Episode 60 - "The Colour Out of Space," Part 2

[Cloven Sunfish]

Has anyone seen Die Farbe, the German adaptation of "The Colour Out of Space" that was made a couple years ago? If I'm not mistaken, you mentioned "a German film" in the episode, Paul. Judging from the stills and trailer I've seen online, it does seem quite atmospheric. I think the filmmakers were wise to shoot in black-and-white so as to avoid the nagging issue of filming a nonexistent color . The trailer left a great impression on me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t-MxVyublk. If nothing else, the camerawork is very good.

"The Colour Out of Space" is easily one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, and these episodes which covered it just solidified that for me. You guys do an amazing job every week. I think Guillermo del Toro should bring you both on as consultants for At the Mountains of Madness if it ever gets made. You've turned me onto Lovecraft stories I'd never heard of or read before ("The Temple," "From Beyond," and perhaps most importantly "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward") which have quickly become new favorites. And I have to say, the sound design in recent episodes - particularly these and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" - has been phenomenal. If Chad keeps this up he'll soon rival Akira Yamaoka as the creator of Sounds That Should Not Be.

[I AM Schenectady]

I live in Western Mass, though I'm out on the New York line well west of the Quabbin which is the reservoir that was to flood this story's blasted heath. I am familiar with the area though and I can tell you that on a sunny day when lots of folks are out on the water fishing you just might detect a slight yellow hue on the water's surface. Fortunately it's not an incomprehensible alien entity. It's urine. When nature calls we like to "flavor the water" for all those Bostonians who who get their drinking water from our four flooded Western Mass towns.

I recommend drinking bottled water when visiting Boston.

[Tom]

I reread Colour a couple of years ago, and while it's a great story I was struck by something.  Doesn't this story read a lot differently to us today, post Love Canal, post Dioxin, post Chernobyl, etc?  It becomes almost unintentional comedy: meteorite hits farm and dissolves, plants and animals are slowly poisoned, water tastes funny (if I recall correctly), family slowly sickens--but no one can figure out what is going on?  The family just stays on the farm, keeps eating the food and drinking the water? 

I totally understand that the creature is exerting some kind of psychic influence on the family to keep them from leaving.  I'm just saying that with our modern experience with toxic pollution, the bewildered attitude of the characters is hard to understand. 

Anyway, great podcast.  I liked the suggestion that the Colour may not even be destructive or "evil" in it's natural environment, that it's presence, feeding, and growth might be very harmful to us earth organisms but benign and natural where it comes from.  Never considered that before.

Tom

p.s. Years ago I read a "sequel" to Colour (by a different author).  Don't recall the title.  It was set after the flooding of the reservoir.  As I recall it really missed the mark; the Colour manifested as some kind of humanoid, creature from the black lagoon-style monster, which was then hunted down and destroyed by the heroes.  Not very Lovecraftian.

[old book]

This is one of those things, like comparing Call of Cthulhu to Andrija Puharich's Sacred Mushroom. There are no causal, cut-and-dried, strict cause-and-effect connections at work. Nor are there literary traditions, borrowings, and that sort of thing, although it is difficult to rule those out completely. There is merely a crystalization of events, or if you like rituals, formed around a sublime idea and appearing in fiction and non- or semi-fiction aka reality.

Jacques Vallee
Confrontations: A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact

page 101, Chapter 7 Botanical Data:

We begin with a simple case from northern California, which I investigated with Bill Murphy, who had brought it to my attention. The main witness, who will be called Jean Kirk, has never reported the case to the press or to UFO groups; this created ideal conditions for serious investigation.

PROJECT CITY

Mrs. Kirk's story was very straightfoward. About 7:50 P.M. on April 23, 1976, Mrs. Kirk became unable to watch television because her set "blacked out," giving only static sounds and a series of random dots. She went outside, curious to find if there was some unusual cause for this perturbation; she observed a small but well-defined "cloud" three hundred feet away, coming toward her at ground level. All the dogs in the neighborhood were barking furiously. There was a brief episode of rain; trees bent wildly in the vicinity, although Mrs. Kirk could feel no win. She later saw steady red and green lights flying through the sky, and that was the end of the sighting itself.

In the following months the weeds in the area where the cloud had been observed grew to a size double or triple that of identical plants in other areas. Furthermore, they continued to exhibit this pattern of exception growth for two years following the sighting, so that by 1978, when she reported the case to Bill Murphy, abnormal plants could still be observed.

We drove to the site--a small house with a large yard in Project City, north of Redding--and met with Mrs. Kirk and her husband to go over the details of the experience.

Jean Kirk confirmed that on April 23, 1976, she was quietly relaxing at home, watching Name That Tune on TV, when static drowned out the program. Her husband, Millard, went to bed with the intention of listening to a ball game on the radio, but the broadcast also suffered from static.

It was 8:15 or 8:30 P.M. when Mrs. Kirk went out to see what could be causing the disturbance. She noticed a cloud she described to us as "sold white with sharp edges" trailing along the ground in her yard. It hovered behind a nearby tree and was illuminated by a streetlight.

