Dagon

No, not that Dagon.

Back in 1985, I saw Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and it became a measuring stick against all other horror films. For better or worse, Gordon didn’t made as many movies as many terrible directors. He died in 2020 but left one of the most notable bodies of work based on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Sadly, that last sentence is true, in part, because so few directors have been successful with Lovecraft.

Dagon was released in early October of 2001 which was about the equivalent of releasing a pro-Japanese movie in mid-December 1941. I vaguely remember it getting negative reviews but most of the reviews I found while writing this were mid to positive.

Lovecraft wrote a short story called “Dagon” but the movie is much closer to his “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

The movie changed the setting from New England to Spain which worked out surprisingly well.

Of the four main “good guy” outsider roles in the movie, none of them impressed me very much. Howard, the protagonist’s financial backer, and his wife Vicki weren’t on-screen enough to make much of an impact (although Vicki does return in a creepy scene).

Ezra Godden and Raquel Meroño play the protagonist and his love interest. They didn’t generate much chemistry together and that made it harder to care about them. Early on, Meroño’s character threw Godden’s laptop computer off Howard’s yacht, into the sea. The plot required her to do it (to cut off communication with the outside world) but it doomed everyone and made me think she was too dumb to live (I was right).

The film ends with “Dedicated to Francisco Rabal, a wonderful actor and even better human being.” I think part of my problems with the other four actors was that Rabal was fantastic as the town drunk. Blending alcoholism, religious faith, despair, and pathos, he reminded me of the priest from Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.

That’s not a comparison you’d expect from a movie about rapist fish demons but Rabal nailed his role so well the rest of the cast paled around him.

Yes, as you may infer from that last paragraph, Lovecraft’s descriptions of “unspeakable rites” are interpreted as monster rape. Low-budget director Roger Corman portrayed this in dozens of movies, always far sleazier than Dagon. Unlike Corman, Stuart made the sacrifices to Dagon intentionally horrifying, not deliberately salacious, but I think it was this scene that caused most of the negative reviews.

In many ways, a town full of unholy fish-human hybrids is a lot like a town full of zombies but it feels far more original (although Lovecraft wrote “The Shadow over Innsmouth” about 30 years before the first modern zombie).

All in all, Dagon didn’t impress me like The Re-Animator but it was better than I’d been led to believe. The subject matter is enough to turn off many viewers but it’s never as purient as most takes on “unspeakable rites” (thanks to Roger Corman for lowering the bar).