2001, Fantastic Factory (
Director: Stuart Gordon
Producers: Julio Fernandez and Brian Yuzna.
Writers: Dennis Paoli and H.P. Lovecraft
Music: Carles Cases
Cinematographer: Carlos Suarez
Starring: Ezra Godden, Francisco Rabal, Raquel Merono, Macarena Gomez, Brendan Price, Brigit Bofarull, Uxia Blanco, and Ferran Lahoz.
Run time: 98 minutes, 15 seconds
MPAA Rating: R (strong violence, gore, sexuality, nudity, and language.)
“Sexy, atmospheric and outrageous, this could only be a Stuart Gordon film.”
- Ramsey Campbell
WARNING: This is a complete and detailed review and analysis of Stuart R. Gordon’s new movie, Dagon. It is loaded with so-called “spoilers”, because it is an in-depth examination of the movie’s plot and characterizations, an evaluation of the symbolism, and a comparison of the film with Lovecraft’s own work. So if you have not yet seen this movie (and you will want to see it, believe me!), you may not want to read any further for fear that I will give too much of the game away. You may want to buy or rent this movie, watch it, and then come back to read this article. However, if you have read Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, you are already familiar with the basic plot of the story, and not likely to be shocked by the “surprise ending”. Besides, this movie has been available for rental on VHS tape and purchase in DVD since July of 2002. (So what are you waiting for?) If you are a Lovecraft fan, a horror movie buff, or just a devotee of outrageously inventive film noir, you are going to enjoy this film no matter how much I tell you about it in advance.
Another warning is also in order: Because of my antinomian writing style, the content of this review may offend those with Puritanical sexual views, conventional religious convictions, or two-digit IQ’s. But if you are bright, courageous, or just insatiably curious - read on!
Okay, let’s face it; Dagon has nothing whatsoever to do with the Necronomicon. I’m reviewing it here for two reasons: firstly because it is a recent (and very good) Lovecraft film treatment, and secondly because I like it. Daniel and I have decided to devote this site to things we like, as well as things relating to HPL’s terrible tome. So get over it!
The VHS and DVD cover blurbs for Dagon say it is “Based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft”. Actually, it is based on three stories by Lovecraft. Mainly it’s a film adaptation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931), blended with “Dagon” (1917) and “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926). It also contains elements from “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (1920), “The Whisperer in Darkness”(1930), and “The Festival” (1923). Dagon may also owe something to a Cthulhu Mythos tale by Robert E. Howard entitled “The Black Stone” (1931), the novel entitled Dagon (1968) by Fred Chappell, and to a Lovecraftian pastiche by Stephen Mark Rainey entitled “Rapture in Black” (1995), which I will discuss later. One might think this kind of Lovecraftian stew would be as confusing and distasteful as seafood gumbo with Oreo cookies, but Dennis Paoli’s script and Stuart Gordon’s direction blend all the ingredients deliciously like the secret recipe of a master chef. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
The film opens with an underwater sequence of a scuba diver swimming down toward the ocean floor. Beneath him is the ancient stone floor of a sunken city. (Is this the Y’ha-nthlei of Innsmouth, the no-so-abandoned ruins in “Dagon”, or the R’lyeh of Cthulhu?) In the center of this floor of titanic stone blocks is a cyclopean eye- or fish-shaped opening that leads into a vast canyon-like pit lined with surreal bas-reliefs of nonhuman sculpture (in his short story “Dagon”, HPL called them “…an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Dore.”). As the diver examines these H. R. Gigeresque carvings, an ethereally beautiful mermaid confronts him. The alarmed diver backs away, but the strange siren swims closer, removing his diving mask. But as she leans forward seductively, she abruptly reveals horrifying shark-like teeth. Startled, the panicky diver…awakens! Yes, it was all a dream.
The dreamer, our hero, is Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden of HBO’s Band
of Brothers), a newly rich American dot.com millionaire who was sleeping in
the cabin of a two-masted yacht with his lovely Spanish girlfriend, Barbara
(sexy Spanish television star Raquel Merono).
The yacht belongs to his suave business partner, Howard (Brendan Price),
and Howard’s glamorous jet-set wife, Vicki (Brigit Bofarull). They are sailing off the Galician coast of
These recurring dreams of Paul’s (similar to Wilcox’s dreams
of R’lyeh in “The Call of Cthulhu”, or Olmstead’s nightmares in “Innsmouth”)
understandably distress him and Barbara. Even the prospect of lovemaking with Barbara
cannot put Paul’s mind at ease, and nor can the pleasures of vacationing. When she cheerfully points out that he is “on
a boat off the coast of
While they are motoring toward the dock, the raft is snagged by something (or some Thing) underwater, and springs a leak. Back on the stranded yacht, Vicki’s blood in the water has drawn an unwelcome visitor, and the water that swamps her cabin is mysteriously filled with oily, black slime (the “hellish black mire” or “black slime” Lovecraft mentioned in “Dagon”). The water suddenly churns like boiling soup, and Howard fires at the unseen threat with his revolver. Hearing the shots from the raft, Barbara wants to go back until Paul points out that they may not even make it to the dock. The outboard motor then conks out (right on cue), and Paul and Barbara have to row the boat ashore. (Hallelujah!)
After reaching the dock, it doesn’t take the couple long to realize that there is something fishy about Imboca – literally. They find the town apparently deserted, but hear the eerie singing again and follow the sound to an old church. The name of the sanctuary is “ESOTERICA ORDE DE DAGON” (HPL’s Esoteric Order of Dagon), and it bears a strange eye/fish-shaped symbol that reminds Paul of the doorway to the vast undersea city in his dream. Pushing open the heavy doors, they find the church also deserted – no sign of the phantom choir. The “religious” iconography inside the church is surreal, to say the least. (“What kind of church is this?”) A sinister priest (Ferran Lahoz) joins them, directing them back to the dock where he arranges for a fishing trawler to take Paul back to the sinking yacht. He insists that Barbara stay behind on the pretext that someone must make a report to the police.
After Paul departs on the fishing boat, Barbara’s cell phone strangely quits working, and the creepy, web-fingered priest sends her to the “Hotel Del Mar” (Lovecraft’s “Gillman House”) where there is supposedly a working telephone. After a panicky run through the eerie village, where deformed faces leer at her fleetingly out of boarded-up windows and misshapen figures stalk her from a distance, she reaches the decrepit hotel. But once Barbara arrives, the creepy priest and the mutant desk clerk assault her for some unspeakable purpose.
Back at the stranded, listing yacht, Paul finds that Howard
and Vicki have mysteriously disappeared.
When he returns to the pier, the creepy priest tells Paul that Barbara
has gone to the neighboring town of
Paul decides to take a room while he waits for Barbara’s return. But the room doesn’t seem to have been occupied (or cleaned) for about twenty years, to judge from the mildewed bed sheets, the filth-encrusted toilet, and the nauseating green slime that spews from the faucet over the cruddy sink. Substandard accommodations, however, are the least of Paul’s worries. The Imbocans spot him standing on the balcony, recognize him as a human intruder, and move to attack him in a mob. The subsequent chase and escape from the hotel are taken almost exactly from Lovecraft’s original tale - right down to the hero screwing on a missing latch, breaking down a door, barricading himself in a room, and escaping out the window.
