The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 6: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.
Alice Sebold’s 2002 debut novel delivered a bold and uplifting take on a brutal child murder story. In 2009, The Lovely Bones became a film by Peter Jackson, but neither the critics nor the box office warmed to his faithful adaptation.
The Book Corner
The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing for the writing group of my former MA colleagues. We work out a theme and everyone chooses a book that we’ll read and discuss. Previous seasons have included literary genre award winners and books that shaped our writing journeys.
In this season, we’re comparing books to their feature-length adaptations. Catch up with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, The Dark Tower vol 1 — The Gunslinger by Stephen King and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin vs Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Coming up: The Color Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft (vs the bonkers Nicholas Cage adap.) and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones.
The Lovely Bones: the story
The Lovely Bones is narrated posthumously by Susie Salmon, a Pennsylvania middle-grader in 1973. When she is raped and murdered by a neighbour as she walks home, her spirit flees to her personal heaven. She can only move on when she comes to terms with her death.
Over the next eight years, Susie observes the loss and grief of those left behind. Suspicions gather slowly towards, George Harvey, who’s revealed to be a serial murderer. This isn’t, however, a cat-and-mouse story about the hunt for a cunning killer. It’s about the ripples which spread out from an act of appalling violence that leaves a family without closure.
Susie sees those ripples affect the relationship between her parents, Jack and Abigail, her younger siblings Lindsey and Buckley, and Abigail’s mother, Lynn. Jack becomes obsessed with finding Susie’s killer and fixes on Harvey. Abigail grows nostalgic for the ambitions she sacrificed to raise Buckley and eventually leaves the family home.
Jack’s obsession with Harvey almost leads to a tragic accident, but Lindsey grows to share his obsession. She eventually exposes Harvey in a daring exploration of his home. The killer becomes a fugitive and Susie’s family find some relief from their pain. Lindsey embarks on a relationship with her future husband, Samuel Heckler. Susie faces a future in which she will never grow old and fall in love.
Lives less ordinary
The ripples of her murder spread beyond Susie’s family. Best friend Clarissa grieves and grows, while first kiss Ray Singh is an early suspect. Misfit Ruth Connors is touched by Susie’s spirit as she flees her death, changing her forever.
In heaven, Susie is befriended by Holly, a child whose death is never explained. Her mentor is Franny, a former social worker who was shot by a man looking for his estranged wife. Later she meets Flora, who was Harvey’s first victim.
Susie is occasionally visible to Buckley, and Ruth’s encounter with Susie’s spirit leaves her forever connected to the afterlife. Ruth and Ray become friends, and in a bizarre moment Ruth is able to gift Susie her body for a few hours. Ray recognises Susie, they make love, and she is released from her youthful crush.
Jack suffers a heart attack after an argument with Buckley, and Abigail returns to her family. The family’s reunion releases Susie to enter an idyllic afterlife, although she’s still able to watch over them.
The Lovely Bones: a writer’s review
The Lovely Bones opens with a paragraph that leaves you in no doubt of Susie’s fate or the time period. It paints a simple picture of her too, but the final sentence sets the tone.
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn’t happen.
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones.
Susie’s rape and murder is all the more unpleasant because you know the murder’s coming but you’re unprepared for the unflinching depiction of her experience. Every whimsical, heartwarming moment that follows is overshadowed by the knowledge of George Harvey’s desire to commit unspeakable acts. It’s as if Sebold has flavoured hot chocolate with a teaspoon of salt.
Unfortunately, The Lovely Bones arrived at a time when I wasn’t in the mood for a dark story. It took me a while to pick it up and discover the secular heaven built from Susie’s everyday experience. Yet Sebold dwells there only briefly before she eases you back into the tragedy unfolding on Earth.
The narrative voice of a dead teenager allows Sebold to employ the perspectives of both first and third person. Susie’s personal voice is tinged with sadness, horror and melancholy. While Susie is forever fourteen years old, there’s a sense that she has grown in the years since her murder.
Her observational distance enables a complex world populated with rich characters. Every writer wants to create characters who the read can imagine living beyond the story. Ruana Singh, Ray’s mother, is a memorable character who could probably fill her own novel, as could Ruth Connors.
