from the obvious videoish look of early films like The Shunned Houseto the current generation of nigh-perfect digicams, and he uses it to great effect. Colors (and colours) are handled with deftness, and not only does CGI provide the shimmering weblike look of the “colour,” but it also provides the subtly moving cloudscape behind almost every daylight shot. Zuccon is a very… Italian director.

Looking back on my review of The Shunned House, I can see that I had much the same complaints about Zuccon’s filmmaking style then as I do now. Like many of the touted Italian genre directors of decades past, he’s very interested in images and tableaus; he’s not as interested in narrative or structure. I doubt even he could tell you why some things are a part of this movie. Why does Alice, on more than one occasion, take a kitchen knife to Rosina, and then be shown holding her as if nothing’s wrong in the next scene? Why does a possessive force which demonstrates such antipathy toward the cross then treat a priest with such offhand disdain? Why does grandfather Giovanni speak with such an Irish accent? (Mainly because he’s played by Gerry Shanahan, who sounds exactly how you’d expect someone named Gerry Shanahan to sound; he’s the main reason I haven’t criticized Debbie Rochon for not even attempting an Italian accent.)

Exorcism school, week #3: How to banish big-ass heads.

Zuccon obviously admires Lovecraft, so it’s painful to see him miss the point of so much of Lovecraft’s work in his movie adaptations. Lovecraft was, above all else, a secular rationalist, and his stories are full of “rationalist horrors”: an intelligent, humanist protagonist faced with evidence that there is something unimaginable beyond his clean, tidy, naturalistic worldview. To adapt a Lovecraft story into a movie with such a focus on the irrational, rendering it a tale of a causeless evil which behaves inconsistently and irrationally for absolutely no reason… “The Colour Out of Space” may be almost impossible to adapt faithfully, but Zuccon didn’t have to go out of his way to make it harder for himself.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 7
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0