Leaping out the window, Paul smashes through a plate glass roof into an old warehouse below, injuring his leg. In the warehouse he finds the skins of dead humans stretched on frames to dry – including the bloody, flayed-off face of his friend Howard from the boat. He recovers from the shock just in time to escape the Imbocans, who have pursued him into the building. He starts a fire with a can of gasoline and Barbara’s lighter, and escapes in the confusion.
Dodging down an alley, Paul runs smack into an old man named Ezequiel (legendary Spanish actor Francisco Rabal), the last true human left in Imboca, who has been living on the streets as a drunk. Paul gradually realizes that Ezequiel is not like the other malformed denizens of the town (in fact, he is the Spanish equivalent of Zadok Allen, the corresponding drunken old man in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”). By now Paul has noticed something very wrong with the “people” of Imboca (webbed hands, tentacles for fingers, bulging eyes that never blink) and wants to know “what’s wrong with everybody in this town” and why they want to kill him and his friends. Ezequiel explains that they are all changing to go into the sea; some cannot walk on land anymore. Paul asks about Barbara, and Ezequiel tells him that she and the “one from boat” are both dead. While Paul tries to recover from his shock and grief at hearing this news, Ezequiel tells him the “secret of Imboca”.
In a long flashback sequence, Ezequiel explains that Imboca
was once a peaceful fishing village. But
when he was a boy of seven, the scarcity of fish brought an economic crisis on
the town. Like good Roman Catholics, the
townsfolk prayed to God for help under the leadership of the local Parrish
priest (Fernando Gil III). Then came
Captain Richard Cambarro (Alfredo Villa III as a Spanish version of Lovecraft’s
Obed Marsh), a sea captain who mocked the villagers for praying to a God who
won’t answer their prayers. Cambarro
claimed to have encountered a more useful “god” in the
Cambarro then led the Imbocans to smash the images of Jesus and Mary in the church, and replace the cross with the eye/fish-shaped symbol of Dagon and other less savory “icons”. After he murdered the Catholic priest, Cambarro installed himself as high priest of Dagon, complete with weird vestments, a gold miter, and a surreal ceremonial dagger that looks like a fishbone. (This was not your average denominational feud.) Cambarro then forced everyone in the town to “worship Dagon or die.” But Dagon wasn’t satisfied with mere worship for long, and it demanded human sacrifices in the form of women whom it could impregnate with its loathsome spawn. The first rape victim on the list was Ezequiel’s mother (Uxia Blanco). When Ezequiel’s father (Javier Sandoval) tried to save her, Cambarro cut his throat with the ritual dagger before little Ezequiel’s horrified eyes. To avoid a similar fate, the little boy was forced to swear an oath of loyalty to Dagon. Now all strangers who come to Imboca meet a similar fate; the women forced to mate with Dagon, and the men skinned alive. (“No one leave Imboca. People come … never leave.”)
Paul is at first skeptical, but is gradually forced to
believe the story of the “loco” old gentleman, and finally learns to trust
him. Ezequiel tries bravely, but
unsuccessfully, to help Paul escape.
While running from the Imbocan fish people, Paul breaks into the
Paul’s lumbering escape attempts come to nothing when the goggle-eyed fish men net and club him over the head. Gradually Paul awakens with his head in the lap of none other than his beloved Barbara – very much alive and prettier than ever, despite Ezequiel’s report of her death. Ezequel is there, too, captured by the fish men. And Vicki is huddled in the corner of the dark pen where they are all being held prisoner. Vicki has lost her jet-set hauteur, her right leg… and her sanity. There are telltale smudges of Dagon’s black slime in her hair. Paul listens as she tells her frightful tale of being dragged off the boat and impregnated by Dagon (“I feel it moving!”). Ezequiel says that her story is “no dream”. He knows only too well the fate worse than death that awaits women caught by the Dagon-worshipers. He apparently told Paul that Barbara was dead in order to spare his feelings. Barbara tearfully begs Paul to promise that he’ll kill her if the same thing happens to her.
But there is no time to stand around discussing the finer points of Kevorkian morality. The fish men are closing in on the holding pen to dispose of them according to gender, and the desperate humans must try to make a break for freedom. Paul punches the creepy priest in the face, Ezequiel stands off his fishy henchmen with a dropped knife, and Barbara punches and kicks her way through their piscine helpers. The escape attempt looks hopeful until Barbara goes back for Vicki (oblivious to the fact that Vicki can’t walk), giving the fish men a chance to subdue them all again. In the confusion, Vicki picks up the knife Ezequiel dropped, and stabs herself in the belly like a samurai – sawing the blade around inside her to be sure and kill the loathsome spawn of Dagon that lurks in her womb. (Apparently a simple abortion and a bit of rape crisis counseling are not sufficient to deal with the trauma of being violated by Dagon.) Paul, Ezequiel, and Barbara are then dragged off to meet their ominous fates.
In the next scene, Paul and Ezequiel are chained between wooden posts in a torture chamber where the skin of their heads and backs will be flayed off according to Imbocan custom. As the evil priest is skinning Ezequiel alive, the old man recites the 23rd Psalm in Spanish, and Paul recites it with him in English. (Paul did not seem a particularly religious person in the earlier parts of the movie but, as the saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes.) But when the creepy priest begins to skin Paul, the festivities are interrupted by Uxia (remember her?), who insists that Paul belongs to her. Uxia promises Paul that he will live with her forever in the sea, but she jealously refuses to release Barbara, whom she plans to sacrifice to Dagon. Because Uxia is the high priestess of Dagon her word is law, and the creepy priest reluctantly releases Paul. But before he stumbles out of the slaughter room, Paul avenges Ezequiel by killing and disemboweling the priest and his two butchers with their own knives. (Gutless bastards!)
Paul’s only plan now is to stop the Dagon-worshipers from sacrificing Barbara to their abominable “god”. He grabs a canister of gasoline, digs out Barbara’s trusty lighter, and limps to the church where he remembers hearing the weird singing. The church is deserted as before, but Paul discovers a secret passageway down into ancient catacombs that must lead to the Dagon-worshiper’s real temple.
In the subterranean temple, Uxia vents her jealous rage on Barbara by stripping her, and tying her to a stone altar and making a score of shallow cuts all over Barbara’s beautiful body with the ugly gold ritual dagger (the same blade Cambarro used to murder Ezequiel’s father). Naked and bleeding from multiple knife wounds, Barbara is then shackled to an iron rod by her wrists, and iron weights are chained to her ankles. The bar is attached to huge chains that are raised and lowered with pulleys. As Barbara hangs from the iron bar, she is hoisted, kicking and shrieking, into the air above a circular stone pit that leads down into the sea. As the sobbing girl hangs in space above Dagon’s watery lair, her blood dripping into the dark water below, Uxia drops the golden talisman into the sea to summon Dagon. The fish men, dressed for the ritual in their finest human skins, ecstatically chant “Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!” while Barbara is lowered screaming into the pit to be violated by Dagon.