What goes around, comes around
At times, the connections feel too neat and make the world feel small, particularly at the story’s conclusion. However, these links also ground the story, prevent the numerous narratives sprawling out of control, and drive its themes.
I’m wary of epigrammatic endings where the author explains what the story is about — they remind me of the moral moment you used to get at the end of kids’ cartoons.
The meaning of The Lovely Bones, and the paragraph it comes from, is the key to Susie’s exit from purgatory to true heaven, and it should probably be the final paragraph. It’s also the right title, focusing the reader on the enlightenment which Susie ultimately achieves and the positive message that she delivers in her conclusion. The original title — Monsters — paid too much credit to the antagonist.
Unfortunately, the titular line is not in the final paragraph. Instead, Sebold dilutes her message with an increasingly saccharine closure to every thread. There’s even a karmic death for Harvey that hints at supernatural agency, though I found it too convenient. I’m not sure that this epilogue is necessary, although it’s hard for any writer to leave these threads dangling.
The Lovely Bones: the film
Peter Jackson has a reputation for juxtaposing light and darkness, so The Lovely Bones seems like a fitting project. He rejected an earlier script that turned Susie’s heavenly narration into a figment of her grieving father’s imagination, and embraced the uplifting, ethereal tone.
He probably goes too far, with a lurid heaven that’s at odds with the quotidian afterlife in Sebold’s novel. Her murder becomes part of the film’s climax and while the rape is downplayed, Stanley Tucci is a chilling George Harvey. Saoirse Ronan perfectly fits Susie’s girl-next-door cuteness, Susan Sarandon embraces the dark comedy of Lynn’s alcoholic affection for her family, and Rachel Weisz embodies Abigail’s frustrated mother. Mark Wahlberg, unfortunately, lacks the gravitas for Jack, and simply doesn’t look like a man who makes ships in bottles.
No-one could fit this much story into a film that didn’t over-run, so Jackson focuses on Jack’s hunt for Susie’s killer. Harvey becomes an ongoing threat to Lindsey, but that tension rises at the expense of Abigail’s story. Drawing Holly and Franny into the circle of Harvey’s former victims simplifies his history and adds to the suggestion that his death is no accident.
The sentimentalometer dials up to 11 on several occasions, despite the darkness. Even so, a 32% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and 42/100 on Metacritic feel like harsh verdicts.
What’s better, book or film? The book has a breadth and darkness that Jackson’s film fails to capture.
The Book Corner season 5, episode 7: The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft
I choose an HP Lovecraft short for my turn in the Book Corner this season, partly to revisit a story and an author that I hadn’t read for more than three decades. Mostly, though, it’s because the adaptation stars Nicolas Cage being Nicolas Cage, in the tale of a simple New England farmer visited by something terrifying, alien and beyond description.
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Last week I closed up Book vs Film: a season of reviews comparing eight novels to their big-screen adaptations. The books won, but as the cliché goes, it’s about the journey, not the destination.
The working title for this season of The Book Corner was “good book, shit film”. As group-sourced projects often go, not everyone stuck to the theme and it became “a book I liked and the film adaptation”.
I also discovered that some of my fellow writers don’t even believe in relative concepts like “good” or “bad”. It’s a mind-blowing philosophy that I’m still trying to understand. Fortunately for the notion of book reviews, I’m comfortable expressing when I like and dislike other people’s artistic choices.
The final review also marked my 51st post on alexanderlane.co.uk, and I kept up my promise of reviewing each book as it was read.
Are you on Team Book?
Are you on Team Book?
Are you on Team Book?
What is The Book Corner?
The Book Corner began as a regular break from critiquing with my former writing group. I’m taking a break from the critiques but it’s always great to catch up on a book group week!
We work out a theme and everyone chooses a book that we’ll read and discuss. Previous themes have included literary genre award winners and books that shaped our writing journeys.
The eight books in season five reflected our usual skew towards SF and fantasy:
Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion.
The Dark Tower vol 1 — The Gunslinger by Stephen King.
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (now updated for the Disney+ TV show).
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin (vs Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki).
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.
The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft.
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones.
Books vs film: which is best?
I know, it’s a pointless question. Adapting a book into a film is an enormous undertaking and these are eight random examples.
Every reader reacts to different aspects of a book, whether it’s characters, setting, story or theme, so they’ll have different expectations of an adaptation. The same is true of scriptwriters, directors and producers who take on the task.
