10 Things You Didn’t Know About The Making Of Color Out Of Space

Color Out of Space is a 2019 sci-fi horror movie written and directed by Richard Stanley. The movie follows the Gardner family as their farm is struck by a meteorite, and chaos ensues. The film stars Nicolas Cage as Nathan Gardner and Joely Richardson as his wife Theresa.

The movie is based on the short story “The Colour out of Space” written by H.P. Lovecraft. The short story was published in 1927 and remains one of Lovecraft’s most popular works.  Richard Stanley has been a life-long fan of Lovecraft, and this adaptation served as his return to feature film directing.

10 Production Delays

The Color Out Of Space project was initially revealed online by Stanley in 2013, but it lacked financing. After two years, in 2015, it was announced that production company SpectreVision would produce the feature.

The production experienced further delays, and in late 2018 it was reported that Nicolas Cage had come on board to portray the main character, filming then began in Portugal in early 2019.

9 Stanley’s First Feature in 27 Years

Color Out of Space was released in 2019, this comes twenty-seven years after Richard Stanley’s last directed feature the 1992 movie Dust Devil. Dust Devil was Stanley’s second feature film, after his debut Hardware in 1990.

Stanley started to direct the 1996 movie The Island of Dr. Moreau but was removed from his post after just a few days of filming. Stanley was replaced by John Frankenheimer who ultimately produced a film far removed from Stanley’s original vision.

8 Cage’s Inspiration

For his character, Cage allegedly found inspiration in Jack Nicholson’s character Robert Eroica Dupea from the 1970 movie Five Easy Pieces. Robert is an oil rig worker who lives with his waitress girlfriend and spends much of his time drinking.

After a phone call from his sister, it is revealed that Robert is in fact from a wealthy background, and comes from a family of classical musicians. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor in a Leading Role for Nicholson.

7 Produced by Elijah Wood

SpectreVision is a production company that was founded in 2010 by Elijah Wood, Daniel Noah, and Josh C. Waller, and primarily produces horror films. In 2018 SpectreVision released Mandy, an action horror with Nicolas Cage in the lead role.

Mandy follows Cage’s character Red and his wife Mandy, a quiet couple living in isolation in a cabin in the woods. After an interaction with a cult leader, the couple becomes terrorized by a hippie cult and a demonic biker gang.

6 Creating The Monster

Lovecraft’s extraterrestrial entity, the title color of the movie, was described in the short story as being made up of a color that humans had never seen. This made the entity all the more terrifying, while at the same time almost impossible to give physical form to.

Stanley experimented with infrared, and countless new technologies as he tried to come up with a visualization of the color.  As Stanley himself stated, the otherworldly monster is “like a gas with fingers”, and naturally there was no blueprint for creating it. He eventually settled on a host of techniques and new technologies combined, and a strong magenta hue.

5 Ezra is based on a character from The Otherworld

Tommy Chong’s character Ezra in Color Out Of Space is based on the real-life character Urani, from Richard Stanley’s 2013 documentary The Otherworld. Ezra is the only one in the movie who speaks truthfully about what is happening in the world and draws many parallels with Urani.

In The Otherworld, Stanley investigates a remote region of France, known as The Zone, that has a rich history of magical belief. Urani, as he is depicted in the film, lives in complete isolation and according to Stanley, claims to have tape recordings of extraterrestrial buzzing from underneath the floor of his house. Ezra makes near-identical claims in Color Out Of Space.

4 Josh C. Waller’s Film Acting Debut

Josh C. Waller is a producer and co-founder of the production company SpectreVision. Waller has many producing and directing credits to his name, but Color Out Of Space was Waller’s first on-screen feature role.

In the movie Waller players Sheriff Pierce, Sheriff of the nearby town of Arkham. The Sheriff appears early in the film as he visits the Gardner’s farm to investigate the newly arrived meteorite.

3 Vampire’s Kiss

For his role as Nathan Gardner in Color Out of Space Stanley allegedly asked Nicolas Cage to model Gardner on his previous performance as Peter Loew in Vampire’s Kiss. Vampire’s Kiss is a 1988 comedy-horror, and Stanley’s favorite Nicolas Cage movie.

Vampire’s Kiss follows publishing executive Peter Loew, who suffers from declining mental health. One night, Loew meets Rachel, played by Jennifer Beals, and after bringing her home she reveals vampire fangs and bites his neck. As his behaviors start to change, Loew believes that he is turning into a vampire.

2 Fifth Adaptation Of The Story

Color Out Of Space is the fifth adaptation of the Lovecraft short story to date. The first was adaptation was Die, Monster, Die!, a 1965 movie directed by Daniel Haller. The 1987 movie The Curse directed by David Keith and set in the 1980s is more closely related to the events of the original story.

In 2008 Ivan Zuccon directed Colour From The Dark, an adaptation of the story set in Italy. This was Zuccon’s third Lovecraft film adaptation. The fourth adaptation was the 2010 German adaptation titled Die Farbe (English: The Color), which was known in the US and the UK as The Color Out of Space.

1 First in a trilogy

Stanley plans for Color Out of Space to be the first in a trilogy of Lovecraft film adaptations. The second installation of the trilogy is to be an adaptation of “The Dunwich Horror”. The short story, first published in 1929, takes place in the fictional town of Dunwich in Massachusetts.

The story follows outcast Wilbur Whateley, as he grows to adulthood at an alarmingly fast rate and is feared and rejected by all he encounters, including animals. Whateley studies witchcraft and becomes involved in the appearance of a supernatural entity, that threatens to take over his farmhouse.

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