But the entertainment is interrupted by Paul, who has finally found the subterranean temple. He douses the worshipers with gasoline and sets them on fire with Barbara’s lighter. The burning fish men now lose control of the crank that lowers the iron bar on chains by the system of pulleys, and Barbara plummets into the water – and into Dagon’s embrace. Paul jambs the gear train of the device, and turns the crank until Barbara is pulled out of the water and back up to the edge of the pit. But by now she is covered with Dagon’s signature black slime (the spooge of the Great Old Ones?), and is staring vacantly into space much as Vicki did. When she finally speaks, it is only to whisper, “Kill me…you promised!” Paul barely has time to protest before Dagon itself – unsatisfied with a mere “quickie” - bursts up out of the water to reclaim its sacrificial victim for another round of loathsome lust.
But the chains that support the iron bar are locked in place, and when Dagon’s tentacles drag Barbara back down into the pit, her arms are torn off and left dangling from the bar like cuts of meat in a butcher shop. The horror and finality of this tragic loss overwhelms Paul, and he lies on the ground unresisting as the surviving Dagon-worshipers kick and beat him. (I would probably have dived in after her, but that’s just me.)
Old Xavier Cambarro hobbles forward on crutches to deliver
the deathblow when Uxia pulls up Paul’s shirt to reveal the developing gills on
his belly, and protests that Paul is one of their own - that he is, in fact, Pablo
Cambarro, descendent of Richard Cambarro.
Paul’s mother was one of the women Captain Cambarro brought to Imboca
and offered up to Dagon. Xavier removes
his mask of human skin, revealing a misshapen, bulbous head with bulging
octopus eyes, and a lower face covered with Cthulhoid tentacles. He vouches for the fact that Paul’s mother
stole him away from Imboca and took him to
Desperate to save Paul, Uxia grabs him by the arm and
plunges them both into the watery pit to quench the flames. Though somewhat charred, Paul discovers that
he can now breathe underwater through the newly opened gills in his
abdomen. Together, Paul and Uxia swim down
into the undersea city of
We shall dive down through black abysses… and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.
-- H.P. Lovecraft
This is not exactly the “happy ending” one might have hoped for, but it is consistent with Lovecraft’s original tale, in which Robert Olmstead is at first horrified by the revelation of his fish-frog ancestry, but later decides to dive in and make the best of it. Besides, there are worse fates than spending eternity living under the sea with Macarena Gomez - even if she has tentacles for legs. I suppose one could think of this film as the dark, Lovecraftian side of Splash (1984), or the Cthulhu Mythos version of The Little Mermaid (1990). The fish people of Imboca are, of course, Lovecraft’s Deep Ones – though they are never referred to as such in the script until the HPL quote at the end of the film.
Cinescape correspondent Jason Henderson wrote; “Dagon is one of my favorite horror films, and I saw it first last week.” I know exactly how he feels. After one viewing of this movie, I realized that I had not actually enjoyed any horror movie this much in years. I also realized that nobody has done a film adaptation of a Lovecraft story that was this good since Dan O’Bannon’s The Resurrected (1991). Dagon is a labor of love, in fact, and it is an “instant classic” (much as I hate to use that term), a courageous and well-made film that genre fans and HPL devotees cannot afford to ignore. This is not just another beer-and-popcorn video rental for a boring Friday night. Dagon is only a “B-movie” in the sense of its limited budget. Regardless of the crassness of most critics, I judge films by their content and creativity rather than by their dollar value. (Silly me!) Dagon is a much more ambitious production than anything the team of Gordon, Yuzna, and Paoli has attempted in the past. The underwater scenes, locations, and elaborate sets make this as close to a Lovecraftian “epic” as we are likely to see.
For fifteen years Stuart Gordon struggled without success to
get this version of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” filmed in the
As producer of this film, Brian Yuzna has finally redeemed
himself after the seemingly unforgivable sin of Necronomicon (1993). Hopefully his new Spanish-based film company,
Fantastic Factory, will jump start the long-dormant Spanish horror film
industry. Nothing this delightfully
wicked has come out of
While the writing, acting, music, cinematography, sound effects, make-up, prosthetics, sets, stunt work, and locations in Dagon are mostly excellent, the CGI effects range from adequate to poor. In this compulsively digital era, nothing looks worse than cheap, shoddy CGI that barely comes up to the level of the latest video games. Fortunately, computer graphics were used sparingly in Dagon, but I almost wish they hadn’t been used at all. This is less an indictment of Gordon, Yuzna, and Fantastic Factory than it is of the misallocation of funds in this sorry world. In the summer of 2002 we saw big special effects budgets wasted on trite, derivative eye candy like Spiderman, Eight Legged Freaks and Reign of Fire, while inventive works like this went begging.
Perhaps the cast of Dagon is its greatest
treasure. British actor Ezra Godden,
speaking with a perfect
The great Francisco Rabal is perfect as Ezequiel. With only facial expression and broken English he communicates all the fear, despair, madness, and heroism of the “last man in Imboca”. In the end, when his quixotic attempts to rescue his friends have failed, he resigns himself to death with nobility (“At least we die like men!”). This is a role made all the more ironic because Rabal (“Paco” to his friends) died shortly after this movie was completed, and the film was dedicated to him. Some critics have cited his thick Spanish accent as a liability to his narrative dialogue, but I think it adds authenticity and even a heightened sense of desperation. This is another of HPL’s plot devices that Gordon has duplicated. Like Lovecraft’s Zadok Allen, Ezequiel is difficult to understand, he is drunk, he may (or may not be) insane, but he is the only man in Imboca we can trust. Critics of Rabal’s pidgin English and Spanish dialect should read the colloquial Old Yankee dialect Lovecraft wrote for Zadok Allen in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” – Rabal’s dialect might actually be easier to understand. (Take for example this quote from Old Zadok: “Wal , come abaout ‘thutty-eight – when I was seven year old –“)
Macarena Gomez is an experienced dancer, and stage actress. It is ironic that a skilled ballerina must play her first movie role without using her legs. There are almost no female characters in Lovecraft’s stories, with the exception of “Medusa’s Coil” (1930 with Zealia Bishop), so it is difficult to cast a female role for an HPL film treatment. But Gomez manages to communicate otherworldly Lovecraftian weirdness in everything she does. The delicate role of Uxia seems tailor-made for her, and somehow she manages to keep her hypnotically beautiful eyes wide open without blinking at all times – even underwater. Not since Mathilda May played the alien vampire in Lifeforce (1985) have we seen this blend of ethereal beauty, eroticism, and cold-blooded menace.
