Posts Tagged ‘H. P. Lovecraft’


Die Farbe

March 16th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Huan Vu
2010 / Spharentor Filmproduktionen / 85′
written by Huan Vu
from the story The Colour out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft
cinematography by
Martin Kolbert
music by Tilman Seege
starring Ingo Heise, Michael Kausch, Marco Leibnitz, Erik Rastetter, Marah Schneider

The 70s. The father (Patrick Pierce) of Arkham academic Jonathan Davis (Ingo Heise) disappears while retracing his own steps during and shortly after World War II in rural Swabia. Jonathan, deeply concerned, follows him, only armed with a pack of old photos.

At first, Jonathan seems to be completely out of luck. Nobody in the small village he traces his father to seems to have seen him, but at last one of the villagers, a certain Armin Pierske (Michael Kausch), recognizes the elder Davis not on the contemporary photo but at least from a thirty year old army picture.

Pierske tells Jonathan a weird story about how he met the elder Davis when he himself came home from the front, and tried to warn Davis and his men off of visiting a neighbouring farm for reasons Pierske then goes on to explain to Jonathan by way of flashing back to a time shortly before the War.

A meteorite crashed down on the farm of Pierske’s (in the flashbacks played by Marco Leibnitz) neighbours, the Gärteners (Erik Rastetter, Marah Schneider, Leon Schröder, Philipp Jacobs, Jonas Zumdohme). The scientists coming to investigate were confused by the thing’s curious properties: meteorites don’t, after all, generally shrink over time, nor do they have properties strangely at odds with what we know about physics. Shortly before the meteorite could disappear forever during a lightning storm, the scientists found some sort of capsule inside of it, setting free an unearthly colour when trying to take a sample.

 
 
 

With no physical evidence at all anymore after the disappearance of the meteorite, the scientists left. However, strange things began to happen on the Gärteners’ farm. Fruit (and later some animals) started to grow freakishly large, but they also developed a taste that made them unsalable; the trees in the family’s orchard took on disquieting properties, moving when there wasn’t any wind to move them. And slowly, one by one, the family members began to change, growing unstable, mad, and ill through the agency of something not from this Earth.

Of course, the Gärtener’s farm is the one Jonathan’s father was visiting after the War; and it might just be that something he saw there has now called him back in one way or the other.

Huan Vu’s (whom you might know as the director of the Warhammer 40K fan film Damnatus that was killed by the angry lawyer brigades of Games Workshop) Die Farbe is a very fine adaptation of one of my favourite Lovecraft stories, the wonderful “The Colour Out of Space”. At first, I was rather sceptical concerning the story’s relocation from New England to Southern Germany, but for the most part, this change of location is to the film’s advantage. Sure, a viewer has to make a bit of an effort to accept the actors speaking English with clear (yet not very heavy) German accents in the film’s beginning as Americans, and then, once the film’s narrative has relocated to Germany, Ingo Heise’s Jonathan speaking German with a fake American accent, but the alternatives would surely have ruined what is after all an independent low budget production. Trying to pretend Germany is New England would have either robbed the film of its often impressive and mood building outside location shots, or threatened to make unintentionally funny what desperately needs to be earnest. A bit of accent trouble is much preferable.

This is especially the case because Vu uses the individuality of rural Swabia so well, giving the film the all-important sense of place that – as I can’t help but repeat again and again in write-ups – is one of the most effective ways for a low budget movie to gain a character all its own; competing with high budget films – European or American – on their own terrain generally means ignoring the advantages this kind of production has over them. Plus, the Swabian-Franconian Forest can be – filmed in the right way like it is here – an excellently creepy place, just the kind of locality where the intrusion of the Weird seems believable.

 
 
 

Die Farbe not only manages to evoke a place, but also specific times, through simple yet effective tools. Initially, I thought the three time levels were unnecessarily complicated, however, it soon became clear that the nested flashbacks really were the best way to tell Vu’s version of Lovecraft’s tale, and that – not a given in independent horror – Vu actually knows how to handle this sort of structure without the resulting film becoming tedious or needlessly confusing. It’s also nice to see a Lovecraft adaptation that does not feel the need to permanently include winks and nods towards the authors other works or shoehorn historical guest stars in for no other reason than to demonstrate that its writers know who Charles Fort was. There’s a guest appearance of the Danforth Memorial Library at the beginning, but that’s mostly that.

This admirable sense of restraint runs through the majority of the film’s writing. The movie prefers to underplay many of its dramatic and horrifying beats, all the better to be able to get its viewers with those it doesn’t underplay. It’s spiritually as close to Lovecraft’s writing in this particular story as possible, using those of the writer’s techniques that are applicable to film, and only changing the story’s framing instead of its major beats. The only part of the writing I’d criticize is the twist in the last act that doesn’t ruin the film, but also doesn’t do anything to improve it. As plot twists go, it isn’t horrible, it just seems a bit unnecessary.

On the visual side, Vu makes the interesting decision to film in black and white, except for the Colour itself, which is a clever and elegant way to get around the question of how one shows a colour that is indescribable – when the world is black and white, any colour will look Weird. For once, I also find it impossible to be annoyed by the use of CGI; in fact, CGI seems to me the right method to bring a living colour without a body as we understand it to life (such as it is). After all, a thing without body mass can’t suffer from the typical CGI problem of things looking like they have no body mass.