Anyone who’s seen the story behind Die Hard will know that just about the only thing that remains of the source material is the skyscraper setting. Many people love Lynch’s cheesy 1980s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic Dune, but most fans of the novel are a lot happier with Villeneuve’s more faithful contemporary vision. Some novels feel like they’re written with one eye on selling the film rights (I’m looking at you, Andy Weir’s The Martian).
I was lucky to come to this season with no built-in love or hate for any of the books or films. On my way through, I discovered strong and sometimes unexpected feelings about some of them. The goal of these reviews isn’t just to express an opinion, but to learn what I want to deliver as a writer and how to achieve that. It’s impossible to achieve that by reading or watching and simply shrugging off the experience without both emotional and intellectual engagement.
Or do you cheer for Team Film?
Or do you cheer for Team Film?
Or do you cheer for Team Film?
The good, the bad and the shrugly
I’m very glad to have read A Wizard of Earthsea and The Colour Out Of Space (again), The Lovely Bones and Howl’s Moving Castle. The films of Warm Bodies and The Lovely Bones aren’t bad and they carry the books’ stories well, but they both lacked impact.
It’s been years since I disliked a book as much as Never Let Me Go, but it’s redefined my thoughts on the relationship between worldbuilding and character. I’ll always remember it, in the way I can remember once eating a piece of slightly-off food that later made me ill. You’d have to force me at gunpoint to read Klara And The Sun.
I’m nonplussed by the shallow beauty of the two Studio Ghibli works but open to the idea that Miyazaki Snr’s original works might be better than his adaptations. Spirited Away, Grave Of The Fireflies, Kiki’s Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke are currently just a Netflix binge away.
Overall, I’d say these books are better than the films that they became, although The Dark Tower and Tales of Earthsea are so different that they barely count as adaptations. Disney’s version of The Lightning Thief absolutely exceeds the original, but turning books into a TV series is a very different game.
What are your book vs film loves and hates?
I’d love to hear about your most-loved and most-hated big screen adaptations. What do you think makes the transition succeed or fail? Are there any novels which are truly impossible to take from the page to the big screen?
The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 8: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones
The whimsical beauty of Hayao Miyazaki’s hit 2004 animation of Howl’s Moving Castle has eclipsed the clever fairytale heart of Diana Wynn Jones’s 1986 novel. It’s a shame.
Howl’s Moving Castle: the story
Howl’s Moving Castle: a writer’s review
Howl’s Moving Castle: the film
The Book Corner
The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing for the writing group of my former MA colleagues. We work out a theme and everyone chooses a book that we’ll read and discuss. Previous themes have included literary genre award winners and books that shaped our writing journeys. So far this year, I’m just about keeping up with the schedule as we read them.
As usual, it’s an odd mix with a skew towards SF and fantasy. Catch up with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, The Dark Tower vol 1 — The Gunslinger by Stephen King and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin vs Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft.
Howl’s Moving Castle: the story
Howl’s Moving Castle has a lot of story, with subplots for a dozen minor characters. Fortunately, they resolve into the main plot around Sophie Hatter, the wizard Howl and the Witch of the Waste.
Simpering 18-year-old Sophie is the eldest of three orphaned sisters in Market Chipping, a very English fairytale town in the magical kingdom of Ingary. She works in the family milliner’s shop, but she’s convinced of the popular superstition that the eldest child will never be successful. Her stepmother enjoys the wealth brought in my Sophie’s hat-making talents and courting new husbands.
The Witch of the Waste — an infamous sorceress — visits the hat shop, accuses Sophie of being a witch and curses her to become an old crone. Sophie doesn’t know it but the Witch is correct: she can talk life into lifeless objects. She leaves the shop seek help for her affliction, telling no-one.
An exhausted Sophie encounters the sinister floating castle of notorious wizard Howl, which roams the hills around Market Chipping. Despite her fears, she thinks the wizard might fix her predicament, but the curse also stops her telling anyone about it. She jumps on board and discovers an untidy kitchen where she falls asleep. On waking, she meets the wizard’s teenaged apprentice Michael, and Calcifer, a fire demon trapped in the hearth.
Sophie appoints herself cleaning lady to the castle and strikes a bargain with Calcifer to lift her curse if she can break his contract. The only problem: neither Howl nor Calcifer can disclose the main clause. Her only clue is a mysterious poem.