There is nothing particularly ethereal about the good looks of Raquel Merono, she’s just drop-dead gorgeous. And aside from being really hot, she delivers her lines with a passionate sincerity that made a believer out of me. She develops her character splendidly as the film unfolds. Tan and curvaceous as she is, she is one of the few actresses who can make me look at her face while she’s doing a nude scene. She deserves some kind of an “attitude award” for putting up the best fight and having the most indomitable spirit of any “victim chick” in any recent horror film. In fact, I can’t decide which I admire most, her beauty, her acting ability, or her courage. She did two of the most dangerous scenes in the film without using a stunt double: One was shot in a sinking raft in the open sea, and in the other she was hoisted high into the air over a pit while hanging onto an iron bar. I doubt that her wide experience of acting in Spanish soap operas prepared her for any of that. The girl has guts! Needless to say, Ms. Merono is welcome to join me on my altar at any time. There will be no chains or knives, and she will have only one er, um – tentacle – to handle.
Anthony Timpone, of Fangoria Magazine wrote that Dagon is “Gordon’s best film since Re-Animator…” I’ll go further than that: Forget Re-Animator! This is Stuart Gordon’s best film yet…period! Re-Animator (1985) was good of its type; clever, postmodern, “exploitation” cheese based on a story that Lovecraft justifiably hated, and called “my poorest work… written down to the herd’s level.” Gordon treated it with the irreverent humor it deserved, and it works better as a comedy than a horror film. It was fun, but it wasn’t really Lovecraft. In Re-Animator, Gordon seduced us into becoming the accomplices of Herbert West. Somehow he made us identify with HPL’s “little tow-head fiend” and become accessories to his mischievous sadism. We laughed at both him and his victims.
But Dagon is, for the most part, no laughing matter, and its character development is the key. The actors play their roles straight, and the leads all have an infectious lovability. The gore is surprisingly restrained, which makes its impact even greater. Some fascinating atrocities are performed in this film, but these horrible things are being done to people we have come to like. You may get some ghoulish pleasure from seeing a kindly old man skinned alive, or a sadistic thrill from watching a courageous, loving woman raped and mutilated. But unless you are a total sociopath, you will also feel at least a twinge of remorse. Gordon has extended his sadism from the victims on the screen to the victims in the audience. We are the ones being tortured now. And there are no worthy anti-heroes in Imboca with which we can identify – not even the dazzling Uxia. Not only is it impossible to identify with the fish people of Imboca, it is impossible not to hate them. This is how Gordon deftly communicates Lovecraft’s feelings of alienation and loathing for the Deep Ones. Because we share Paul’s hatred of the Dagon-worshipers, we are all the more horrified when he learns that he is one of them.
In Dagon, Gordon has given us a darker, more serious tale – darker than From Beyond (1986) or Castle Freak (1995), and better than both put together. There is some mordant humor in Dagon, however. In one scene, for example, Paul fights a hulking fish man with tentacles for arms who forces his head into a toilet bowl – the comic irony is that a man who has just escaped death on the high seas is now in danger of drowning in a commode. There are some amusing puns as well: Uxia tells Paul that Dagon needs Barbara for a sexual sacrifice. Paul angrily shouts “F*ck Dagon!” Uxia innocently replies, “Yes, and the child will be immortal.” There are also plenty of Lovecraftian in-jokes just for HPL fans; Paul wears a sweatshirt of Halloween orange that has MISKATONIC (the name of Lovecraft’s fictional university) printed on it. The name of the town, “Imboca” means “in mouth” in Spanish – a pun on the name of HPL’s fictional town of Innsmouth (Inns-Mouth, get it?) But the humor is mostly tragicomic, it never goes over the top as it did in Re-Animator, and it remains subordinate to the story.
Timing and synchronicity are paramount in Dagon. In the first ten minutes of the film, we are suddenly thrown into a world where the ordinary rules of reality don’t work. Computers, radios, cell phones, and outboard motors are useless here. Even money doesn’t work, as Paul discovers when he tries to bribe the Imbocans. Paoli, Gordon, and Yuzna are wise enough to exploit adult horrors like financial worries, bad plumbing, lost laptops, and dirty hotel rooms with no telephones. What could be more terrifying to a yuppie geek than lack of communications technology? Paul’s cyberpunk theory that life is a “binary system” that can be programmed (“Two possibilities”) is completely disproved by the end of the film.
Dagon also makes good use of Lovecraft’s sense of
xenophobia, and his hatred of all things aquatic. There is a good reason why many of
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos creatures seem to be fish, crustaceans, or mollusks
on steroids. HPL once told Donald
Wandrei: “I have hated fish and feared the sea and everything connected with it
since I was two years old.” Lovecraft’s
hatred of seafood is best illustrated by a story from E. Hoffman Price, in
which HPL took him to Pawtuxet for the famous
Some ethnocentric English-speaking critics have complained about the amount of Spanish dialogue in Dagon. As stated earlier, I consider the Spanish an asset, rather than a liability. For the English speaker, it should heighten the sense of paranoia – of being isolated in a sinister town where the conspiratorial natives are all plotting against you. If that isn’t good enough, you can go for the English subtitles option on the DVD. And then there’s another, more frightening option; you could get off your lazy gringo ass and (shudder!) learn some Spanish.
To me, the only objectionable thing about this film is Stuart Gordon’s and Brian Yuzna’s, morbid fetish for mutilated female bodies. Neither of the two fully human women in this movie can get to the end of the film with all her limbs intact. Vicki gets her right leg cut off at the knee after being raped by Dagon, and Barbara’s fate at the grand finale is even worse. I know it’s a horror film tradition to use actresses for punching bags, but this is ridiculous. These guys must watch amputee porn in their spare time.
Now don’t get me wrong! I’m just as perverted as the next guy (unless the next guy happens to be Larry Flint), so I don’t mind seeing a beautiful, naked girl writhing in chains as she is lowered screaming into a dark, watery pit. And I don’t mind her getting humped by a tentacled, slime-oozing abomination from the depths of the abyss. (As long as it’s only on film.) I don’t even object to her begging for death after being knocked up by the cephalopod monstrosity below. (Charmingly feminine in a retro-Victorian way.) I can even endure seeing her sliced up beforehand by a sadistic squid bitch. But when the monster tears the girl’s arms off at the elbows, Gordon and Yuzna have gone too far - even by my depraved standards.
(Will someone please prevent Kenneth Grant from seeing this movie, and turning this scene into a ritual for the Typhonian OTO? In fact, the sacrifice scene in Dagon is remarkably similar to a ritual of the New Isis Lodge Grant describes in Hecate’s Fountain. For more about this, and the subject of “Lovecraftian sex magick”, see my subchapter “The Love-Call of Cthulhu” in the new edition of The Necronomicon Files, available from Red Wheel/Weiser in the spring of 2003.)
But I suppose this scene was downright restrained compared to the sequence in Gordon’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1990) in which Torqemada cuts out the leading lady’s tongue, or his Castle Freak (1995) where the creature bites off the nipple on a prostitute’s breast. Or Yuzna’s cinematic spasm, “The Whispers”, at the end of Necronomicon (1993), in which the lady cop awakens to see her severed arms and legs eaten by flying monsters. And then there was Yuzna’s Bride of Re-Animator (1991), in which a number of women “donated” their body parts for Herbert West to build a female zombie who tears herself apart at the end. Being an actress in a Gordon or Yuzna film could cost you an arm and a leg…or worse!
