There is a death-and-taxes-like inevitability to most Nicolas Cage performances. At some point, a hinge will snap on the metaphysical door that holds back all of his “nouveau shamanic” actorly instincts, and his face will stretch and twist—like a gargoyle’s—as he unleashes a series of tortured howls or a strangled piece of dialogue. Those moments are an essential part of what makes him still so reliably entertaining and fascinating, 100-some-odd films into his career.
They’re also perfectly memeable. Cage knows that people punctuate their tweets and texts with GIFs of his onscreen meltdowns, that a particularly wide-eyed pose of his from, say, Vampire’s Kiss can be endlessly repurposed. He isn’t exactly thrilled by this, either; the sea of context-free images don’t hint at the carefully calibrated method behind his madness. “It’s been branded ‘Cage Rage,’” he once complained, “and it’s frustrating.” His angst isn’t entirely misplaced. Each of his crack-ups and breakdowns is unique—a snowflake wrapped around a stick of dynamite. A well-earned, judiciously deployed outburst can be the difference between a good Cage flick and a bad one.
Fortunately, Cage has, at 56, found the best possible use of his talents, which include being able to channel the spirits of animals, paintings, and cartoons, and practicing something he calls Western kabuki: horror films. He made occasional forays into the genre in earlier stages of his career, but lately seems willing to tackle horror roles more often. In 2018, Cage starred in Mom and Dad, a frenzied horror-comedy about parents who are inexplicably compelled to murder their children, and Mandy, a critically acclaimed, psychedelic revenge story that saw him engage in a grisly chainsaw fight with a cult member and commit to a vodka-fueled, octave-jumping scream sequence in his underwear. Both films allowed Cage to crank the volume up to 11, and were unmistakably better for it.
Now comes Color Out of Space, a largely faithful adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft tale about a family whose lives are upended when a meteorite plummets onto their farm in a fictional Massachusetts town. Lovecraft’s story was first published in 1927, but makes for an unsettling read even now, a slow burn that finds its characters losing their grip on reality while some malevolent entity reshapes their land, and their bodies.
It is an ideal marriage of subject matter, star, and filmmaker. Color Out of Space is directed by Richard Stanley, who hasn’t helmed a feature film since being fired from his ill-fated 1996 passion project, The Island of Dr. Moreau. (The backstory was explored in a 2014 documentary.) Both Cage and Stanley are avowed Lovecraft fans, and can run a little, well, eccentric. Cage infamously burned through a chunk of his fortune with questionable purchases, like a $276,000 dinosaur skull, a 9-foot burial tomb, a $10 million castle, and an island in the Bahamas. He told The New York Times last year that he sewed an “antique from an ancient pyramid” into his jacket—to better tap into its power—during the filming of a Ghost Rider movie, while Stanley once recalled meeting a glowing spirit among the ruins of a château in the French Pyrenees.
“Me and Nic made for an extremely good match. Ultimately, we both, I think, brought the same sensibility to the material,” Stanley told me during an interview. “Everything I do has a kind of deadpan, apocalyptic black comedy [streak]. Nic’s got incredible comic timing. There’s an aspect of what he does that makes me think he should lean further into gothic character roles. He can be the next Vincent Price.”
Nic Cage, a modern Vincent Price? What a scream.
Color Out of Space initially finds Cage sane and tame, moseying through some Norman Rockwellesque rhythms. As family patriarch Nathan Gardner, he wears a cardigan, gently chides his three children about their chores, and good-naturedly fields complaints about his suspect cooking. His wife, Theresa, played by Joely Richardson, needles him about their farm’s unreliable Wi-Fi connection.
No one expects the ho-hum family banter to last—promotional artwork for the film leaned heavily on what could be described as a tripping balls motif—and it’s not long before the meteorite smacks into the Gardners’ backyard and sinks below ground, where an unseen extraterrestrial hand begins to wreak havoc.
Stanley introduces subtle changes to the farm’s landscape—purple flowers here, angry-looking tomatoes there—that become more overt as the film wears on, while each of the characters begins exhibiting erratic behavior. Theresa absent-mindedly lops off a few fingers while preparing dinner; the youngest Gardner child, Jack, sits out back for hours, communicating with something in the water well.
