“All worship Dagon, or die.”
I really wanted to get some Lovecraft in this year’s 31DOF. At first I was going to write about 2019’s truly excellent Color Out of Space, but then I remembered that the director is an abusive piece of shit, so I didn’t want to spend 1,000 words praising him as an artist. Lovecraft is notoriously tricky to adapt: the indecipherable language and abundance of tentacles require a steady hand to avoid being silly, and his prose is so dense that the stories are inaccessible to a lot of readers. So I turned to one of the most prolific purveyors of Lovecraftian horror: Stuart Gordon, the man behind Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Castle Freak, all relatively loose Lovecraft adaptations. In true form, Gordon’s 2001 Dagon is less an adaptation of that story than it is of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” I didn’t go into the film (which was released straight to DVD) expecting much, so imagine my surprise when my reaction was a reappraisal of Gordon as an artist.
I won’t lie, though: Dagon doesn’t get off to a very promising start. We meet Paul (Ezra Gooden, doing his best impression of Keith Gordon in Christine), newly wealthy from selling a website. He’s on a boat with his girlfriend, Barbara (Raquel Meroño), and an older couple, Howard and Vicki. (If the relationship between the two couples was ever explained, I missed it.) The opening scenes – including Paul’s recurring nightmare of a fanged mermaid – look and feel cheap, and Gooden’s one-note performance makes our leading man somewhat of a drip. Things turn around, though, when a violent storm crashes the boat. Paul and Barbara are able to get to a raft and make for shore, where they plan on sending help for Howard and Vicki, whose leg is stuck under debris.
They land at Imboca, a small Spanish village; contrary to how it looked on the water, the city is near-empty, its buildings locked and shuttered. Barbara enlists some odd-looking locals to take her back to the boat, while Paul has to stay behind. He makes his way to a hotel to use a phone, and this is where Gordon really flexes his muscles. Imboca is a small-scale triumph of environmental storytelling. Gordon abandons the over-the-top spectacle of his previous works and relies on the unease of both Paul and the viewer. Perhaps the highlight of the film is when Paul, hiding from a gaggle of cultists, hides out in what looks like a tannery, uselessly clutching a utility knife. Around him are hanging human hides. There’s no music in this scene, only Paul’s labored breathing and the shuffling of the cultists’ feet.
A lot of Dagon plays like a survival horror game, not unlike Outlast. Gordon isn’t a filmmaker known for his deft hand at suspense, so it comes as a welcome surprise to see it put to use here. We follow Paul almost exclusively, and while at time’s he’s head-scratchingly naïve (after barricading himself in a room to escape the cultists, he asks “Can I help you?”) he’s also pretty resourceful, and I’ll admit that while Gooden’s performance never really improves, my estimation of the character definitely did.
Dagon knows that it doesn’t have enough story to stretch out over 100 minutes, but it unwisely does so anyway. There’s a nice respite, though, when Paul hides out with an old man named Ezequiel, the last sane man in town, and therefore the last whose limbs have not started mutating into tentacles or claws (he’s played by the prolific Spanish actor Francisco Rabal in his last film). Ezequiel tells Paul the story of the town, once a pious fishing community who turned to apostasy when the fish no longer entered their nets. I’m not typically a fan of flashbacks, but I’ll make an exception for this one: it’s just as long as it needs to be, it’s interesting both narratively and visually, and Rabal’s mellifluous voice makes him a pleasure to listen to.
The third act is suitably bonkers for a Gordon film, and would even likely make Lovecraft proud. There’s some dodgy CGI at work, but I can’t fault the film too much for that because I imagine the budget was miniscule, and Gordon’s determination to use sets and makeup whenever possible is admirable. That suggests, and Dagon proves, that Stuart Gordon was more than just a notable purveyor of gore and schlock. He was an artist.
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