But lest we accuse Gordon, Yuzna and Paoli of outright male chauvinism, the male humans are treated with equal, or worse, brutality in the most graphically horrible face-skinning scene ever filmed. It makes the Hellraiser movies look like cosmetology training films. One critic lambasted Gordon for these “gratuitous” scenes of skinned human faces, claiming they were non-Lovecraftian. But the concept of alien creatures cutting off and wearing human faces is found in “The Whisperer in Darkness”, in which the Mi-Go (the Fungi from Yuggoth) use the surgically removed face and hands of Henry Akeley to impersonate him before his friend Wilmarth. Wilmarth later finds these discarded body parts lying in a chair in the study.
The central storyline of Dagon is “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, which is arguably Lovecraft’s most action-packed tale. Lovecraft’s fiction, guided by his maxim “atmosphere, not action,” has always been notoriously difficult to film. But “Innsmouth” is an exception to the rule, in which Robert Olmstead (not named in the story, but identified in HPL’s notes), jumps out of windows, smashes down doors, climbs down drainpipes, and runs through streets – behavior very unlike the usual mild-mannered Lovecraftian hero. In fact, the hotel escape/chase episode takes up most of the fourth chapter of the novelette. Lovecraft scholar Will Murray believes HPL infused the story with so much action because he intended to sell it to Strange Tales, a pulp magazine that favored action stories. With all this in mind, it is amazing that it’s taken filmmakers so long in get around to putting an adaptation of “Innsmouth” on the screen. This is even more amazing when one thinks of such inappropriate adaptations as The Unnamable (1988) that made it to film.
“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is also one of Lovecraft’s
finest stories. S.T. Joshi considers
it Lovecraft’s best fusion of internal
and external horror. In HPL’s original
story, the young Robert Olmstead celebrates his coming of age by traveling to
Marsh brings this alien alliance back to his home base of
Marsh’s arrangement with the Deep Ones goes smoothly for a
while, until the fish creatures decide to mate with humans. Many of Innsmouth’s citizens rebel at the
prospect of these unnatural acts and arrest Obed Marsh and his confederates. This causes the Deep Ones to rise up out of
the sea in retaliation and kill much of the population of Innsmouth (or at
least those unwilling to prostitute themselves to the Deep Ones). Following this holocaust, Marsh and the Deep
Ones are now the undisputed masters of Innsmouth, and the surviving humans are
forced to swear loyalty to the Deep Ones by taking the Oath of Dagon. At this point, Marsh has essentially pimped
Innsmouth to the Deep Ones, turning it into a kind of alien bordello where the
fish creatures can mate with humans free from outside interference. But there is a fringe benefit for the
offspring of this interspecies mating: the Deep One/human hybrids acquire a
sort of immortality. Though they are
born looking fully human, these hybrids with the “fish blood” gradually take on
fish-like characteristics as they grow older – the “Innsmouth look”. Eventually these mutants take to the sea and
live in the sub-aqueous cities of the Deep Ones. The transition of the mutants is not always a
smooth one, and is horrible to Zadok, who remembers the town as it once
was. Even more horrible are the
shoggoths, the allies or servants of the Deep Ones, a foul species that appear
as enormous black blobs that can extrude whatever appendages (tentacles) or
sensory organs their masters require. [See The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana
by Daniel Harms, second edition,
Olmstead is skeptical of Zadok’s wild tale and writes it off
as the product of drunken senility until he is attacked by the fish people of
Innsmouth at the Gillman Hotel and barely escapes from the town. Olmstead later reports what he has seen to
the authorities, who launch a military raid on Innsmouth, including the Navy
bombing Devil Reef with depth charges.
Later, Olmstead discovers he is a descendant of Obed Marsh himself and is also acquiring
the “Innsmouth look”. Olmstead is
troubled by dreams of swimming under the sea where he wanders through “titanic
sunken porticoes and labyrinths of weedy Cyclopean walls”. There he meets his grandmother, who is also a
Deep One, and lives in a “phosphorescent palace of many terraces”. He also finds that one of his relatives
committed suicide rather than live with the truth of his teratological
ancestry. Olmstead is tempted to shoot
himself as well, and even buys a pistol to do so, but suddenly has a change of
heart. As the story ends, Olmstead has
decided to rescue his cousin (who is also a fish/human hybrid) from the
madhouse in
We
shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black
abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the
Deep Ones we shall dwell in wonder and glory forever.
Lovecraft may have meant “Innsmouth” to be a cautionary allegory about the dangers of miscegenation (more of HPL’s campy turn-of-the-century racism), but the story goes beyond race and addresses the issue of species from Lovecraft’s cosmic perspective. “Innsmouth” is a tale of evolution in reverse, in which humans return to the sea from which all life on land emerged eons ago. But the Deep Ones may not be an inferior species after all: Old Zadok warns that “they cud wipe aout the hull brood o’ humans if they was willin’ to bother”. This implies that the Deep Ones are superior to us in certain ways, and merely allow us to live on this planet by their permission. Olmstead says ominously:
For
the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again
for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It
would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time.
Gordon and Paoli have interpreted Lovecraft’s ideas with their usual sardonic wit. Some of the symbolism in Dagon takes the form of dark Lovecraftian satire on humanity’s place in the universe and shows how easily we can be toppled from our position at the top of the food chain. When Barbara is lowered into the pit in chains and dangled over the water, a beautiful, intelligent woman (the crowning achievement of human evolution) has suddenly become “live bait” squirming like a worm on a hook. The gold talisman Uxia throws into the water to summon Dagon looks like nothing so much as a big, shiny fishing lure, and weights are hung from Barbara’s ankles like fishing weights. Her blood dripping into the water helps draw Dagon like chum. Barbara is lowered slowly, teasingly, into the water (fly fishing anyone?). But it is the fish people who control the “rod and reel” (chains and pulleys) that cast her into the sea. The male humans are skinned alive with the kind of filleting knives that are normally used to scale, shin, and gut fish. The Imbocan fish men keep these skins as trophies; they wear these human skins as proof that they have overthrown the “dominant species” of this planet. (I will say more about Gordon’s elaborate symbolism in Dagon in just a moment.)
One of the things Lovecraft fans and scholars may criticize is the emphasis on xenophilic sex in the movie. But this is not really off-base. As I pointed out in the essay “The Love-Call of Cthulhu” (in the new edition of The Necronomicon Files), Lovecraft’s fiction emphasizes only the fearful results of perverse sexuality, which corrupts succeeding generations like a kind of “original sin”. Gordon has, like other filmmakers, simply expanded his focus to include the mechanics of these abominable matings to make the story more exciting for modern horror fans, who do not suffer from Lovecraft’s quaint sexual inhibitions. While these “exploitation” scenes of gore and sexuality may differ from the letter of “Innsmouth”, they are in complete accord with the spirit of the tale. But Gordon has done this better, and – dare I say it? – more erotically than any other director of any Lovecraft film treatment before him. His only “sin” (if you want to call it that) is that he has graphically depicted things Lovecraft only hinted at in his tales. As my friend and fellow Lovecraft collector, Dru Myers, succinctly puts it: “Lovecraft was too much of a Victorian gentleman to describe things like that in detail, but we in the twenty-first century are a bunch of sick f*cks who enjoy that kind of stuff.” The sacrifice scene at the end of Dagon is undoubtedly the kind of scene Roger Corman and Daniel Haller would like to have done for The Haunted Palace or The Dunwich Horror if they could have gotten away with it back in 1963 or 1970.
