DAGON (2001)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, metaphysical*

"Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt

"Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!"-- HAMLET

Hamlet might have fantasized about dissolving into a dew, but H.P. Lovecraft knew that "too too solid flesh" could only dissolve into something far less pure than dew, which may be best represented by his felicitous phrase "spiritual putrescence."

Most Lovecraft stories rely on suggestiveness and are low on physical action. This is particularly true of his first professional short story, DAGON, which strongly resembles many of the vignettes of Poe, where all one gets is "beginning" and "end," setup and resolution, with nothing akin to a "middle." A feature film needs much more development, and thus Stuart Gordon's DAGON borrows little from the 1919 story save the idea of a monstrous sea-god. The principal plot is loosely based upon HPL's novella THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH, which involved an isolated Massachusetts seaport which was slowly taken over by a race of fish-humanoids, sometimes called "the Deep Ones." 

Naturally, director Stuart Gordon and writer Dennis Paoli put a lot more sex and violence into DAGON than Lovecraft did, or ever would have. The two had followed the same pattern in their other four collaborations, particularly in the eighties films REANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, which remain two of the best regarded Lovecraft film adaptations. The location shifts from a Massachusetts seaport to a Spanish fishing-village, largely because the film was produced by a Spanish production company in concert with Gordon's frequent production-partner Brian Yuzna. 

I haven't reread HPL's INNSMOUTH for this review, but I'll point out that unlike the prose story, the film starts out at sea, as the boat of four vacationers nears a Spanish coastline dominated by the aforementioned fishing-village, "Imboca." A storm whips up and devastates the boat, trapping its owners, Vicki and Howard, aboard the wreckage. Paul (Ezra Godden) and his girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Moreno) take a lifeboat to shore seeking help, only to find that not only are the inhabitants indifferent to the boat's peril, many of them have a pale, fishy texture to their skin. Paul is separated from Barbara, and he finds himself forced to flee the crazed denizens of Imboca.

I won't dwell upon all the travails of Paul as he tries to find Barbara and save both their lives from the mad-seeming townspeople. Gordon and Paoli clearly wanted DAGON (their last collaboration, incidentally) to be a wild thrill-ride. And if that was all the film was, I might deem it a betrayal of the spirit of HPL.

However, what Gordon and Paoli capture here is the author's alienation from the impure nature of human existence, the condition of being encased in human flesh. HPL used very little violence in his stories, but on a fundamental level he shared some characteristics with the cinematic theme known as "body horror." When HPL's stories aren't suggesting weird transformations of either the narrators or the people the narrators observe, they reflect the fear that one may have some forbidden genetic heritage that could, at any moment, assert itself, turning one into an ape-man, a fish-man, or even a half-human, half-demon. The film's Deep Ones (who are only given that name via an HPL quote at film's end) are the pawns of the fish-god Dagon, and they render the god both blood-sacrifices and human women with which the deity can breed.

One thing that keeps the "thrill-ride" from being meretricious is that Gordon and Paoli constantly emphasize the contagion of Imboca, not just through its menacing fish-people but even just by showing how grungy the town is in the hands of these devolved freaks. Prior to Paul first being attacked by the Deep Ones, he takes a room at the local hotel just to get his bearings, and he's appalled at the filthiness of the room. But if there's anything worse than being forced to associate with slovenly people, it's having kinship with them. In keeping with a much more minor subtext in the prose story, Paul finds that he is genetically related to the people of Dagon, thus putting an end to the self-confident persona he projects at the film's opening.

Though I enjoyed RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, I felt like Gordon and Paoli placed too much emphasis on sexual horror. HPL's affinity with body-horror has more to do with a fundamental sense that your own flesh will betray you by becoming something else, irrespective of whether one has congress with other human beings or even with non-humans. Paul does face with a sexual threat as well, one that veers into an incest-domain that would not have interested Lovecraft. But at present I've not seen a film that better captures HPL's unique take on body-horror that Gordon and Paoli's DAGON.