Nicolas Cage has been set to star in Color Out of Space, a horror film based on terror-master H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 novella. The film will be directed by South African filmmaker Richard Stanley in his first feature in 20 years. For Cage, it’s a reteam with producer SpectreVision after last year’s hit revenge thriller Mandy. Principal photography on the new project begins next month.

Joely Richardson, Tommy Chong, Elliot Knight, Julian Hilliard and Q’Orianka Kilcher join Cage in the cast of the pic, which in the story centers on the Gardners, a family who moves to a remote New England farmstead to escape the hustle of the 21st century. They are busy adapting to their new life when a meteorite crashes into their front yard. It seems to melt into the earth, infecting both the land and the properties of space-time with a strange, otherworldly color, and to the family’s horror they discover the alien force is gradually mutating every life form that it touches including them.

SpectreVision’s Daniel Noah, Josh C. Waller, Lisa Whalen and Elijah Wood are producing, with Timur Bekbosunov, Johnny Chang, Emma Lee and Peter Wong executive producing for ACE Pictures, which is also financing. Stacy Jorgensen will executive produce for SpectreVision.

“Lovecraft is the dark father of modern horror, and we have been searching for an adaptation that captures the true scope of his cosmic dread for years,” Noah said in a release Wednesday announcing the project. “Richard Stanley — a wizard in his own right — will at long last bring Lovecraft’s humbling power to the screen unfiltered.”

Stanley directed cult hits Hardware and Dust Devil and was famously excised from helming the eventual 1996 pic The Island Of Dr. Moreau based on the book of another famed writer, H.G. Wells.

Cage, next up in the thriller Kill Chain from Millennium Media and CineTel Films, is repped by WME and Stride Management. Richardson is repped by Gersh and ARG, Knight is with ICM Partners and Affirmative Entertainment, Hilliard with Paradigm and The Green Room, and Kilcher with APA and Anonymous.