But “The Colour Out of Space” puts its focus on the Gardner family, through the eyes of their neighbor Ammi Pierce, who recounts the colour’s changes of the Gardners to a land surveyor from the city. It allows a lot of room for interpretation, and yet Lovecraft’s stories have proven very difficult to adapt. Lovecraft’s brand of horror emphasizes the unknowable, usually in the form of indescribable monstrosities, and a whole lot of unanswered questions that leave a lingering feeling of dread. Annihilation isn’t based on Lovecraft’s works at all, and yet it feels like the greatest adaptation among his most popular stories the story that’s garnered more adaptations than any other in Lovecraft’s catalog.Īmong Lovecraft’s personal favorites of his work, “The Colour Out of Space” was the first in which he blended sci-fi with horror. And that looming fear of the unknown feels very much in line tonally, as well.

For Lena ( Natalie Portman) and the expedition sent to investigate the Shimmer, their journey is nothing like the horrific decay of the Gardner farm in Lovecraft’s story, but they reach very similar conclusions. In Alex Garland’s Annihilation, the meteor crash near the coast unleashes the “Shimmer,” an iridescent dome of color that has irrevocably changed everything inside it. Lovecraft’s popular short story “The Colour Out of Space”, the strange alien meteorite affects a farm near the coast with “colour,” indescribable globules of color that taints and alters everything around the crash site.

A meteor crashes to Earth, emits strange colors in the perimeter around the crash, and begins altering the flora and fauna in bizarre ways that defy Earthbound science.

The colour out of space pages