The wizard of woo
The dandyish Howl grudgingly accepts Sophie’s help as he goes about an apparently carefree life. His main passtime is romancing a series of women including Sophie’s younger sister, Lettie.
Sophie learns that the kitchen’s door also exits to places other than Market Chipping. There’s Porthaven, an idyllic fishing town, Kingsbury, the capital of Ingary, and modern-day Wales. Howl was born there as Howell Jenkins, and his family think he’s an idler who disappears for months on end. While he’s vain and cowardly, he’s also intelligent, charming, endearing and occasionally considerate.
The king of Ingary calls upon Howl to find his brother, who has gone missing, and to kill the Witch of the Wastes. Howl doesn’t want to help because the Witch has already cursed him.
The Witch captures Sophie by pretending that she has kidnapped Howl’s current love interest, Miss Angorian. Howl defeats the Witch, but discovers that Miss Angorian is really the Witch’s fire demon. It wants to kill Howl and take his head to create the perfect human vessel for itself.
Miss Angorian tricks her way into the castle and siezes Calcifer to control Howl. The wizard kept Calcifer alive by giving him his heart in exchange for magical power. Sophie gives Calcifer life so he can break his contract and restore Howl’s heart, then Howl destroys Miss Angorian.
Calcifer lifts Sophie’s curse but decides to stay in the castle. Howl had all along known Sophie was under a spell, and they have fallen in love while she was disguised.
The 1986 first edition of Howl’s Moving Castle was illustrated by Tim Stevens (also in the Kindle edition).
Howl’s Moving Castle: a writer’s review
Diana Wynn Jones begins Howl’s Moving Castle with a bold announcement that this fairy tale won’t play by the rules.
The heroine should be the ugly step-sister, her stepmother is far from wicked and there are not one but two evil magicians. Readers who don’t pay attention will miss out on red herrings and important details.
As a boy, I would have found the opening chapters all too twee and girly, though Jones wastes no time turning Sophie’s life upside-down. Her characters and locations are vibrant, and the story never seems more than a few pages from a fresh mystery or surprise.
Sophie’s curse also transforms her into a heroine determined to save herself and speak her mind. The transformational power of identity is a key theme, found in multiple characters and locations.
Even Wales feels real
Ingary has enough context that it feels like a real place, able to exist beyond the confines of the story. Indeed, Wales feels as fantastic as anywhere else when it’s seen through Sophie’s eyes.
Despite the many threads demanded by a large cast, everything is tied up as far as it needs to be. The central romance draws on a trope of enemies to lovers, but their attraction develops organically. Howl’s actions win Sophie’s affection, not his good looks, and she remains a crone until the denouement.
The castle also provides a venue for comic relief as her attempts to tidy the castle unleash as much chaos as order. These set pieces are crucial to the development of an alternative family for Sophie in her exile.
Even the Witch proves a tragic villain, self-destructively addicted to the fire demon’s power. It’s a warning to Howl and Calcifer, and makes her defeat appear like an act of mercy.
Howl’s Moving Castle: the film
Hayao Miyazaki’s animated vision streamlines the complex subplots and busy cast, and his steampunk realisation of the castle is wildly different yet fabulously successful on screen.
The most dramatic differences affect Howl and the Witch of the Waste. The cowardly wizard becomes a Batman-esque hero, playboy by day and winged warrior by night. The Witch is a minor threat, turned into a helpless old lady in a show of the real villain’s power.
The flying battleships are beautifully drawn from the art of science fiction’s silver age, and the airborne set-pieces are a highlight. It’s impossible not to love the scene when Sophie, Markl and the scarecrow hang washing on the castle as she tidies their home. Calcifer is playfully portrayed as a devilish yet loveable fire demon.
The real threat is Madam Suliman, an evil wizard-politician who controls the king of Ingary and bombs her own people in a senseless war. There’s an obvious message of “war bad, politicians evil” but Suliman is moustache-twirlingly unsubtle and one-dimensional.
Sophie is sadly diminished from a sorceress in her own right to a gentled love interest for Howl, there to draw out his sensitive side. More than anything, this left a bad taste after the novel.
