Fridge Brilliance
- The Color can only drain and manipulate life forms that have been consuming water contaminated by its essence. Everybody on the farm succumbs to dementia, hallucinations and/or mutations, but neither Ward Philips nor Sheriff Pierce are affected by the Color's influence or subjected to the draining, even when the Color is at its most powerful. Instead, it tries to dispose of them indirectly through the animated flora, and finally Nathan's reanimated corpse.
- Nathan is shown drinking heavily in the later stages of the film. Specifically, he's shown drinking bourbon on the rocks, using ice almost certainly made using local water. The effects of the alcohol on Nathan's brain likely made the Color's manipulation even easier, causing his increasingly unhinged behavior.
- Not to mention it invokes a false sense of security. Even if Nathan were more aware of the Color affecting all who drink the well water and thought drinking nothing but alcohol could save him, there's still a catch. Because he's using ice made from the water from the well, it only makes him more susceptible to the Color's influence.
- Aside from this just not being that type of story, there's a subtler reason Lavinia's ritual ultimately didn't work. See, the "Necronomicon" she's using is in fact an actual book. Commonly known as the "Simon Necronomicon", it was a purported grimoire published as a hardcover in 1977 and then later as a paperback in 1980. It's also been debunked in books like "The Necronomicon Files" and is widely seen as a hoax.
- However, the symbol she puts on her forehead is seen during the vision of the Color's homeworld, indicating at least that symbol had some power. Unfortunately, it implies that symbol wasn't protection, more a dinner bell, and a lot of hoaxers use real symbology to sell their fakes, plus it may not have failed as much as thought. Remember she tries to use Dark Magic, which she earlier mentions at the start, if you use, it comes back threefold, so maybe she tried to curse the Color but it ended up being too powerful and backfiring three times over, hence her clearly painful death.
- It could also be that in the Lovecraft books "The Necronomicon" does exist and is filled with information and incantations devoted to the Old Ones (the "Simon Necronomicon" was directly inspired by Lovecraft's own fictional grimoire). So any spell Lavinia would have found in there would have only summoned more evil and if the Color happened to be connected to the Old Ones (since most of Lovecraft's works are interconnected) it might have in fact empowered it.
- What if....what if, in this movie's universe, the "Necronomicon" on Lavinia's bed is the real Necronomicon? What if someone got a copy of the real book and published it in the form of a mass-market paperback? And anybody who wants a copy of the book can get one. Anybody. Now we're edging into the territory of Fridge Horror!
- The usage of bright pink as the eponymous color. Out of all visible colors on the spectrum, the one color that technically does not exist is pink. Or more specifically fuchsia/magenta. While we are able to perceive it in our daily lives, in all technicality it's a placeholder color created by our brain between red and blue which our eyes perceive to be between the two. Technically that color would appear as yellow, but since humans do not have yellow color receptors in our eyes (in fact, the color we see as yellow is a mix of green and red), it does not register as such (because there is no green in it). Which fits the book's description of the color not existing on the normal spectrum of light despite clearly having a distinct color. And it especially fits with the Lovecraftian theme of human perception being inherently too limited to realize the full truth of things.