All these elements (plus some decent to good acting) add up to a piece of contemporary independent horror cinema I for once find easy to praise; I am, as it turns out, a sucker for films whose directors make one intelligent decision after the other and even improve on these decisions through thoughtful execution.


The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.



The Mist

November 14th, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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POSTERcompany: Dimension Films
year: 2007
runtime: 126′
country: United States
director: Frank Darabont
cast: Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden,
Laurie Holden, Andre Braugher,
Toby Jones, William Sadler
dvd companies: Genius Products
and Dimension Home Entertainment
release date: March 25, 2008
retail price: $24.95
disc details: Region 1 / dual layer x 2
order this film from Amazon.com

Plot: Citizens of Bridgport, Maine contend with dangerous otherwordly creatures and themselves after an ominous mist envelops their town and traps them in a supermarket.

I missed this film while it was out in theatres and took my sweet time in catching up to it on home video, assured by the trailers that it was going to be little more than another prototypical glossed-up studio horror.  I’m happy to say that my cynicism was misplaced, and that it’s better to be late in coming to a good film than to never see it at all.

Sourced from Stephen King’s 1980 novella, THE MIST follows in the trend of claustraphobic survival horror initiated by Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD while tapping into a Lovecraftian fear of things unknown.  The focus throughout is on the collective of survivors and the tensions that build between them as an ambiguous and alien threat swirls about outside.  The drama is centered on artist David (Thomas Jane) and his young son Billy, who are picking up supplies at the local supermarket when the titular mist descends, announced by a local man’s frantic story that one of his neighbors was taken by something hiding within it.  David spearhead’s efforts to protect the store and those within it, piling supplies in front of the plate glass storefront and gathering makeshift “weapons” (rakes, knives, and mops doused in kerosene) to defend against the creatures lurking just beyond it.

It isn’t long before the large group held up within the supermarket splits into factions, including one led by David’s disgruntled lawyer neighbor Brenton (Andre Braughter) who refuses to believe that there’s anything at all in the mist.  His group leaves on a mission to find help just before their assumption is proven disastrously wrong.  Fatal to his group as it may be, Brenton’s skepticism is never dangerous to those outside his sphere of influence.  The same cannot be said of the brand of apocalyptic Christianity held by the vitriolic Mrs. Carmondy (Marcia Gay Harden).

Mrs. Carmondy’s lengthy diatribes about divine judgment and the end of the world falls on an assortment of deaf and annoyed ears early on, but as the crisis continues and more and more lives are lost a congregation develops around her.  The message she preaches is not of hope and faith, but of expiation – atonement for the sins she sees as having brought the mist and its many monsters upon them.  To Mrs. Carmondy these sins can only be paid for in blood, at first that of a local military man (connected to a secret government project underway just outside of town) and later that of David’s own son.  Things grow so dangerous within the store that David and a small group of sensible locals see no alternative but to take their chances in the mist . . .

While the struggles of the human characters dominate the narrative, the film delivers on the monstrous goods in spades.  The idea of Lovecraftian horrors let loose upon the everyday offered ample opportunity for the effects crew (headed by Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger on the design side of things and Cafe FX for the frequent CGI) to devise hideous creatures that do hideous things – huge spiders with gnashing human teeth, bat-winged reptiles, and claw-ridged tentacles belonging to who-knows-what.  While these animated monsters aren’t as endearing to me as, say, the ghostly giant grasshoppers of BEGINNING OF THE END or the pulsing tendriled eye-monsters of THE CRAWLING EYE, they’re campy brand of horribleness should appeal just fine to newer fans of B-movie thrills.

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Director Frank Darabont [THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, THE GREEN MILE] effectively guides the proceedings, offering up a few moments of camp among the overriding seriousness of the rest.  Photography, by Ronn Schmidt [THE SHIELD], is gritty and immediate, alternating between static and handheld with generally fine results.  The only potential misstep of the project may be with its ending, which brings things to a decidedly grim conclusion that deviates (reportedly with King’s blessings) from that of the source novella.  Ending aside this is a fun little film steeped in the old-school tradition of lower tier horrors that, with more rubber and less computer trickery, would fit nicely on a double bill with any of the more grotesque creature features of old.

The Genius Products / Dimension Home Entertainment dual disc DVD of THE MIST is quite the looker.  The film itself is presented in two transfers – one in the original color and another in Darabont’s own preferred black and white.  Both look as good as one should rightfully expect for a film scarcely two years old and the black and white version, with its harsher contrast, provides for a unique alternate viewing experience.  Audio is offered in English 5.1 surround for both versions, with an additional French dub (also 5.1) present on the theatrical presentation.  Subtitles are offered in Spanish and English SDH for both versions.

Extras are expectedly stacked.  The theatrical presentation is accompanied by a full-length commentary track with screenwriter and director Darabong while the black and white version comes with an optional introduction by the same.  There are a nice collection of featurettes focusing on the creature design and visual effects as well as a more traditional Making-Of and some Behind The Scenes videos originally posted online.  An appreciation of Drew Struzan, the artist who inspired the character of David in the film and an assortment of short deleted scenes (with optional commentary from Darabont) and trailers round out the set.

003THE MIST opened to mixed critical reception but made more than enough at the box office to account for its relatively low ($18 million) budget, and certainly exceeded this reviewer’s expectations.  It’s no classic of the genre by any means and the ending will rub many the wrong way, but it succeeds more than it faulters and is certainly worthy of recommendation.  The special edition DVD package comes without any complaints on my part, though casual viewers may want to consider the lower-priced single disc release instead.