Fish People
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
H.P. Lovecraft
"Dagon" (1919) and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936) by Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) provide the inspiration for Stuart Gordon's 2001 horror film, Dagon, a blending of humor, weirdness, and ickiness, working well due to a quickly unfolding premise and atmosphere characterized by relentless rain and a setting made terrible by villagers worshipping an ancient sea god, Dagon.
Many years before the present of the story, the village of Imboco, suffering from lack of the formerly abundant fishing that brought prosperity, switches religions from Christianity to what could be called Dagonism. Dagon provides copious amounts of fish and worked gold artifacts of a peculiar nature, resembling nothing human-made.
Dagon, like Christ, promises immortality. Villagers over many decades transform into human-fish hybrids, becoming eventually water dwellers entering the sea to worship the god.
This arrangement's class structure guarantees the wealthy leader and his daughter, Uxía Cambarro (Macarena Gómez) a prime spot as Dagon's chief representatives on land. The father, still living in his mansion outside the village, resembles an evil-eyed octopus, while Uxía, pretty facially and still a woman down to her waist, can't walk anymore, legs transformed into thick, tapering tentacles. Getting around on an old wooden wheelchair, lower part covered, she resembles a disabled Spanish aristocrat of the late nineteenth century, complete with mantilla topping her head, framing her lovely face.
The protagonist, Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden), has, at the film's opening on board a sailboat, just located the underwater coordinates for a cache of gold, part of Dagon's wealth. He and his girlfriend, Barbara (Raquel Meroño), with Howard and Vicki, the boat's owners, get hit by a sudden storm that smashes the vessel against a rock outcropping. Vicki's leg is pinned, Howard stays with her. Barbara and Paul take the lifeboat to shore, at first finding no one in the village. Rain pounds the streets and buildings.
Entering a church, they note right away the lack of Christian paraphernalia. A big symbol above the altar shaped like a stylized fish's eye provides a clue they don't yet understand. An English-speaking priest (Ferran Lahoz), eyes intense, friendly at first, arranges for two fishermen to take just one of the strangers to the wrecked sailboat. The other should go to the town's only hotel to phone for medical help, since Vicki's leg is at the very least broken.
Barbara goes to the hotel, Paul rides out with the fishermen on their boat. Howard and Vicki aren't there. Barbara, meanwhile, runs into silence and lack of help from the hotel's spooky desk clerk. The phone doesn't work. Could be related to the terrible storm, but when she notices gills in the clerk's neck, the priest and another bulging-eyed villager knocks her out.
Paul returns at night, finds the hotel. Exhausted, he decides to wait for Barbara, gets a room. Imagine the shittiest fucking hotel room possible; it's maybe something like this one. The lights don't work. Lightning and Barbara's Zippo lighter (found by him on the hotel's desk counter) reveal a spacious but damp bedroom with a mattress stained by black mold. The bathroom's sink gushes stinky green water from its faucet. The tub and everything else show layers of dirt built up, apparently, over sixty years.
Paul takes a seat in the least dirty armchair, falls asleep, dreams again of Uxía. He's seen her before in dreams, guiding him into the endless darkness of an underwater pit surrounded by the fish eye symbol seen in the church. Chased out of the hotel by villagers, he hurts his leg jumping from his room. Paul spends many scenes in this film running or limping for his life. He sets fire, with the aid of a gas can, to some of his pursuers, all of whom speak a simple grunting Spanish. Turning into a fish man, evidently, compromises human vocal cords.
He runs into a human being, Ezequiel (Francisco Rabal, from Luis Buñuel's Nazarin and Viridiana, also Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse), an old man who relates what happened to the village decades ago when he was a boy. Ezequiel helps him try to escape in the octopus man's car. Paul by this point has been informed by the old man that Barbara and Vicki are dead. Paul saw Howard's skin (the villagers wear human skin masks) earlier. Ezequiel's report of the women's deaths is an assumption. Paul later finds them both after he's caught. Barbara urges him to kill her rather than let the god, or whatever it is, have its way with her.
Yes, Dagon requires a human female sacrifice now and then, fucking the victims somehow. Considering the god's behemoth body, it's hard to imagine how he (it) does this. Vicki, missing the lower half of her right leg, tells Paul that Dagon had its way with her. So horrified is she by her experience she plunges the first available knife into her heart.
Paul watches while Ezequiel is flayed alive by the priest and two henchmen, using gold-bladed knives. No one says, "This is how we make clothing in Imboco," but they may as well have done so.
Paul's about to get this treatment himself when Uxía wheels herself into the room, ordering Paul released to be her groom, preparatory to the two of them living an immortal sea life with Dagon. Paul, unbound, kills the priest and his assistants with a gold knife, kills more Dagon followers (all wearing human flesh masks) with good old gasoline and Barbara's trusty Zippo. Barbara, naked and chained by her wrists, gets lowered into a hole, her blood from cuts inflicted by a gleeful Uxía dripping into the dark water below.
