Stuart Gordon's 2001 H.P. Lovecraft Adaptation Dagon Is Another Spooky, Scary Sleeper From the Legendary Frightmaster
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With 2001’s Dagon Stuart Gordon switched things up a little while still doggedly holding onto the elements of his films that worked and could be relied upon.
Dagon found the beloved fright-master and master storyteller working without his frequent collaborators the Band brothers or their Full Moon production company. He similarly did not cast either Jeffrey Combs or Barbara Crampton in lead roles though he did very ostentatiously cast an actor who looks distractingly like a younger, more handsome and less eccentric version of Combs as his star.
In other respects, however, Dagon was business as usual. Dating back to his theater days in Madison, Wisconsin, Gordon understood the importance of working repeatedly with the same group of simpatico collaborators.
To that end Dagon once again reunited Gordon with screenwriter Dennis Paoli, whose credits include Re-Animator, From Beyond, The Pit and the Pendulum and Castle Freak, as well 1993’s Body Snatchers, which he wrote with Gordon as well Abel Ferrata’s screenwriter Nicholas St. John.
Dagon was produced by Brian Yuzna, who has worked with Gordon on Re-Animator, From Beyond and Dolls. Most importantly Dagon found Gordon once again finding inspiration in the dread-filled horror of his enduring muse H.P. Lovecraft, that great ghoulish man of letters. Dagon is based loosely on the H.P. Lovecraft short story of the same name as well as the novella The Shadow over Innsmouth.
The film opens with protagonist Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden) on a boat, having a nightmare about a mermaid with razor-sharp teeth. A storm of great fury interrupts the pleasant holiday Paul has been enjoying with his girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Meroho) and their friends Vicki (Birgit Bofarull) and Howard (Brendan Price).
Paul and Barbara take a lifeboat to a sinister Spanish fishing village that is seemingly uninhabited, a rain-slicked ghost town. From the very beginning, something is ineffably off. Gordon cultivates an atmosphere of free-floating dread and mystery.
In its first two acts Gordon shows tantalizing glimpses of the monsters at the film’s core. For a very long time we don’t see any of the town’s monstrous inhabitants in all of their hideousness. Instead we see haunting little hints that the town is not just backwards and behind the times but a place of pure, deep, inhuman evil: webbed fingers on a priest and gills on an otherworldly torso.
Dagon takes place during a torrential rain storm so intense and unyielding that it feels like God punishing this town for turning their back on him in favor of worshipping the titular God, a Lovecraftian monster almost beyond our imagination.
Much of the film’s first hour is filmed in wet, black, inky near-darkness at least partially designed to hide a budget modest even by Gordon’s standards. But the all-encompassing blackness doesn’t feel like a cheat.
Our horrified and overmatched hero finds himself in a realm of pure darkness literally and figuratively, lost in a world that he does not understand because this is Lovecraft Country, and consequently contains terrors unique to its shores.
An increasingly panicked and terrified Paul is separated from his girlfriend and soon finds himself pursued by wet, slimy, clammy creatures of water and rain and mud, ungodly mutations born of unconscionable transgressions.
One of Gordon’s great strengths as a filmmaker is his contempt for exposition. For him, exposition is a necessary evil at best, and something to be ignored completely at worst. Dagon consequently tells us only what we absolutely need to know and leaves the rest to our imaginations.
Ezequiel (Francisco Rabal), a drunken, half-mad old man who appears to be the only full-blooded human being in this fishing village of the damned explains that his hometown was once relatively normal, or at least not a godless abomination/affront to all that is good and decent in the world.
Then hard times hit and a mysterious figure convinced the locals to abandon Jesus and the Catholic Church and worship the fish god Dagon. This Faustian bargain resulted in great hauls of fish and gold that perverted the people of the village on a biological as well as moral level.
The insatiable Dagon demands blood and human sacrifices and human women to breed with and infect with his ancient evil. Needless to say, something very fishy is going in this waking nightmare of a small town.
In the town Paul encounters the beautiful mermaid from the opening scene and learns, to his shock and horror, that she does not have legs but rather tentacles. Our understandably despondent hero comes to learn that he has a connection to this watery world of heresy and horror that he can’t begin to comprehend, let alone accept.
The preternaturally resourceful Gordon once again puts on a master class in how to make the most of a small budget. For much of the film’s duration we feel the impact of the monstrous fish-people pursuing Paul for trespassing on their unholy grounds but we see only the bare minimum.
When the fish monsters finally arrive they are triumphs of low-budget imagination, slimy, ghoulish and viscerally unnerving. The special effects and character design are as impressive as you would expect from a Gordon production.
The man nobly devoted his life to thinking up abominations so fucking disgusting they make you want to puke: truly a life well lived.
Dagon is a modest movie in scope, budget and ambition. It’s a little movie about an evil so vast it’s almost beyond human comprehension. It’s yet another over-achieving literary adaptation along the lines of Castle Freak and Pit and the Pendulum.
Gordon would re-visit his obsessions with H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe with his contributions to the Masters of Horror anthology series.In 2005 Gordon directed an adaptation of Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch House. Two years later he followed it up with a very loose adaptation of The Black Cat starring Jeffrey Combs as Poe.
In terms of movies, however, Dagon was Gordon’s last pure horror film. The three films that would follow, 2003’s King of the Ants, 2005’s Edmond and 2007’s Stuck were dark and wildly pessimistic but they were less conventional horror films than dark melodramas/Neo-Noirs about the horrors of the human condition and our incredible capacity to hurt each other and ourselves.
I quite like Dagon the same way I pretty much dig everything Gordon has done with the exception of Dolls. Thankfully I’ve got a handful of Gordon movies left in this journey, at least three of which I have not seen.
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