H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space

This is the latest in mangaka Gou Tanabe’s adaptations of Lovecraft’s work and I bet most people have a good idea of what to expect from them now.  I thought I did, but this one is the first to actually disappoint me.  Not because of any obvious flaws with the adaptation – not that I can tell because I’m the guy who reads these things without ever having read the original stories – but because it lacks the style, suspense, and creepiness of previous adaptations.

The premise is solid, in that it’s about a meteor that crashes in a farmstead and how whatever came along with it slowly transforms the land and everything around it.  Crops grow big, but grow bad.  Animals start to change.  Strange new flora start to take over the land.  Then the family living on it starts to come undone.  All good stuff for a horror story, it’s just that none of it ever feels very scary.  Unsettling, maybe, but never scary.  I say this as someone who finished reading this late at night was able to go right to sleep afterwards.

How did it turn out this way?  A lot of what happens to the humans feels very low-key compared to what we’ve seen in previous Lovecraft adaptations.  Tanabe’s efforts to keep the pace measured might also be an issue, but there aren’t any moments where you feel things really pick up or see the humans confronted by something unreal.  I wouldn’t say that this is enough to turn me off of future adaptations from Tanabe, but it’s one I’d feel comfortable in telling other people they can skip.

Maybe the movie version with Nicolas Cage is better…