Published in Gothic Nature: Issue Three [2021]

In an era where everything is rendered visible and accessible by the all-seeing eye of present-day technologies, it is no wonder that the occult has become such an attractive subject in popular culture. Whether it be in pop music, television, art, literature or fashion, contemporary culture's usage of the occult's dark symbology appears to be driven by a desire to re-enchant an enlightened yet disillusioned modernity with a sense of supernatural otherness and arcane mysticism. In short, we might interpret pop culture's dissemination of occult aesthetics as an effort to re-inject a feeling of divine mystery back into a world domesticated and ruled by rationality and empiricism. It seems the scandalous French intellectual Georges Bataille was right when he declared, back in 1943, that as experience moves from 'the unknown to the known, it is necessary to invert itself at the summit and return to the unknown' .


This current fascination and appetite for all things darkly enigmatic and ominously elusive is perhaps most strikingly evident in the magical realm of cinema, as illustrated by the commercial successes of the mystical and occult inflected horror films Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) and The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019). For some fans and critics, the popularity of these films herald a new direction in horror cinema where terror is elicited less by jump scares or gore and more by a mounting sense of cosmic dread, whereby the events and characters of the film seem to be menacingly directed and shaped by an unknowable, alien force. While this particular mannerism of horror is certainly threaded throughout the narratives of both Midsommar and The Lighthouse to bone-chilling effect, it is perhaps more richly embodied in Richard Stanley's bewitching comeback film Color Out of Space (2019).


Adapted from H.P Lovecraft's short story of the same name, the film's narrative is centred on the Gardner family who live peacefully and duly on a remote farming estate in Arkham County. However, their relatively mundane existence is irrevocably shattered when a meteorite suddenly crashes into their property, carrying with it a cosmic malady that begins to infect the surrounding environment as well as each member of the family. The unearthly toxicity emitted from the meteorite initially expresses itself as a dazzlingly unfamiliar 'color', described by Lovecraft in the original short story as being so otherworldly that it can only be referred to by analogy. This makes it quite literally a colour 'out of' space in that it exceeds our phenomenological capacity to apprehend an object in space and time. Indeed, whenever the film attempts to depict the Color in its raw and unmediated form the screen becomes immediately overwhelmed by incandescent bursts of searing magentas and luminous whites, causing the visuals of the scene to dissolve and burn up in a flaring abstraction. It is as though the Color is so extremely and unrelentingly 'other' that even the film's visualisations of it are doomed to disintegrate into an incoherent surplus of sound and image. However, this violent rupturing of our perception speaks to the thematic core of Stanley's film: which is the cosmos' absolute indifference to all the flimsy constructs that we humans employ to order and structure the world around us. In this regard, the Color signifies the non-human darkness which lurks beyond all our methods of understanding, thereby exposing all the rationalising frameworks and humanist ideologies we use to make sense of the world to be nothing more than a facile illusion. Or, to put it in Lovecraft's own words, 'a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity'.


But perhaps what makes Stanley's film so exceptional is the way it frames this 'nonhuman darkness' to be nature itself, which the film achieves by channelling the unfathomable amorphousness of the Color into the narrative's setting and characters. By focusing on and extending upon these moments, the film paradoxically reveals and conceals its monster: we see the horrifying effects the Color has on the landscape yet the Color itself remains veiled and obscured by its host. This cunningly imbues the Color with a physical presence whilst also maintaining its abstract, alien aura. As a result, the Color is portrayed less as a distinctly concrete entity but more as a terrifying form of processing that virally destabilises its host in a series of horrific psychological and biological mutations. In this sense, Stanley's version of the Color bears a striking resemblance to Friedrich Schelling's description of nature as a dynamic process of unconditioned productivity which grounds the world in a never-ending state of flux and becoming. However, this incurs an intriguingly familiar paradox whereby nature can only ground the world by continually ungrounding itself, meaning that nature denies itself any solid or physical formation and, as such, can only ever appear to us indirectly via its inhibitive form as phenomena. Hence, Schelling's nature, like Stanley's Color, is not simply a tree or a mountain but, rather, a dark maelstrom of drives, compulsions and impulses which generate all phenomena (humans included) in an infinite succession of transformations and aberrations.


The implications of Schelling's concept of nature, as played out in Stanley's film under the guise of the Color, is that the popular dichotomy which separates us from nature is false, as we are neither above or below nature but simply a node or a stage within its all-encompassing web of interconnected processes. To put it more succinctly, man is nature and nature is man, as echoed in a line uttered in the film by the eccentric hippie Ezra: 'What's in here is out there, and what's out there is in here now'. However, the opening scenes of the film appear to be in direct opposition to this holistic sentiment in the way it sets up a master and slave dynamic between the people of Arkham County and the sprawling forests which surround them. As a result, the trees, plants, and shrubs of Arkham Forest are, at first instance, positioned to be nothing more than passive voyeurs to their own degradation and exploitation at the hands of humankind. Indeed, many of the character's attitudes and actions shown in the first half of the film express a dangerously narcissistic strain of anthropocentrism, where one believes that through sheerly being human, they are above nature and, therefore, the master of it. However, as the film progresses and the Color gains more control over the characters and environment, this humanist conceit is brutally turned inside out.


The Color skews this binary by permanently fixing the ecosphere in an effervescent state of endless blossoming, depicted as large masses of flamboyantly coloured plants abruptly sprouting and smothering the original landscape in rich blotches of pink and violet. This is subtly introduced in the scene where Jack, the youngest of the Gardner family, is lured to the family's well by a high-pitched whistling. As he stumbles towards the sound's source, the film cuts to a long profile shot that tracks his movements, bringing into our peripheral view the vivid eruptions of colour that have rapidly spread around him. The effect is both unnerving and hypnotic: we are mesmerised by the incongruous display of pinks and blues that frame the scene whilst also being wary of their sudden appearance, as though the landscape itself is an exotic predator stalking Jack as its prey. Indeed, the malignant appetite hinted at in this sequence is dreadfully confirmed and emphasised in later scenes, where we see the forest's gruesome, yet beguiling metamorphosis repeated in the character's physical and mental states. Horrid patches of pink and violet begin to cover the body of Nathan as his mind progressively unravels into schizophrenic insanity; Theresa assumes a trancelike state, appearing eerily vacant and dispossessed, before she is nauseatingly fused together with her youngest son Jack, transforming into a monstrous spider-like creature in the film's final act. In each of these instances, the Color's acceleration of the natural environment causes it to transgress all ecological boundaries, thus allowing it to engulf all phenomena in a fevered state of overproduction. As a result, all biological hierarchies are dissolved under the Color's alien glare into a flat and singular ecological plane, thereby causing all ontological distinctions between man, animal, and nature to collapse into indeterminate blobs of twitching matter.


In a darkly perverse way, this grotesque breakdown induced by the surging energies of the Color curiously reiterates Schelling's positioning of nature as an all-encompassing, universal property. Indeed, both are depicted as indistinct forces of ceaseless production that remain beyond humanity's immediate perception, seizing the world in an endless state of fluctuation. And it is within that immeasurable and primordial chasm of nature, with all its cosmic energies and prodigious urges, that all phenomena are unified. But whilst Schelling portrays this unity with typical romanticism, Stanley renders this oneness as something truly and deeply horrifying. For in Stanley's film, to be unified with the world is to be painfully stripped of one's own humanity and drained of all anthropocentric ideals, absorbing one into the unfathomable abysses of nature.