As the crises that befall the Gardner family grow increasingly horrific, Nathan assures his children that “everything is under control,” despite mounting evidence to the contrary. The stress and mania feed not one, but two epic Cage eruptions, the first of which unfolds inside the family’s old Volvo. “You fucking cocksucker!” Cage shrieks when the car fails to start. “Ahh! Ahhh! Ahhh!” He pummels the interior with the desperation of a man who is trying, but failing, to save his family from a threat he can’t begin to understand. The Volvo outburst, and a subsequent one in a blood-streaked barn, show Cage as an ideal horror star. Only a film as gonzo as Color would force a character like Nathan to marinate in misery for so long; only Cage could so believably tap into such primal anguish and fury.
“He hit exactly the right tone for the material,” Stanley said. “Given that he was a Lovecraft fan, he’s also one of those rare folks who could understand the extremely negative arc. Lovecraft characters generally go mad.”
Color marked the first time that Richardson worked with Cage, who developed a reputation, early in his career, for unpredictable on-set behavior. (While filming Vampire’s Kiss, he ate live cockroaches and insisted, unsuccessfully, that a live bat be used for certain scenes.) “He’s a free spirit, but he’s not grand,” Richardson told me. “I actually became terribly fond of him. He expresses himself in between ‘Action,’ and ‘Cut,’ but you have no idea which direction it’s going to go. I found the ride rather thrilling.”
To Stanley’s credit, the movie never goes off the rails, which is no small feat, considering that it ends up resembling an LSD-addled love child of The Thing and Poltergeist. He deftly blends Cronenbergian practical effects with CGI, and even works in a welcome cameo by Tommy Chong. “I think I might’ve started thinking about making this movie when I was 13 years old,” Stanley said. Color Out of Space is meant to be the first in a Lovecraft trilogy for the director; up next is The Dunwich Horror.
Cage told one interviewer that Color is “a fascinating combination of family drama and horror,” two of his favorite genres. He said all of this while wearing a studded black leather jacket that had licorice-red accents and a leopard print collar. And then he told a story about waking up in his house one night and finding a naked man in his bedroom, eating a Fudgesicle.
Your mileage on Cage’s performances probably varies. Some people prefer him as the hapless ex-con in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Raising Arizona, or the alcoholic screenwriter in Leaving Las Vegas—for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor—or as the magnetic lead in his trio of 1990s action films, The Rock, Face/Off, and Con Air. But it was Vampire’s Kiss that offered a glimpse at what an asset Cage could be to a horror project, utilizing what he described as “Max Schreck–like acting” to add bizarre, compelling dimension to the cruel, mentally ill Peter Loew. (Perhaps it’s a coincidence that as Nathan Gardner’s mental state deteriorates in Color Out of Space, the pitch of his voice climbs, and he begins speaking in an affected manner that calls to mind Loew’s faux-British accent.)
Cage wasn’t well served by 2006’s The Wicker Man, a remake of the 1973 Christopher Lee classic. The film offered elements that would later become a hallmark of True Detective and similar prestige noir shows: a missing child, a haunted cop, creepy cultists. Cage briefly dressed up in a bear costume, and his freak-outs—“Not the bees! Not the bees!”—are more campy than chilling. “I could have had a little more help with that film,” he told The New York Times. “I wanted them to leave me in the bear suit to burn me. That would have made the whole farce of the film more disturbing.”
Like Vincent Price, Cage has sometimes embraced starring in schlocky fare that feels more like community theater than Hollywood, a decision he has blamed in part on his financial woes. But with better material, like Mandy and Color Out of Space, he doesn’t have the burden of being the only interesting thing onscreen. Since it seems unlikely that he’ll slow down his pace of appearances—he’s set to work on at least five movies in 2020—hopefully the warm critical reception to Color will encourage Cage to add more worthwhile horror roles to the mix.
As it happens, one of the films already on his to-do list is called Wally’s Wonderland; he’s expected to play a drifter who’s tricked into spending the night at an abandoned amusement park. But a shadowy park and some rusted rides aren’t particularly imposing antagonists, certainly not the kind to push him to his breaking point, the place where his face contorts and the screaming begins. So Nicolas Cage will also fight a wave of demonic animatronic creatures in a battle for survival. That should do the trick.
David Gambacorta is a writer-at-large at The Philadelphia Inquirer. He’s also written for Esquire, Longreads, and Philadelphia Magazine.