Much of the film has a surreal quality, with a fantasy-tinged score and drawn out moments of quiet that feed into a permeating unease as things proceed. Color Out of Space seldom disappoints on the visual front, from the heights of the Color’s interdimensional tomfoolery all the way down to the way lights cut through the mist on the Gardner farm. For such a destructive force, the Color is also beautiful, terraforming the area into a fantasyscape and tinting many scenes in a dreamy wash of pinks and purples. Stanley took that to heart, as the Color feels oppressive and dangerous thanks to the fact that we never end up learning too much about it. As a genre, cosmic horror (Lovecraft’s jam) generally calls for a lack of comprehension of the antagonists’ origins and motives. Sure, it starts with standard horror red flags, like phone calls from no one and youngest kid Jack (Julian Hilliard) ominously drawing scary monsters, but the Color proves to be much more adept at taking over its new home, warping time and enticing the Gardners to make increasingly dangerous choices in service of its purpose.

The bounds of the Color’s power and influence are intentionally left vague, so the only real gauge of what it’s capable of is the deterioration of the Gardners. The Color, the disembodied force that escapes this meteorite and plagues the Gardners, proves to be an effective and malleable threat, and director Richard Stanley never runs out of new ways of using it to disturb and shock. Before long, a purplish alien meteorite crashes into their yard, and the psychic shockwaves it sends through the house are just the beginning of a slow descent into madness for the Gardner family. Nathan (Nicolas Cage) has moved the family there to focus on his wife Theresa’s (Joely Richardson) recovery from breast cancer. The film brings Lovecraft’s short story into the modern-day and follows the Gardner family, living on a secluded farm in the fictional Arkham County, Massachusetts.

William Wilberforce by Derick Bingham