H. P. Lovecraft's tales and novels have been adapted into pedestrian motion pictures. I have liked very few of them, especially «Re-Animator», for its exacerbated irreverence in 1985 and the iconoclastic direction by Stuart Gordon, who was taking his first step in cinema; and two fine low-budget but stylish productions by the H. P. Lovecraft Historic Society, «The Call of Cthulhu» and «The Whisperer in Darkness»
Lovecraft's adaptations often fail, not only because the writers and directors are mediocre, but because, to find a narrative line in stories like, say, "The Shadow over Innsmouth," you have to overlook pages and pages of descriptions of buildings, bell towers, sidewalks and docks, of ugly mutants, of tiaras, lineages and tenures, and, in the end, in the inventory of significant incidents you make for your adaptation, much of the author's best is lost. However, I recently found a little gem that is by far the best film that I have ever seen based on a Lovecraftian text: «Die Farbe», based on «The Color Out of Space».
Lovecraft fans have rejected it, maybe because it is not American, possibly because it was made in Germany with German actors and the action relocated to the Swabian-Franconian Forest, or maybe because it was directed by a Vietnamese man raised in Brecht's land and financed through crowd funding. You can even think that they are annoyed because Huan Vu did it so well.
Lovecraft's tale is a story about a color. It can be a symbol, a metaphor, but in any case, this color is unknown on planet Earth. It arrives with a meteorite that falls in a splendid valley near Stuttgart. The meteorite is subject to investigation, but the object - which is getting smaller and smaller - gradually gains in strangeness, manifested in trees that bear enormous and rotten fruits, on the farm of a family whose members are losing their sanity, announcing the impending tragedy. Director Huan Vu decided to make the film in black and white, so that when the color finally manifests itself, it seems new but also strange, terrifying, and devastating.
The tragedy in «Die Farbe» directly affects few persons... First, the family made up of the parents and three boys; then the American young man who comes to the forest looking for his father, a soldier who served in the area during World War II; and finally, a witness to the events, a neighbor of the infected farm, who narrates the film. The resolution suggests that eight people were affected by a color that in the end flew away from Earth... But in the final shots, during the end credits, something larger is hinted at, something that will spread like a pandemic, just like in «Invasion of the Body Snatchers» by Siegel, Kaufman, or Ferrara; or Polanski's «Dance of the Vampires»... "It's all over", repeats one of the characters, but no, that is not so... The devastation will continue.
