Miskatonic Arcihves

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An encyclopedia of strange fiction, its creators, places and mythos. Follow the sources; draw your own conclusions.

Tagged: The blasted heath

Characters

Ammi Pierce

Ammi Pierce is the neighbor who preserves the most extensive surviving account of the Gardner catastrophe in The Colour out of Space. He witnesses the meteorite’s investigation, the family’s decline and the final ascent from the well, then tells the story decades later to a surveyor planning a reservoir.

5 min read · 877 words

Places

Arkham

Arkham is Lovecraft’s fictional Massachusetts town on the Miskatonic River: an old New England community of decaying houses, family histories and modern scholarship. It contains Miskatonic University and serves as a recurring point of contact between ordinary civic life, dangerous local survivals and discoveries reaching far beyond Earth.

7 min read · 1,307 words

Film & television

Color Out of Space (2019)

Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space turns the Gardner farm into a contemporary household threatened by an extraterrestrial contamination. The adaptation preserves the source’s damaged landscape and compromised water while giving the family an immediate dramatic presence and translating the impossible colour into an audiovisual design.

4 min read · 819 words

Entities & creatures

Colour out of Space

The colour is the extraterrestrial or extra-cosmic presence associated with the meteorite that falls on Nahum Gardner’s farm in The Colour out of Space. Perceived through an indescribable hue, it alters the surrounding environment, consumes or drains living things and finally rises from the farm’s well, leaving evidence that some portion remains.

7 min read · 1,401 words

Film & television

Die Farbe (2010)

Die Farbe, also circulated under English versions of The Colour Out of Space, is Huan Vu’s independent German adaptation of Lovecraft’s story. It moves the farm catastrophe into German history and sets an anomalous colour against a predominantly monochrome image.

4 min read · 685 words

Characters

Nahum Gardner

Nahum Gardner is the farmer whose home, family and land are destroyed after a meteorite falls beside his well in The Colour out of Space. His decline gives the cosmic event its domestic scale: a prosperous household becomes isolated, exhausted and unable to escape the process transforming its surroundings.

5 min read · 902 words

Places

The blasted heath

The blasted heath is the approximately five-acre gray wasteland left by the destruction of the Gardner farm west of Arkham. In The Colour out of Space, its surviving well, barren surface and suspected continuing spread make it a material remainder of a catastrophe the surrounding community prefers not to discuss.

5 min read · 847 words

Literature

The Colour out of Space

A meteorite falls beside a New England farmhouse, and the land begins producing abundant but poisonous growth. As the Gardner family and its surroundings deteriorate, the neighboring farmer Ammi Pierce witnesses a form of life that can be recognized through its effects but never comfortably described in human terms.

12 min read · 2,372 words

Film & television

The Curse (1987)

The Curse relocates The Colour out of Space to a Tennessee farm and intensifies its family conflict, visible contamination and bodily destruction. It preserves the meteorite, corrupted harvest and threatened water supply while giving surviving children a more active role in escaping the disaster.

4 min read · 806 words