Mrs. Kirk is an active, dynamic person with a positive outlook on life and an open mind on unusual phenomena, and is free of any preconception regarding their possible nature. When she saw the cloud, which was moving toward her, her first impulse was to run inside the house. Then she thought that "a cloud could not hurt her," and her fear went away. What seemed odd was that the sky was cloudless with many stars.

The cloud moved directly over her while the neighborhood's dogs began barking. Mrs. Kirk could still see under and behind the cloud, but she observed no stars above it. She had a sort of spell of dizziness. Suddenly it started raining, and a forty-foot tree nearby bent as if whipped by some tremendous force, although the witness felt no wind. With that final display, the cloud disappeared.

Instead of a cloud there were now two big lights in the sky: a steady green light and a steady red light, slowly moving north without any sound. Soon she could see only the red light; it was large and hovered. "It was bright red," Mrs. Kirk said, "like the light of an ambulance, but bigger for that distance." It moved to the top of a hill, in the direction in which the cloud had first appeared; it was still hovering there when Mrs. Kirk, feeling cold, decided to go back inside.

The witness had felt nothing except the spurt of rain. She noted no unusual sound, smell, or taste. She did not feel or hear the wind.

In the following months she confirmed that the area of the yard where the cloud had hovered exhibited abnormally fast growth of the grass and weeds. At first Mrs. Kirk paid little attention, but in April 1977 she actually measured the weeds at eight feet, while typical weeds of this family reach only three and a half feet. The grass had grown densely to about five feet. Mrs. Kirk cut the weeds, but they grew high again and could still be observed in their abnormally high condition when photographed in May 1978.

My examination of the site did not reveal any natural factor that could explain accelerated growth of plants in that small area. There is a grassy patch some distance to the right where the washing machine empties, and there is a small vegetable garden to the left, but nothing special at the spot itself.

Conditions returned to normal after three years and a follow-up visit in August 1979 found no unusual plants. We were left with the possibility that the peculiar "cloud" seen by Mrs. Kirk had indeed stimulated the growth of the grass and weeds; but in view of the time that had elapsed since the event itself, it was difficult yo document these changes with greater precision.

There are numerous reports of effects on vegetation in the UFO literature. An event that took place on August 2, 1978, in Vallenoncello, Italy, involved a bright oval object that descended while illuminating the ground. After the object's departure, the witess found an irregularly shaped burned area in the grass, about two meters in diameter. The grass had changed to a reddish color and was covered by a dark brown jellylike substance. The witness collected some of that substance but eventually threw it away, not knowing what to do with it.

Vegetation only began growing two years later. The burned area was still visible in 1981, and it was covered with moss and small cactuslike plants that were not typical of the area. An analysis by the regional center of agricultural research found an abnormal level of calcium at the site, according to the June 1978 issue of the Italian UFO Reporter.

[Jake W]

Hello everyone. Sorry for my extended absence! An intangible, unearthly essence which defies my ability to describe it (but probably a set of botnet viruses) was visited upon me by a mysterious group I suspect to be a shadowy cult. Or the Russian mafia. So my computer and my iTunes have been up the spout for several months. I have quite a lot of catching up to do but very happy to come back to The Colour Out of Space

By the way, I live in Brighton so I looked up the Colour Out of Space arts festival you mentioned on the show. I'd never heard of it. Brighton is a very arty place. We have several annual arts festivals and a comedy festival, plus a lot of fringe events and quite a few ongoing arts and music events and venues throughout the year. Looking at the website for COoS.org I don't see any connection at all with HPL, which is a shame. It looks like a small festival, not mainstream but far from horrific. As we're a seaside town I think it's only fair to expect any HPL inspired festival to involve a display of mind-torturingly proportioned architecture rising from the waters. We do have a broken and rusting old pier and quite a few misty Victorian streets and alleyways. Actually HPL would love it here. There's a lot of Victorian buildings still in use, especially on the seafront, and even old gas street lamps converted to electricity. I even saw someone riding a penny-farthing last weekend! Brighton does have a reputation as a party town, but that really only applies to a very small part of it. It's a Bohemian place and you're more likely to see people dressed up here for apparently no reason than in any other town in the UK, but it's not all nightclubs and wild nights. Everyone's usually in bed by 11

[bar1scorpio]

p.s. Years ago I read a "sequel" to Colour (by a different author).  Don't recall the title.  It was set after the flooding of the reservoir.  As I recall it really missed the mark; the Colour manifested as some kind of humanoid, creature from the black lagoon-style monster, which was then hunted down and destroyed by the heroes.  Not very Lovecraftian.

Sounds like one of those Mythos stories you just toss. 

Better sequel is " A Little Color in Your Cheeks" by Michael Minnis, in the Elder Signs Press anthology book Horrors Beyond.  The books put out by ESP & the associated Chaosium titles tend to have some quality stories in them.  Though each anthology can be pretty hit & miss.  One of my first faves is the book I started reading them with - High Seas Cthulhu.  (Yes, Mythos + Pirates.)