Paul's violent interruption almost saves his girlfriend, but she drops into the water, winched up moments later by her boyfriend, who refuses to kill her as he'd never quite promised to do. Dagon appears, finally, a quick image of a multi-tentacled entity launching itself at the helpless woman about to be impregnated. Paul sees Barbara's bloody forearms and hands still depending from the manacles. Now there's really no hope for his relationship with her--they will never enjoy a life of riches derived from gold found off the coast of Spain.
Uxía presents her case for marriage, but Paul pours the remaining gas on himself, lights the Zippo. The half-fish, half-woman saves him. They both drop into the Dagon communication hole. Burned, Paul soon finds he can breathe underwater. The pair swim to the abyss surrounded by the fish eye symbol, going inside and disappearing from sight, a honeymoon blessed by the Old Ones, the Lovecraftian gods.
I feel as if I got too detailed in describing this movie. It's entertaining to the extent that many years ago when I saw it on the Syfy Channel (in an extensively edited form, removing nudity and excessive violence, like the skinning of Ezequiel) I was intrigued by it enough that I kept an eye out for it. Now that I've seen the uncut version, I give it a positive review. Its frantic pace, weird elements, its visuals and unsettling sounds, make for a good horror movie capturing some of Lovecraft's themes. The setting of a fishing village, on the surface seeming to be normal at first, makes the intersection of small town life with cosmic divinity a compelling contrast.
That the villagers switched from worshipping Christ (a deity associated with fish, with Pisces) to a different, older deity representing fish, eyes always open, as in an all-seeing god, shows the malleability of beliefs, especially when challenged by environmental or social change detrimental to once thriving communities.
Lovecraft's perspective, curiously, seems to have been one of a popular god (Christ) supplanted not by a new religion, but by an old one; a reversion to something that never went away, but maybe lay sleeping, waiting to wake up under the right conditions. Having died in 1937, it's a guess as to how Lovecraft would've fictionally treated the atom bomb, a new kind of "god" challenging the hope of Christianity and other major religions with a new form of dedicated destruction. The Old Ones, destructive in their own ways, share with the atom and hydrogen bombs, a lack of concern for human life generally speaking, as they use, on occasion--seen in this film--certain people to carry on with their godly essences.
Armless Barbara may be the mother of a human-divine hybrid, the Virgin Mary, so to speak, behind a new great religion.
Vic Neptune
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
H.P. Lovecraft
"Dagon" (1919) and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936) by Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) provide the inspiration for Stuart Gordon's 2001 horror film, Dagon, a blending of humor, weirdness, and ickiness, working well due to a quickly unfolding premise and atmosphere characterized by relentless rain and a setting made terrible by villagers worshipping an ancient sea god, Dagon.
Many years before the present of the story, the village of Imboco, suffering from lack of the formerly abundant fishing that brought prosperity, switches religions from Christianity to what could be called Dagonism. Dagon provides copious amounts of fish and worked gold artifacts of a peculiar nature, resembling nothing human-made.
Dagon, like Christ, promises immortality. Villagers over many decades transform into human-fish hybrids, becoming eventually water dwellers entering the sea to worship the god.
This arrangement's class structure guarantees the wealthy leader and his daughter, Uxía Cambarro (Macarena Gómez) a prime spot as Dagon's chief representatives on land. The father, still living in his mansion outside the village, resembles an evil-eyed octopus, while Uxía, pretty facially and still a woman down to her waist, can't walk anymore, legs transformed into thick, tapering tentacles. Getting around on an old wooden wheelchair, lower part covered, she resembles a disabled Spanish aristocrat of the late nineteenth century, complete with mantilla topping her head, framing her lovely face.
The protagonist, Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden), has, at the film's opening on board a sailboat, just located the underwater coordinates for a cache of gold, part of Dagon's wealth. He and his girlfriend, Barbara (Raquel Meroño), with Howard and Vicki, the boat's owners, get hit by a sudden storm that smashes the vessel against a rock outcropping. Vicki's leg is pinned, Howard stays with her. Barbara and Paul take the lifeboat to shore, at first finding no one in the village. Rain pounds the streets and buildings.
Entering a church, they note right away the lack of Christian paraphernalia. A big symbol above the altar shaped like a stylized fish's eye provides a clue they don't yet understand. An English-speaking priest (Ferran Lahoz), eyes intense, friendly at first, arranges for two fishermen to take just one of the strangers to the wrecked sailboat. The other should go to the town's only hotel to phone for medical help, since Vicki's leg is at the very least broken.
Barbara goes to the hotel, Paul rides out with the fishermen on their boat. Howard and Vicki aren't there. Barbara, meanwhile, runs into silence and lack of help from the hotel's spooky desk clerk. The phone doesn't work. Could be related to the terrible storm, but when she notices gills in the clerk's neck, the priest and another bulging-eyed villager knocks her out.
