By my
original plan I should have watched another werewolf
movie but really didn't want another one so soon after
Wolfen. So I changed my schedule. Besides, I didn't have any lovecraftian horror on my list.
Instead of watching
Moon of the Wolf (1972) I watched Dagon
(2001) a Spanish horror film based on a novella by H.P. Lovecraft.
You might have expected it be based upon his story Dagon,
but it wasn’t. It was based on his later
story The Shadow over Innsmouth.
The film follows a group of American tourists who are forced
by a sudden storm to steer their yacht toward Imboca, a dismal looking town on
the Spanish coast. And, because this is
a horror movie, they soon wish they hadn’t.
The town seems empty at first, and silent except for a strange singing
which seems to come from a strange church (Esoterica Orde de Dagon). But
it’s soon crawling (quite literally) with people (not so literally.)
The townfolk are horrible monstrosities with tentacles and teeth and gills. They
have for many years, abandoned their Christian faith for the worship of Dagon
and the “Deep Ones” –strange ocean dwelling creatures - in return for bountiful
fish and for gold. But Dagon demands
human sacrifice and the mating of humans with the Deep Ones. The resulting
offspring are the grotesque inhabitants of Imboca
I think their predominant color was a greyish-green,
though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the
ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid,
while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that
never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their
long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and
sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs.
Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the
dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked ... They were the
blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design - living and horrible.-from The Shadow over Innsmouth - H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft’s fiction is characterized by an inevitable
fatalism. The human race will disappear,
swallowed up by ancient nightmarish creatures from beyond the galaxy. Humans, in Lovecraft’s stories, are utterly
insignificant. These creatures invading the earth care as much for us as we do
for the insects we crush beneath our feet. And human action, choice, freedom,
is all but an illusion. The horror of
Lovecraft’s fiction isn’t in the hideous creatures (though they are fearful and
horrible) but in the meaningless of our existence, it is in the discovery of
the fact that we can do nothing to effect a change in the vast uncaring and
indifferent universe.
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
“We shall dive down through black abysses, and in that lair of the Deep Ones, we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever."
There Once Was a Prophet from Judah: Biblical Limericks for Fun and Prophet
