Hey folks, Harry here... 3 years ago on AICN, I gave you a look at the stylistic universe that Stuart Gordon wanted to set SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH in. I met Stuart about 3 years ago at the Alamo Drafthouse one night, and we hit it off... Talking about fishy monsters and wet Lovecraftian horror. He told me about the live grand guignol theater he directed in between films... How he had this dream project that wasn't going anywhere with great Bernie Wrightson designs and... He started to see a pool forming beneath my crotch, EXORCIST style, and said, "You want to read the script and have copies of the art? The pool turned to a lake, and he decided to send them to me. We chatted a couple of times, but lost track of one another about a year and a half ago... about the times the rumors about DAGON began. From the sound of this report, DAGON is a blending of DAGON (an extreme short story) and SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH... And that sounds... promising. From the sound of the trailer, which I'd wake the ancient one for a copy of, this project sounds like it is great. It has been... Too long with out a Stuart Gordon film... Here's the report....
On Saturday August 18 while at the NecronomiCon Lovecraft convention in Providence Rhode Island I saw two trailers for Stuart Gordon's new film, Dagon.
Ironically they were shown just before a special viewing of the Japanese version of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and severely overshadowed my enjoyment of that film. The first preview was pretty vague, but the second 'R' rated trailer was quite revealing. I watched the trailers each three times and have a very clear memory of the contents of the second in particular.
What follows is as clear a reconstruction as I can manage of both what the trailer actually showed and what it revealed about the film's plot. There are a huge number of similarities to Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", but is unclear if the name of the town or any of it's residents' names have been kept in the film. Lovecraft's "Zadok the bum" has a counterpart in the film, but it's unclear whether his name is the same.
The look of the film is very similar in my mind to the night time scenes in Ridley Scott's "Hannibal", especially the scene in the plaza where Hannibal hangs and disembowels his victim. The look of the European architecture in Ridley Scott's moody lighting is the best analogy to the look of Dagon that I can find.
The trailer begins with a bookish man and his hot European girlfriend on a boat off the coast of Spain. He's more interested in checking his stocks on his laptop than enjoying the vacation so she tosses the laptop overboard. The trailer then cuts to the man in scuba gear discovering some sunken ruins (perhaps he was searching for the laptop?).
Suddenly a beautiful naked woman swims in front of him. The camera pans down her body as we see the flesh suddenly turn to scales; she sweeps her mermaid tail in front of the camera and we cut for a split second to something, well, indescribable but clearly bad from the tone of the music. Back on the boat our pair encounters bad weather and must escape in a raft as their boat is smashed against some rocks.
They paddle towards a truly creepy fishing village built against a hillside giving it a tiered, crowded feeling. On the docks a priest directs them down a street and for just a split second we see the webbing between his fingers. They approach an old church and we read the Spanish title above the door: "Order De Dagon Esoterico" (or somesuch). Inside the church we see a strange symbol like a circle between two half moons facing outward. The lady says, "What kind of church is this?"
Somehow the pair becomes separated and we witness a few shots of creepy encounters with denizens of the town. The lady walks down a long deserted street and glances in a window. For a second we see a distorted face before the shutters slam closed from the inside. She passes a malformed man in an alley. He actually resembles the Elephant man in dress and implied deformity. The man meanwhile has made it to the town's dingy hotel and has asked about the woman. But of course no one has seen her.
He meets the town drunk who informs him, "lots of people come, but no one leaves". At this point the preview starts speeding up, giving us wonderful shots right out of Bernie Wrightson's sketches such as a legless hybrid wearing a raincoat and sitting on a wheeled platform. In his deformed hands he holds two blocks of wood which he uses to pull himself down the dark alley. In another shot we see masses of the town's denizens gathering in the courtyard outside the man's hotel room.
An expensive car pulls up and some men help another man get out of the back seat. He is hunchbacked and uses braced crutches attached to his forearms to walk. The make-up is really well done in the shots we see, with elongated fingers, bulging eyes and down-turned lips. Stuart Gordon plays up the deformity of the hybrids very effectively. While I can't guess how it will be tied together for sure, here are the other images we are given in the preview:
-We see the mermaid woman underwater again, but this time with a mouth full of shark-like teeth lunging for the hero.
-A circle of people at night around a fire on an outcropping of rock as the camera flies over them.
-We see hands put the circular symbol in place above the altar.
-A Priest of Dagon in a golden headdress and robes raising his arms in front of the circular symbol.
-A hybrid woman lying nude on a bed. As the camera pans past her one of her tentacles slides off the end of the bed.
-A human woman's feet being chained apart as people carrying torches look on.
-The woman saying to the man, "if it happens to me, promise you will kill me."
-A woman looking very much like the mermaid (but with legs) seducing the man.
-The man, sweating and bloody, pulls out two large knives and says something like "come and fucking get it!"
-The man falls through a huge glass sky light.
-A mob of hybrids force their way into the man's hotel room, breaking the door down. The unblinking eyes and long fingers (like catfish whiskers) of the mob are really unnerving.
-The man and the bum run into eachother around a corner and scare each other.
-The man looks at the mermaid woman and says something like, "I really don't have any choice do I?"
How this will all play out remains to be seen, but this film looks more serious, far darker, and far more professional than Stuart Gordon's other two Lovecraft films, "Re-Animator" and "From Beyond". The film will probably not be released until Spring 2002, but it looks well worth the wait.
This poster is from the Summer 2001 issue of Wicked Magazine.