This is the second Studio Ghibli adaptation that we’ve seen this season. It shares with Tales From Earthsea a shallow, fragile beauty that bears little scrutiny. You’ll enjoy this if you buy into the Ghibli experience but there were key moments where it gave me a hard bounce.
Markl, scarecrow and the dog-man in Studio Ghibli’s adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle.
What’s better, book or film? The film’s as beautiful and charming as you’d expect, but Miyazaki takes an unforgivable liberty with Sophie’s character and clumsy moral messaging.
The Book Corner will return
The group is still arguing about the theme of our next list, but there will be another season of the Book Corner. If it’s taking a while to happen, I’ll pull something from my recent reading list next month.
The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 7: The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft.
Hold on to your sanity for 1927’s The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft, and its 2019 adaptation starring Nicolas Cage.
The Colour Out Of Space: the story
The Colour Out Of Space: a writer’s review
The Color Out Of Space: the film
The Book Corner
The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing for the writing group of my former MA colleagues. We work out a theme and everyone chooses a book that we’ll read and discuss. Previous themes have included literary genre award winners and books that shaped our writing journeys. So far this year, I’m just about keeping up with the schedule as we read them.
As usual, it’s an odd mix with a skew towards SF and fantasy. Catch up with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, The Dark Tower vol 1 — The Gunslinger by Stephen King and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin vs Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Coming up: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones.
The Colour Out Of Space: the story
Our unnamed narrator is a surveyor for a reservoir in land west of Arkham, Massachusetts, in the mid-1920s. He discovers a land known to locals as the “blasted heath”, poisoned fifty years earlier by a strange meteor. The narrator hints that after what he’s learned, he wouldn’t drink the local water.
The locals won’t talk about what happened there, but he learns of an allegedly crazy old loner, Ammi Pierce. Pierce tells him the story of Nahum Gardner, a farmer who lived on the heath with his family.
The meteor defies analysis by scientists from Arkham’s Miskatonic University, but they uncover a ‘globule’ that emits a mysterious colour. One of them hits the globule and it disintegrates. Overnight, bolts of lightning strike the meteor and it disappears.
Nahum enjoys a bumper harvest in the next following season but the unnaturally large crops are inedible. Over a year, the problem spreads, mutating both plants and animals. His crops turn grey and brittle, and the livestock’s meat is also unfit to eat.
The thing from another world
Ammi Pierce becomes the increasingly-isolated the family’s only contact with the world. He learns that Nahum’s wife went mad, so she was locked in the attic. The same fate soon follows for Nahum’s son, Thaddeus. Ammi advises Nahum to dig a new well because his water is poisoned, but the advice is refused. Thaddeus dies in the attic and Merwin, another of Nahum’s sons, disappears while drawing water from the well.
After weeks with no contact, Ammi visits, and Nahum claims that Zenas, his third son, is living in the well. Mrs Gardner is still in the attic but she is horribly changed, and Ammi hints that he killed her in an act of mercy. When he returned downstairs, Nahum was also deformed and dying. Before his death, Nahum tells Ammi that the colour from the meteorite is pulling the life out of the land.
Ammi returns with six men, and they find Merwin’s and Zenas’s skeletons in the well. The colour begins to pour from the well and take over the farmstead, convulsing the trees. They flee to the house but the colour consumes it too, and they escape out of the back. The colour runs into the sky, but only Ammi sees some of it fall back before there’s a blinding explosion. When they return the next day, the farmstead has become the desolate, blasted heath.
Most of the neighbours move away but Ammi stays, though his sanity never recovers. It’s clear that the colour didn’t come from outer space, but from somewhere beyond reality. It no more understood what it was doing to the Gardners than they were capable of understanding what it was, and it didn’t care.
The Colour Out Of Space: a writer’s review
Original 1927 art from Amazing Stories magazine for The Colour Out Of Space.
It’s an understatement to say that HP Lovecraft is a controversial figure. In spite of this, he’s also enormously influential in horror and science fiction, almost single-handedly creating the genre known today as “cosmic horror”.
Before I knew anything about Lovecraft himself, I was a 1980s teenager fascinated by the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Unlike most RPGs, in CoC your heroes faced mind-boggling creatures that were as likely to drive them mad as dismember them. Gaming magazines like White Dwarf often contained discussions of the literature, and I dove into the mythos with youthful verve.
