At The Mountains Of Madness may have ultimately defeated Guillermo Del Toro, but Richard Stanley is not a man to avoid a challenge. The director of Hardware and Dust Devil is now attacking his own adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story. He's set to direct The Colour Out Of Space for SpectreVision (the indie production company behind A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night).
Stanley's aformentioned first two films in the 1990s immediately pegged him as a maverick talent to watch, but the debacle of The Island Of Doctor Moreau (recently the subject of the great documentary Lost Soul) sent him screaming into the wilderness, and he's only directed online series and documentaries since. His most recent work is the surreal The Otherworld, about his own experiences searching for a dimensional gateway in Montsegur.
His name has often cropped up in connection to projects that have fallen through: he wrote a screenplay for High Rise for director Vincenzo Natali, before that film was taken over by Ben Wheatley. And when Empire spoke to him a few years ago he was talking up Vacation (an end-of-the-world film that at one time had Bruce Campbell attached) and** Bones of the Earth**, based on an unrealised Donald Cammell screenplay - neither of which happened.
The Colour Out Of Space, however, seems now to be a properly going concern. Casting is underway, and shooting is pencilled in for early next year.
H.P. Lovecraft is the undisputed father of literary horror," says SpectreVision's co-founder Daniel Noah, "and yet, bafflingly, there has yet to be a cinematic treatment that captures the dark beauty of the man’s oeuvre. Richard Stanley’s note perfect adaptation of The Colour Out of Space represents an epiphany for me, as it no doubt will be for legions of Lovecraft devotees around the world.”
Lovecraft's 1927 story revolves around an unnamed narrator trying to piece together the history of a "blasted heath" in the author's regular fictional haunt of Arkham, Massachusetts. Animals mutate and people are driven insane by the place, which was the site of a meterorite crash in the 19th Century. An old madman relates the terrible events that befell the farming family at ground zero.
“There needs to be a scary Lovecraft movie,” Stanley said last year. “I want to make a bad trip film and The Colour Out Of Space definitely has what it takes to be a very, very bad trip indeed...”