This brings us to the only real discrepancy between the sexuality in Dagon and that implied in Lovecraft’s original tale. In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, it is the individual fish creatures, the Deep Ones themselves, who are having sex with humans, not Dagon. In fact Dagon itself never makes an appearance in the tale, and is only spoken of in hushed and frightened tones. Nor did Lovecraft’s story contain any male-oriented sexism. Female Deep Ones also forced male humans to mate with them. This was the case with Obed Marsh himself, who was compelled to bring a mysterious “bride” back from the islands, who was never seen in public, and with whom he had three hybrid daughters.
This is also the case in an excellent Lovecraftian pastiche: Fred Chappell’s fascinating novel Dagon (1968), in which a disillusioned minister becomes obsessed with the ancient Philistine God Dagon, and moves to the North Carolina farm he inherited from his grandparents, where he intends to write a book on the subject. In the old house he finds barely literate Whatleyesque letters mentioning Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, and a set of blood-encrusted shackles hanging in the attic that indicate what might have happened to his father, who died when he was a boy. There he also meets a family of white trash tenant farmers who live on his land. These red neck Cthulhu-worshipers have a noseless, bug-eyed daughter who, despite her “Innsmouth look” ugliness, fascinates and seduces the good reverend. The apostate preacher dreams of undersea cities, murders his pretty wife, and runs off with his new, fishy, trailer-trash girlfriend. The novel contains the most graphically repulsive description of sex between a human and a Deep One ever written. (Imagine a Cthulhu Mythos story written by James Dickey of Deliverance fame – then squeal like a pig!) I wonder if Gordon and Paoli were influenced by the title and the storyline of this fine work.
In fact, all horror films of the Fish-Men-Want-to-Shag-Our-Women subgenre have ripped off this original idea from Lovecraft. This includes horror flicks like Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), Revenge of the Creature (1955), The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), Beach Girls and the Monster (1965), Humanoids From the Deep (1980), and They Bite (1995). The ichthyous Romeos in these films were invariably the horniest movie monsters of all, and, unlike amorous space aliens, for example, had no interest in conquering the earth. They had only one thing on their fish brains – interspecies debauchery (or maybe lunch). And these scaly don-Juans-of-the-deep all had surprisingly good taste, since the women they attacked were invariably beautiful and well-built. One of the dangers of HPL film adaptations is that Lovecraft’s work has been around for so long, has been so influential, and has been copycatted by so many other writers and filmmakers, that if you try to film a Lovecraft story exactly as written, you will probably be accused of being derivative. Gordon must have had sense enough to know that if he shot scenes of gorgeous human babes being mounted by fish-finned horndogs from the deep, he would be accused of making derivative B-movie nonsense.
So Gordon and Paoli opted to add a trope from HPL’s “The Dunwich Horror” to the mix, by having Dagon, the god of the Deep Ones, do all the impregnating of human females by itself, just as Yog-Sothoth impregnated Lavinia Whatley in the above-mentioned tale. There is no mention of Mother Hydra, Dagon’s mate, in the movie, so Dagon seems to be a horny bachelor constantly waiting for his next human “date”. But why would the Imbocan hybrids look like fish if they carried the DNA of a creature that looked as much like a giant squid as anything else? The answer is provided by the tentacle prosthetics the actors wear on their hands, arms, and legs. Some, like old Xavier Cambarro even have tentacles on their faces! In a sense, Imboca is a town populated entirely by Wilbur Whatleys – genetic mutants whose mothers were impregnated by a Great Old One. But at least Wilbur had the decency to keep his tentacles in his pants.
This brings us to another seeming discrepancy between Dagon and “Innsmouth”; the religious practices of the Deep Ones. In HPL’s tale, the Deep One’s worship of Cthulhu and Dagon is mentioned rather casually, but its importance is never really impressed upon the reader. But in Dagon, the fish people of Imboca definitely have that Old Time Religion – or perhaps I should say; that Great Old Ones Religion – and chant the Cthulhu incantation before any ritual act. And that question brings us to the next major Lovecraftian influence on Dagon: “The Call of Cthulhu”.
Lovecraft’s tale of cosmic terror, “The Call of Cthulhu”,
probably needs little introduction. It is a fictional documentary, the account
of what a man named Francis Wayland Thurston found among the papers of his
deceased granduncle, George Gammell Angell and during his own investigation of
the Cthulhu Cult. This cult is composed
of primitive or degenerate humans all over the world who are devoted to Great
Cthulhu, an alien being of immense size and incalculable antiquity, who lies
“not dead, but dreaming” in the undersea city of R’lyeh. In prehistoric times, R’lyeh was submerged as
a result of a war between Cthulhu and other extraterrestrial Great Old Ones,
trapping it in its cyclopean city.
Though Cthulhu is not (usually) physically active in the modern world,
it still communicates telepathically through dreams with its worshipers and
with certain psychically sensitive individuals. Thurston’s investigation takes
him from the troubled dreams and bizarre sculpture of a sensitive artist named
Henry Anthony Wilcox to the account of Inspector Legrasse, a
In Lovecraft’s “Dagon”, the story after which Gordon decided
to name his film, the unnamed narrator is a supercargo on a
“Dagon” is a good story in its own right, but was essentially just Lovecraft’s dress rehearsal for “The Call of Cthulhu”. No less an authority than the great S.T. Joshi states: “’The Call of Cthulhu’ is manifestly an exhaustive reworking of one of Lovecraft’s earliest stories, ‘Dagon’ (1917).” And here we have the bond between the three stories that provide us with the real substance of Dagon (the movie). The connection between “Innsmouth”, “Cthulhu”, and “Dagon” is a solid one.
And yet, this leaves us with a few questions unanswered: Most Lovecraft scholars and fans of the Cthulhu Mythos would say the creature called Dagon that the Deep Ones worship is just a gigantic Deep One. The explanation is that Dagon is the oldest and largest of the Deep Ones (apparently they never quit growing). This was Daniel’s tentative explanation in The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana. Gordon and Paoli, however, seem to be using the name “Dagon” as a synonym for “Cthulhu”, and sometimes I wonder if Lovecraft wasn’t doing the same thing. Let me explain what I mean:
Lovecraft never describes the creature in “Dagon” as a giant fish man (this is something we have all assumed), he simply says that it is “Vast, Polyphemous-like, and loathsome” with “gigantic scaly arms” and a “hideous head”. Interestingly, in “The Call of Cthulhu” he describes Cthulhu as “the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ships of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water…” the similarity here should be too obvious to require much commentary. (Polyphemus is the Cyclops who captures Ulysses and his men in the Odyssey.) In “Dagon”, Lovecraft has the narrator seek out a “celebrated ethnologist” with questions about “the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God;” but soon abandons this line of research as useless. Joshi admits that he doesn’t really understand HPL’s connection between the monster in the story and the ancient God of the Philistines either. In “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, it could be that Obed Marsh simply uses the name of Dagon as a label for one of the Great Old Ones (Cthulhu?) that is called by another name elsewhere in the Lovecraft Mythos. The name “Dagon” would have been recognizable to the people of Innsmouth because of its biblical associations and would serve as a handy centerpiece for the blasphemous religion he was encouraging them to accept.