Along the way, I learned about Lovecraft’s use of literary structure and linguistic techniques to disassociate readers from reality. His tales tried to communicate the horror of humans confronted with ancient, unimaginable and implacably hostile creatures of godlike power. It’s a nihilistic universe in which the light of humanity is desperately feeble — as Generation X as you can get!
One thing I enjoy about the mythos is that many contemporary writers suvert Lovercraft’s nihilism. They use his universe to lean into the importance of defending human warmth, liberty, democracy and diversity against a universe which sees us as little more than a psychic snack. The author is dead, as Barthes said, and his vile opinions with him.
Thirty years later, I was curious to find out what middle-aged me thought of Lovecraft’s prose.
Worlds beyond words
The Colour Out Of Space is experimental fiction: an attempt to create a truly alien entity. Most contemporary SF featured aliens that looked very human (no change there) and he wanted to challenge the status quo.
Lovecraft was also an early proponent of stories set in a shared universe. Here, we find the fictional Massachusetts city of Arkham and its Miskatonic University. The learned narrator who finds something that’s beyond his comprehension is also a familiar figure.
The Massachusetts countryside, another common setting, becomes otherworldly and forbidding. The narrotor not only hints that it’s an empty and remote, but that “the immigrants” — meaning recent arrivals in America — don’t want to settle there.
Fundamentally, it’s a shaggy dog story that you might hear from a well-oiled regular in the local pub. The colour and many of the changes it brings are beyond description, so they remain beyond comprehension. This has nothing to do with class or education, as the learned men of Arkham and the simple country folk are equally confounded.
There ares only so many times you can substitute “indescribable” for a genuine adjective, but the trick survives the length of a short story. As someone who’s read a lot of Lovecraftian fiction, I know that it slips easily into a cliché through overuse.
You could almost call it a pastoral horror. The alien force creeps gently over the Gardners, in time with the seasons of farming life. They succumb gradually, driven mad, mutated or drawn into the well. It’s only at the climax that the pace accelerates in a day of mounting terror.
The Color Out Of Space: the film
The Colour Out Of Space has been adapted numerous times since Boris Karloff starred in 1965’s Die, Monster, Die! For me, the lure of Nicolas Cage’s 2019 leading role had an unearthly power that was impossible to resist.
In many ways it’s a faithful adaptation, with Cage’s character escaping the city to realise his dream of farming alpacas. His family are given personalities and Nahum’s teenage daughter is often the narrative focus. Ammi becomes a conspiracy theory loner and the narrator is still a surveyor, albeit one who becomes entwined in the Gardner family’s descent.
The fundamental question has to be: how does a film depict things that are intentionally beyond description? Writer/director Richard Stanley tackles this challenge by using that most unnatural colour: purple.
He also draws on a sense that film can’t capture — smell. Cage repeatedly notes a smell that he can’t describe, until it’s revealed to be the smell of his wife’s cancer. The analogy of cancer to a relentless alien invader should bring a terrifying human dimension to the story. Somehow it misses the mark, either through the script or Cage’s erratic delivery.
The poster art tells you everything you need to know about The Color Out Of Space.
For most of the film, Cage’s gonzo style is at odds with the naturalism of the rest of the cast. It’s only when the world becomes truly insane in the final act that he’s the perfect choice. Joely Richardson’s prosthetics are undeniably influenced by John Carpenter’s The Thing, and it’s impossible not to compare the two films. Unfortunately, where Carpenter’s animatronics are terrifying and dynamic, Stanley’s feel like passive exhibits in a horrific theme park.
Stanely isn’t happy to analogise the strangeness of the colour. We briefly witness a dimension of crawling tentacles and horned creatures which has become almost visual shorthand for Cthulhoid terror.
While it doesn’t have a long running time, The Color Out Of Space drags through the first act. It doesn’t find a consistent tone or pace until the latter stages. All the same, it’s won a generous 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and 70% from Metacritic.
What’s better, book or film? Lovecraft’s short story broke new ground and doesn’t out-stay its welcome. It’s hard to say the same for the film.
The Book Corner season 5, episode 8: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones
The Book vs Film season closes with a children’s favourite of page and screen. Howl’s Moving Castle has won classic status since it was first published in 1986, no doubt assisted by an animated adaptation in 2004 by Hayao Miyazaki.