[zelowell]

Anyone who likes this story should definitely check out T.E.D. Klein's "The Events At Poroth Farm" (I read it recently in Penguin's "American Supernatural Tales" edited by S.T. Joshi), which features the same subject: an isolated group of people threatened by an unseen, unknowable, evil force.  Note though that Klein's story has more of a pagan/"White People" sort of vibe, whereas "Colour Out of Space" has a more Space Invader slant; however despite this difference, Klein references Lovecraft in the story (specifically with an allusion to a polluted well) as well as several other influential horror writers.  If there was ever a story written with the modern weird tale fan in mind, it's "Poroth Farm".

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

Was at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum today with a friend to check out the crocheted coral reef (loved it! great habitat for crocheted Cthulhus) and we ended up making a trip to pet the meteorites too. I got to tell her about the Colour Out of Space and how we were now going to go mad and disintegrate.

[old book]

Hey, does Smithsonian have the Jessup meteorite from Greenland now? It used to be in New York but I've lost track of it. Ironic that museum meteors still have trajectories...

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

Hey, does Smithsonian have the Jessup meteorite from Greenland now? It used to be in New York but I've lost track of it. Ironic that museum meteors still have trajectories...

I don't recall one from Greenland, but it might've been the one I snuck up behind and petted. ...because I definitely did that to one of them. The other was from the Southwest.

[old book]

Hey, does Smithsonian have the Jessup meteorite from Greenland now? It used to be in New York but I've lost track of it. Ironic that museum meteors still have trajectories...

I don't recall one from Greenland, but it might've been the one I snuck up behind and petted. ...because I definitely did that to one of them. The other was from the Southwest.

Weren't you afraid of space germs???

Here's a mugshot, take your time, just see if you remember this guy:

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

Hey, does Smithsonian have the Jessup meteorite from Greenland now? It used to be in New York but I've lost track of it. Ironic that museum meteors still have trajectories...

I don't recall one from Greenland, but it might've been the one I snuck up behind and petted. ...because I definitely did that to one of them. The other was from the Southwest.

Weren't you afraid of space germs???

Here's a mugshot, take your time, just see if you remember this guy:

I was more afraid of other-people germs.

That is not one of the meteors I molested, they were taller. It might've been somewhere I wasn't looking.

[old book]

Nah, it's probably still at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, gathering dust in a basement.

[osyrisdiamond]

I reread Colour a couple of years ago, and while it's a great story I was struck by something.  Doesn't this story read a lot differently to us today, post Love Canal, post Dioxin, post Chernobyl, etc?  It becomes almost unintentional comedy: meteorite hits farm and dissolves, plants and animals are slowly poisoned, water tastes funny (if I recall correctly), family slowly sickens--but no one can figure out what is going on?  The family just stays on the farm, keeps eating the food and drinking the water? 

I totally understand that the creature is exerting some kind of psychic influence on the family to keep them from leaving.  I'm just saying that with our modern experience with toxic pollution, the bewildered attitude of the characters is hard to understand. 

Anyway, great podcast.  I liked the suggestion that the Colour may not even be destructive or "evil" in it's natural environment, that it's presence, feeding, and growth might be very harmful to us earth organisms but benign and natural where it comes from.  Never considered that before.

Tom

p.s. Years ago I read a "sequel" to Colour (by a different author).  Don't recall the title.  It was set after the flooding of the reservoir.  As I recall it really missed the mark; the Colour manifested as some kind of humanoid, creature from the black lagoon-style monster, which was then hunted down and destroyed by the heroes.  Not very Lovecraftian.

I agree it does have that fallout aspect to it; kind of chilling considering the fears in Japan right now. I also like the neutral nature approach to the creature. It came, it lived, it fed, it grew, it multiplied (apparently) and spawned, and now it festers. It does seem odd that if the creature remains, the reservoir idea doesn't sound good. However, I might say that given the slow progress of the creature's influence after it "released its eggs", as I like to refer to what happened at the end, the creature is either biding its time or is just festering in the last stages of life (since many creatures die after spawning).

It could also be that the creature is indeed dead but that its body still absorbs energy; or that the color and the physical creature that pawned are in fact two separate but symbiotic creatures that use each other to survive. If we then presume that one dies, the other lives on but does not have its partner to grow and expand rapidly. In either case, the flooding might be good, as most of the living material will die and unless what remains can survive on dead biological material or move itself to a better location, the flooding might put an end to the creature... though in the world of Lovecraft, I doubt this would be so.

I liked this story a lot; bad things happening to good people is always a good way to produce drama and intrigue.

[Genus Unknown]

Just noticed a nice little detail near the beginning of the story:

Before that time there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious 'lone altar older than the Indians.

It's a neat throwaway reference on its own, but the real payoff is 5 years later in "The Dreams in the Witch-House," which features that very island as the place of Keziah Mason's meetings with the Black Man.