the thing about me is that I will see my mutuals post about wanting to be friends with their mutuals and I'll be like "oh but they probably meant their other mutuals not you"

So I watched Color Out of Space yesterday because I thought it would be bad and batshit and something that would serve as good knitting background.

Only it wasn’t bad.

(Still batshit and still good knitting background though.)

I don’t really know where to start talking about this but since I’m doing this for free, I’m going to talk about eggs benedict first. I love eggs benedict. If you don’t know what it is, the standard is an English muffin, with Canadian bacon on top of it, with a poached egg on top of that, and the whole thing topped with hollandaise sauce.

I can poach an egg sort of successfully most of the time. But my standard grocery shopping doesn’t include English muffins or Canadian bacon, and making hollandaise is a whole thing with raw egg yolks and either getting your blender dirty or whisking until your arm falls off and like…if I have enough time to make a breakfast of more than one step for myself (or if I feel like having breakfast for dinner) I’m also probably trying to chill that day. Also I’m already poaching a couple of eggs and that’s where the anxiety has to go.

So when I want eggs benedict at home, it’s going to be made with: whatever kind of bread thing I have, topped with whatever kind of meat I have in the fridge (I have used a sliced-up hot dog for this), topped with a poached egg, topped with not hollandaise, but something that will work for the purpose, made by stirring up mayo with lemon juice and a dash of cayenne pepper. I’ve never been disappointed with my results, maybe because I’m a gremlin? I wouldn’t serve any of this business to a chef, but I don’t make this to serve to a chef, I make this to eat it.

Maybe that will help you understand what I’m feeling about Color Out of Space. Some spoilers below.

In the first half-hour or so of the movie, I was flip-flopping about whether the movie was “self-aware” or not. Like, is the weirdness unintentional? Should I wince with secondhand embarrassment at the filmmakers?

I think the answer is firmly NO to these two questions. In fact, I think that the filmmakers were WILDLY SUCCESSFUL in what they intended to do.

There were several different things that convinced me that they were doing whatever they were doing on purpose, including all their deviations from the H.P. Lovecraft story the movie is based on.

1. Right at the beginning, there’s a bit of flirting between the hydrologist and the daughter of the family that lives on the farm where the meteorite will soon land. Yeah it’s heterosexual nonsense, BUT. The hydrologist is Black and the daughter is white. H.P. Lovecraft’s head is suitably exploded, now we can do whatever we want.

2. The dinner scene with the family where there’s a short conversation about how the daughter is always wanting fast food. Now, in context this is just to establish that she’s missing living in the city vs. in the middle of nowhere. But importantly, she’s the first character we see in the movie and so is kind of our gateway into this situation. And she doesn’t want the home-cooked meal, she wants the fast food, even after her mother points out the questionable ingredients. “I know,” she says. “But it tastes like heaven.” Sometimes you want fast food even though you know very well that it’s not gourmet. Not every horror movie has to be a perfectly balanced tour-de-force of suspense, mystery, and social commentary. You can relax. Come into the movie.

3. The first creepy phone call. The hydrologist is at his survey camp (? IDK why he was outdoors at night in this scene actually, mumble mumble fieldwork?) and he gets a garbled, static-filled phone call on what is obviously a modern smartphone. But when he disconnects, there is the clear sound of a DIAL TONE. To me, this is too bizarre to be an accident, especially because there are a number of other phone calls and disconnections in the movie, and none of them end with a dial tone. I think the filmmakers do know what it’s like to use a phone. (Though there is a scene where the daughter is trying to call 911 and tells her father in a panic that she can’t get a dial tone. IDK what that’s about. A genuine error? A moment that might as well have a label that says “nitpickers take pot shots here”?) Back to the hydrologist. At this moment, as a viewer, I’m still thrown off by the dial tone. It’s nonsense, and that makes it a “bad movie” marker, I guess, but someone had to decide to put the sound in. It couldn’t have happened carelessly. And then the hydrologist has to block a glare of light. He uses the book he’s been reading, which is “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood—which was one of Lovecraft’s favorite supernatural stories. It’s very clear to the audience—not a lingering shot, but still something that’s not supposed to be an Easter egg.

And this is where I say, okay. The filmmakers know their source material. They know their audience. No one in the movie is winking at the camera, and the movie is yes, kind of funky, but it’s not made in a careless way or in a way that you feel that the filmmakers are inviting laughter. It’s horror—and believe me, they’ve got some practical effects in this one are truly ghastly—but it’s horror that exists very clearly in its genre and feels playful because of that.

Three things that show that playfulness to me: the name of the hippie squatter’s cat. The cat is named G-spot, which, in the movie itself is explained as an immature joke “a pussy named—” but even as I was groaning and thinking “that’s a terrible name for a cat” the part of my brain that knows more about Lovecraft than I care to is like, “but not the WORST name for a cat!” and I don’t know if the filmmakers expected anyone to be like “well at least the cat isn’t named ———” but that was part of my reaction.

The casting of Nicholas Cage. Nicholas Cage is/was kind of a meme on his own, and in this movie he plays the dad of the family that lives in the house the meteor lands by. And at a certain point in the movie, his accent goes a little weird and he starts acting more like the stereotypical asshole horror movie dad. I dismissed this as just a disappointment at first, like, this is bad acting and bad acting choices and bad writing happening to move the plot. But then he switches back to his previous established character, and after it happened again I realized that this was happening because of the alien color messing with his mind! Even after accepting that the movie was being purposeful, I was still caught up in the idea of Cage as a bad actor and the movie as a bad movie that I was fooled into missing the first signs of alien mind control! That’s meta.

The kid going full creepy child like, immediately after the meteor hit. Obsessive drawing, staring off into space, invisible friends, the works. But it’s not even a main thing. We never even get a full good look at what he’s drawing. There’s no scene where either parent stops and dramatically stares at it and we wonder “oooooh is it really real?” It’s definitely real and it’s causing worse problems by the minute. The kid has gone full creepy child, but there is OTHER SHIT that is ALSO URGENT. It amused me to have this trope be present but not central.

What else do I want to say? Overall this movie had very little downtime. It didn’t waste a bunch of time with people denying that anything weird was going on, or trying to make the viewer wonder if all this was real. It’s real and it’s fucking up your alpacas! The movie assumes that viewers know “The Colour Out of Space” and doesn’t tease us with any “what-is-happening-if-anything” tension. Of course it’s happening. Show us what we came to see.

I think what made it successful for me were the same kinds of things that make good fanfiction successful, which only makes sense as it is essentially a “The Color Out of Space” modern AU. The willingness to play with tropes, the assumption of viewer familiarity with the source, etc.

The effects were used judiciously, and if some of it just seemed like a light filter or two I have to say I don’t really care.

And I think that’s all for now. Oh, except that I want to mention, only the Black guy lived. The hydrologist was the one to narrate the opening and the closing, the only voice that spoke any words from the original short story. Whaddaya know.