(“Dagon” is the Hebrew form of Dagan, a real
God in the Ancient Near East. He was
originally a West Semitic deity of corn and fertility who was assimilated into
the Sumerian pantheon at an early date.
The meaning of His name is uncertain, but dagan is a common
Hebrew and Ugaritic word for grain, and one tradition states that Dagan
invented the plow. His worshipers
included Sargon the Great, who attributed some of his victories to Dagan, as
well as to his personal deity, Ishtar.
Dagan had nothing to do with fish or the sea. This misconception may have arisen because
the word dag means “fish” in one Hebrew dialect. Lovecraft must have known of Dagan (or Dagon)
only from the garbled, anti-Pagan accounts in the Bible. Nevertheless, HPL’s use of the name
“Dagon” offered Simon a chance to establish a much better false connection
between Lovecraft and ancient
Stuart Gordon seems to have decided to simplify matters enormously by using the name “Dagon” as just another name for Cthulhu. How else do you explain summoning Dagon with a Cthulhu incantation? In the underwater dream sequence at the beginning of the film, there is an octopus motif among the bas-reliefs, could it be the “squid-dragon bas-relief” Johansen sees at R’lyeh? And the cult of Dagon in his film shows an awful lot of similarity to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Cult. The Imbocans are more proactively viscous in their treatment of humans than the Deep Ones described in HPL’s “Innsmouth”. In fact, they seem to exhibit the “deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness” Lovecraft describes in “The Call of Cthulhu”. Like the “voodoo” cultists Inspector Legrasse busted, the Imbocans have a habit of stringing up humans and doing unspeakable things to them: “From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a center hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had gone missing.” (I wonder if any of them were skinned. Lovecraft doesn’t say!) Lovecraft describes these rituals as characterized by “insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames;” which, to my mind, sounds like a pretty fair description of the sacrifice scene at the end of the film.
In Brian Yuzna’s Necronomicon, the first (and best) of the three stories was “The Drowned” directed by Christophe Gans. In addition to a brief appearance by a Deep One (who delivers a copy of the Necronomicon), the film features an appearance by Great Cthulhu itself (talk about your “special guest stars”!). What fascinates me is the similarity in the way Cthulhu is depicted in “The Drowned”, and the way Dagon is shown in Dagon. In “The Drowned”, Cthulhu is presented as a toothy, one-eyed monstrosity whose head is surrounded by tentacles. In Dagon, Dagon is presented as – well – a toothy, one-eyed monstrosity whose head is surrounded by tentacles. See what I mean? Sounds pretty close to HPL’s “awful squid-head with writhing feelers” to me!
There is no record in any of Lovecraft’s stories of Great Cthulhu impregnating human females – but, of course, there is also nothing to prove that “Big C” never did, or that it wouldn’t if it got the chance. [Robert Bloch’s novel Strange Eons includes such a scene – Dan.] In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Inspector Legrasse leads his men against the Cthulhu Cult when he hears the reports of the squatters living in the swamp that “some of their women and children had disappeared”. We don’t know what unspeakable things the cultists did with the women… but we can guess.
As I mentioned earlier, Dagon may owe something to a pastiche written by Stephen Mark Rainey entitled “Rapture in Black”, in which an obnoxiously vampiric Goth chick gets abducted by a couple of Deep Ones and impregnated by the Spawn of Cthulhu. (Hey, she said she liked morbidity!) What makes it unusual is that the fish creatures don’t do her themselves, but turn her over to their allies, Cthulhu’s spawn, which Lovecraft referred to as “cosmic octopi”.
To get a better idea of what exactly went on at the rituals of the Cthulhu Cult (and where Gordon, Yuzna and Paoli might have gotten some of their ideas), we may have to turn to Lovecraft’s friend and fellow horror writer, Robert E. Howard. Since Howard was less inhibited (sexually and otherwise) than his colleague HPL, he gives us more salaciously detailed descriptions of things like orgies and bloodlettings. And his description of the ritual in “The Black Stone”(1931) is strikingly similar to the sacrifice scene in Dagon. In fact, the structure of the two rituals is almost identical, though some details vary.
In REH’s tale, the unnamed American narrator is doing
research in history and folklore, when he discovers information about the Black
Stone in von Junzt’s Nameless Cults, and decides to go in search of
it. He finally finds the strange black
monolith near the town of
The ritual is conducted by worshipers who don’t seem quite human, their “features… degraded as from a mixture of some baser, alien strain that I could not classify.” They are wearing skins (animal, not human), and chanting some word over and over again with “slobbering ecstasy” as they wave their arms and writhe. There are two sacrifices, one of which is “a young girl, stark naked and bound hand and foot” (sound familiar?). There is also “a naked young woman” who dances before the monolith while the high priest cuts her body with a whip (not a knife). The priest is “incessantly raining cruel blows on her naked body” until “blood trickled down the dancer’s limbs…” (Where have we seen that before?). This priest continued “lashing her unprotected body with all the power in his arm as she writhed along, leaving a heavy track of blood on the trampled earth” (rather than dripping it into the water.) This combination of “unhallowed ritual and sadism and blood” evokes a toad-like creature that materializes at the top of the black monolith (rather than rising out of the sea). Howard never tells us exactly which one of the Mythos “gods” squats atop the black obelisk, but he describes this unnamed monster/god as “bloated” and “repulsive”, and says that its eyes “mirrored all the unholy things and vile secrets that sleep in the cities under the sea,”. This allusion to things sleeping under the sea sounds rather Cthulhuesque to me, and the scene is remarkably similar to the orgy in “The Call of Cthulhu” in which the swamp cultists are dancing around a monolith with an idol of Cthulhu at the top.
Ultimately, the nude, bound girl is offered up to the thing at the top of the black obelisk (not lowered into a pit), or, in Howard’s words:
Now
the beast-masked priest lifted the bound and weakly writhing girl in his
brutish hands and held her up toward the horror on the monolith. And as that monstrosity sucked in its breath,
lustfully and slobberingly, something snapped in my brain and I fell into a
merciful faint.
It’s just as well that Howard borrowed a page from Lovecraft here, and had his narrator faint. Otherwise he would have had to describe copulation between a girl and a Great Old One – something even the pulps of the Thirties wouldn’t have printed.