Paul returns at night, finds the hotel. Exhausted, he decides to wait for Barbara, gets a room. Imagine the shittiest fucking hotel room possible; it's maybe something like this one. The lights don't work. Lightning and Barbara's Zippo lighter (found by him on the hotel's desk counter) reveal a spacious but damp bedroom with a mattress stained by black mold. The bathroom's sink gushes stinky green water from its faucet. The tub and everything else show layers of dirt built up, apparently, over sixty years.
Paul takes a seat in the least dirty armchair, falls asleep, dreams again of Uxía. He's seen her before in dreams, guiding him into the endless darkness of an underwater pit surrounded by the fish eye symbol seen in the church. Chased out of the hotel by villagers, he hurts his leg jumping from his room. Paul spends many scenes in this film running or limping for his life. He sets fire, with the aid of a gas can, to some of his pursuers, all of whom speak a simple grunting Spanish. Turning into a fish man, evidently, compromises human vocal cords.
He runs into a human being, Ezequiel (Francisco Rabal, from Luis Buñuel's Nazarin and Viridiana, also Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse), an old man who relates what happened to the village decades ago when he was a boy. Ezequiel helps him try to escape in the octopus man's car. Paul by this point has been informed by the old man that Barbara and Vicki are dead. Paul saw Howard's skin (the villagers wear human skin masks) earlier. Ezequiel's report of the women's deaths is an assumption. Paul later finds them both after he's caught. Barbara urges him to kill her rather than let the god, or whatever it is, have its way with her.
Yes, Dagon requires a human female sacrifice now and then, fucking the victims somehow. Considering the god's behemoth body, it's hard to imagine how he (it) does this. Vicki, missing the lower half of her right leg, tells Paul that Dagon had its way with her. So horrified is she by her experience she plunges the first available knife into her heart.
Paul watches while Ezequiel is flayed alive by the priest and two henchmen, using gold-bladed knives. No one says, "This is how we make clothing in Imboco," but they may as well have done so.
Paul's about to get this treatment himself when Uxía wheels herself into the room, ordering Paul released to be her groom, preparatory to the two of them living an immortal sea life with Dagon. Paul, unbound, kills the priest and his assistants with a gold knife, kills more Dagon followers (all wearing human flesh masks) with good old gasoline and Barbara's trusty Zippo. Barbara, naked and chained by her wrists, gets lowered into a hole, her blood from cuts inflicted by a gleeful Uxía dripping into the dark water below.
Paul's violent interruption almost saves his girlfriend, but she drops into the water, winched up moments later by her boyfriend, who refuses to kill her as he'd never quite promised to do. Dagon appears, finally, a quick image of a multi-tentacled entity launching itself at the helpless woman about to be impregnated. Paul sees Barbara's bloody forearms and hands still depending from the manacles. Now there's really no hope for his relationship with her--they will never enjoy a life of riches derived from gold found off the coast of Spain.
Uxía presents her case for marriage, but Paul pours the remaining gas on himself, lights the Zippo. The half-fish, half-woman saves him. They both drop into the Dagon communication hole. Burned, Paul soon finds he can breathe underwater. The pair swim to the abyss surrounded by the fish eye symbol, going inside and disappearing from sight, a honeymoon blessed by the Old Ones, the Lovecraftian gods.
I feel as if I got too detailed in describing this movie. It's entertaining to the extent that many years ago when I saw it on the Syfy Channel (in an extensively edited form, removing nudity and excessive violence, like the skinning of Ezequiel) I was intrigued by it enough that I kept an eye out for it. Now that I've seen the uncut version, I give it a positive review. Its frantic pace, weird elements, its visuals and unsettling sounds, make for a good horror movie capturing some of Lovecraft's themes. The setting of a fishing village, on the surface seeming to be normal at first, makes the intersection of small town life with cosmic divinity a compelling contrast.
That the villagers switched from worshipping Christ (a deity associated with fish, with Pisces) to a different, older deity representing fish, eyes always open, as in an all-seeing god, shows the malleability of beliefs, especially when challenged by environmental or social change detrimental to once thriving communities.
Lovecraft's perspective, curiously, seems to have been one of a popular god (Christ) supplanted not by a new religion, but by an old one; a reversion to something that never went away, but maybe lay sleeping, waiting to wake up under the right conditions. Having died in 1937, it's a guess as to how Lovecraft would've fictionally treated the atom bomb, a new kind of "god" challenging the hope of Christianity and other major religions with a new form of dedicated destruction. The Old Ones, destructive in their own ways, share with the atom and hydrogen bombs, a lack of concern for human life generally speaking, as they use, on occasion--seen in this film--certain people to carry on with their godly essences.
Armless Barbara may be the mother of a human-divine hybrid, the Virgin Mary, so to speak, behind a new great religion.
Vic Neptune
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