Exclusive: Lovecraft Trilogy in the Works at SpectreVision!

ComingSoon.net had the opportunity to speak with SpectreVision’s Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah about their upcoming movie Color Out of Space, starring Nicolas Cage, as well as their love of H.P. Lovecraft, confirming that they are attempting to “build out a Lovecraft universe” with Color Out of Space’s director and co-writer Richard Stanley.

Noah and Wood revealed that they are in the very early stages of developing The Dunwich Horror, saying that they hope there’s “enough of an appetite for these things, and we can keep them going and make at least three of them” as they feel Lovecraft is “such an important voice in horror.”

Stanley himself expressed interest in adapting Dunwich to us back in 2015, saying that he would “love to see the Whateley’s brought onscreen one day, as a kind of proper backwoods degenerate, Great God Pan crossed with The Texas Chainsaw family, type of way you would imagine.” He described the decision of whether to make Color Out of Space or Dunwich Horror first as “a toss up.”

Noah and Wood were drawn to Stanley’s script for Color Out of Space, as remaining faithful to the Lovecraft source material is incredibly important to the duo. The two share a desire to “help bring what Lovecraft did into the modern era in a way relays the power that it had during the time that he was writing it and published it.”

“Lovecraft is possibly the most adapted horror author ever,” Noah continued. “But there’s really never been a totally faithful adaptation of any of his works. I think there are a few that are sort of close. One of them is the German version of Color Out of Space that came out a few years ago. Stuart Gordon’s films are wonderful, but they are more Stuart Gordon than they are Lovecraft. We had been hellbent on finding the Lovecraft adaptation that truly captured cosmic dread without the camp. When we encountered Richard Stanley’s script, I remember texting Elijah after I read the first page and said, ‘This is it. We found it.’ When you see this film, you’ll see that there are all kinds of little references that are allusions to other Lovecraft stories.”

Noah also talked about translating complex stories into film, calling cinema and literature “closest cousins” and depicting something “unknowable” by making it subjective. “The character is able to know it. You experience it through their eyes and ears, and that can be a very abstract, psychedelic experience. That is the case with Color Out of Space, the third act is absolute chaos. I mean, sensory overload to the point where you have people after this film saying I don’t even really understand what happened the last 30 minutes, but boy was it overwhelming. And that’s Lovecraft. You don’t know what happens. The gods don’t stop to tell insignificant beings what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. We’re just ants on the bottom of someone’s shoe. And we never get to know. That’s Lovecraft’s thesis, and personally we don’t think it is impossible to tell on screen.”

Color Out of Space will arrive in theaters on January 24, 2020.