While the scene of Barbara nude, bleeding, struggling in
chains, and being lowered into a pit to do the wild thing with Dagon (or
Cthulhu, or Whatever) may not exactly jibe with Lovecraft’s fiction as written,
it does, as we have seen, hold up fairly well with what it implied. It also falls right in line with much of the
pulp fiction and illustration of the era.
In fact, that scene would have been used as an illustration for the
pulps. For example, in one 1936 issue of
Spicy Mystery Stories there is an illustration of a scantily clad girl
hanging by her wrists over a pit filled with skulls, and another of a half-naked
woman about to have her posterior attacked by a slobbering demon. (Great art never dies!)
One of the things that distinguish Dagon from the horror movie herd is Gordon and Paoli’s use of symbolism. Some of these elements may be horror movie staples, but in Dagon they never seen cliché or overused.
Water is the symbol of the Deep Ones, and it appears in every scene. It is always raining in Imboca, from sheets of driving, torrential rain, to dreary drizzle – but it never stops. We humans are essentially land animals, and it is surprising how uncomfortable even a little water can make us. And this film explores the horrors of water in all its forms – from storms at sea, to dirty, knee-deep flood water, to filthy toilets and bad plumbing. Blood in the water is a frequent image, and seems to symbolize human helplessness. The Deep Ones seem to have a magical connection with water. As soon as Paul and Barbara hear the strange singing (incantation?) from Imboca, a storm blows up to wreck their boat. Perhaps the Dagon-worshipers used their black magic for weather-working.
Fire is the symbol of the humans. This is fitting, since our ability to make fire is the one thing that really sets us apart from the other animals on this planet. Fire is also the symbol of human power, and the only weapon Paul has against the fish people. Barbara’s lighter becomes the symbol of the love she and Paul share. In the end, the lighter is all Paul has left of her, and it is the weapon he uses to attempt suicide.
For some reason, Gordon has traded in the phallic monoliths in “Dagon”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, and “The Black Stone” for an eye or fish-shaped, vaginal opening in the ocean floor. I haven’t figured out why yet, but I’m all for it. Just don’t show this movie to a Freudian psychologist; you don’t want him to have a nasty seizure.
Gordon and Paoli’s clever and perverse use of religious
symbolism is the most striking. In this,
too, they have taken a page from HPL.
Lovecraft parodied Christian religion in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by
having Marsh sell his soul to the Deep Ones in exchange for fish and gold. This echoes the miracle of Jesus in which
Christ arranged for Simon Peter to catch a fish with a gold coin in its mouth
(Matt
Gordon and Paoli decided to call the last man in Imboca
Ezequiel (Ezekiel) instead of Zadok.
Why? Because Ezekiel was the
prophet appointed to
The sacrifice scene at the end of the film seems to be a deliberate parody of the Crucifixion. Since the Deep Ones seem to hate Christianity (that rival human religion), perhaps they deliberately designed this ritual as a travesty of Christ’s Passion. When Barbara is sacrificed to Dagon, she is hung up with her arms spread wide above her head and her feet together in a classic crucifixion posture. Like Jesus, Barbara is “scourged” before her “crucifixion” when Uxia slices her skin repeatedly with the ritual dagger, covering her body with cuts. (These cuts will be agonizing when she is “baptized” in salt water.) Uxia cuts her especially deeply on the side of her belly – the place where tradition states that the Roman spear pierced the side of Jesus. A mixture of blood and water poured out of the side of Christ, and as she hangs above the pit, Barbara’s blood drips into the water, like the blood of Christ on the cross. Proving that she is a Christ figure, Barbara pronounces a very Christian curse (mixed with a little secular profanity) on the Dagon-worshipers as she hangs above the pit: “Rot in Hell! You will burn for f*cking eternity!” Like any good Messiah, Barbara is also a prophet. A moment after she promises the fish people that they will “burn,” Paul shows up to douse them with gasoline and literally set them on fire. Like Ishtar (religious history’s earliest “risen savior”), Barbara descends naked into a dark underworld. The “sun” does indeed “go dark” for her, as it did for Jesus, at the climax of her crucifixion, when she is covered by Dagon’s black slime. When Paul pulls her up out of the pit (not much of a resurrection), Barbara asks him to kill her – her blend of Jesus’ last words from the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mt. 27:46) and “It is finished!” (Jn.19:30). Like Christ, she feels her mission will not be complete without her death.
Even before she went through these parodic “Stations of the Cross”, Barbara exhibited certain “Christ-like” traits. Just as Jesus threw the moneychangers out of the temple, Barbara throws Paul’s laptop overboard when she sees that his preoccupation with money was making it impossible for him to enjoy life. Above all, she is concerned for others; she offers to stay with the injured Vicki on the sinking boat, and goes back for her during the escape attempt, even though Vicki is, by then, crippled and insane (“Love thy neighbor as thyself”). Barbara is definitely Paul’s “personal savior” in that she is always able to tell him what to do in times of crisis. If Barbara is a symbol of Christ, perhaps she is also symbolic of the Virgin Mary – though the “conception” she receives from Dagon is anything but “immaculate”.
Uxia, for her part, has the same motive for sacrificing Barbara the chief priests and the Pharisees had for crucifying Jesus: Though Uxia claims that what she is doing is for the good of her people and the appeasement of Dagon, she is simply jealous, and sees Barbara as a threat to her (romantic) ambitions who must be removed. The only thing I can say in her defense is that neither Pontius Pilate nor the high priest Caiaphas ever looked so good.
If Barbara is a symbol of Christ, then Paul is an unwitting
Judas Iscariot, who “betrays” her accidentally by involving her in his tangled,
non-human destiny. He further “betrays”
her by failing to prevent her capture by the fish men, and again, when he
refuses to kill her as he promised. He
kisses her, as Judas did Christ, moments before she is dragged off by the
Imbocans, as Jesus was arrested at the
Perhaps the most horrific revelation Dagon has to
offer is a true picture of decaying American film industry. Why did Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and
Brian Yuzna, three U.S. filmmakers with a couple of acclaimed cult hits behind
them, have to go to Europe to get backing to do a horror film based on a story
by Lovecraft (whose name alone can make even the worst movie marketable)? Why was Dagon given the shabby
straight-to-video treatment in the
But the good news is that Dagon is available in an excellent DVD edition. The 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer from Lion’s Gate gives the movie a much better look than many of Gordon’s earlier efforts had on DVD. Features include scene access with 24 cues, English and Spanish subtitles option, two full-length, scene specific commentaries, both featuring Gordon, and one with Ezra Godden, one original trailer, and a storyboard section.
That Gordon, Paoli, and Yuzna could balance all these layers of symbolism, Lovecraftian elements, and plotting (while even adding a few elements of humor) and come up with something watchable would make this movie a work of genius. But Dagon is more than watchable – it is mesmerizing. One critic complained that Dagon had nothing to offer anyone who was not a Lovecraft fan or a genre buff. As an experiment, I showed this movie to a friend of mine who had never heard of Lovecraft, occasionally watches a horror movie, and didn’t know who Stuart Gordon was. She loved it!
1998 © John Wisdom Gonce III. All rights reserved.