Director Stuart Gordon, producer Brian Yuzna, and screenwriter Dennis Paoli come together once again for the most atmospheric adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft to date. Dagon does many things, the most admirable of which is the director’s decision to alleviate a lot of the arbitrary comedy,* which is to be found in Gordon’s earlier versions of the author’s tales, as he focuses upon characterization and circumstance, thus attempting to remain as faithful as possible to the source material. Though not perfect, Dagon is one of the best presentations of the gothic writer ever to be set to the big screen.
After a boating accident off the coast of Spain, Paul (Ezra Godden) and his girlfriend, Barbara (Raquel Merono), resort to a nearby fishing community called Imboca for assistance. However, after Barbara disappears, Paul finds himself running from the locals, who are pursuing him in droves while making strange noises, before discovering the town’s dark past as well as his own.
Dagon is yet another installment from the Gordon/Yuzna/Paoli H. P. Lovecraft adaptation team. As with Castle Freak, Gordon tried something different this go around, namely casting someone other than Jeffery Combs in the lead as Ezra Godden attempts to fill the shoes of what the writer’s fan base dubbed as the first “official” H. P. Lovecraft actor. In retrospect, it seems as if Gordon was grooming Godden to be the next Lovecraft lead because the actor later appears as the central character in Gordon’s Masters of Horror contribution, Dreams in the Witch-House, another Lovecraft adaptation.
Aside from the major shift in casting, Dagon–like Castle Freak–is almost completely devoid of humor as tension and atmosphere fill the void. Outside of Paul appearing as a later day Harold Lloyd character, nervously shaking his unsteady way through life, à la Woody Allen, the tone of the film is utterly sober. Furthermore, Paul is not only a fish out of water in a town of less-than-hospitable locals (who hark back to Alex Proyas’s Strangers in his sci-fi epic, Dark City), he is in visual contrast to the dank, wet, gray town of Imboca via his overly orange Miskatonic sweatshirt and beige slacks as he stumbles around the town, evading detection. Without a doubt, Dagon is Gordon’s most visually appealing film thus far.
The drenched sets replace the blood of Re-Animator with precipitation upon precipitation (an indicator that Gordon is moving toward substance in place of brute impact?). However, there are two excessively gruesome scenes, one of which is the defacing of a character, Hannibal Lectur style (though still alive), the other instance of gore being the result of an offering gone wrong as a character’s arms are left eerily dangling, sans body, at the sacrificial alter .
In regards to plot, the work is a stricter adaptation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” than the title story, upon which the history and mythology of the film is founded. As with all of the writer’s works given birth by Gordon, the stories have been modernized, shaved, and shifted in order to conform more readily to the cinematic medium. This said, Dagon is arguably the most faithful adaptation of the writer to date (Dan O’Brannon’s The Resurrection, based on “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” being the other contender). Paoli does a great job of keeping the events and occurrences in the film plausible. For example, considering that many of the inhabitants of Imboca suffer from physical abnormalities, thus slowing their locomotion considerably, the threat is sustained after Gordon has Paul fall victim to a nasty drop (which was unavoidable). Also, though rain is used as a symbolic omen as well as a visual trick pony in horror films, the filmmakers avoid cliché in this respect after the town’s history has been revealed.
However, the ironic resolution isn’t given the weight it deserves (which, in part, was a fault of Lovecraft’s original as well). Furthermore, the deus ex machina character of Ezekiel (Francisco Rabal) is revealed too late, that is, after the local threat has begun to close in upon Paul, as opposed to introducing the town’s history earlier and allowing the tale to house dread as the viewer is permitted (as the author does) to shirk the speaker’s tale off as an aggregation of drunken ramblings. The local color of the original story’s dialect is excessively convoluted in and of itself. Gladly, the filmmaker’s wisely implemented a flashback sequence in order to clarify issues during one of the film’s most integral scenes but the remaining dialogue still bears upon the viewer slightly. Lastly, the audio isn’t synched correctly in a couple of spots during the production.
Dagon is as sad as it is interesting in that it is the first peek into Ezra Godden’s shift as the leading Lovecraft actor for Stuart Gordon. Luckily, he does well in arguably one of the most atmospheric works, not only in the director’s canon, but in all of horror. Irrefutably, the film is the most visually stunning work of the author to date. Simply put, Dagon readily stands beside The Resurrected and Castle Freak as the purest cinematic glimpses into the world of H. P. Lovecraft.
*–This isn’t to imply that I don’t enjoy and applaud the comedic elements of Re-Animator and From Beyond. They are unique visions in and of themselves. However, in regards to faithful adaptations to the source material, as any reader of the author will tell you, comedy is excessively sparse in the writer’s works.
-Egregious Gurnow
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- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
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