Something Wicked: On re-watching Dagon and watching Blood Creek

[bruceb]

More film-triggered pondering, over at Moon Design:

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This is a tale of two movies that try to do fairly similar things, one of which succeeds. Dagon is a 2001 film directed by Stuart Gordon, Blood Creek a 2009 film directed by Joel Schumacher. Now, neither of those is a name to inspire a lot of confidence-Gordon tends to do schlocky stuff

Comments

[misterandersen]

Nazis are like the real world equivalent to orcs in that they are so obviously by definition evil that you're not only free but almost obligated to slaughter them in any way whoch takes your fancy,

[bruceb]

Yes, and I've gotten very deeply perturbed by any setup that suggests "oh, it's fine, all moral issues go away when you're fighting X". Also, I don't think it's wise to let a genuine real-world evil get associated mostly as a source of brains grafted onto monkeys and other impossible pulp science.

[misterandersen]

This is one of the reasons I'm so over WWII as a genre; it has literally been done to undeath.

Interestingly, it's typically just the Nazis thanks to Hitler's obsession with the occult. The Japanese were just as brutal and horrific as their German allies, but outside of historical simulation and the very odd RPG, they're largely ignored. It's like we have to feel some degree of sorrow / guilt / avoidance of them either because [the west] nuked them or because they're not white and it'd be racist.

Compared to the Nazis, whose racism we can safely punish to feel good about ourselves.

[bruceb]

This is me agreeing.

Of course one of the reasons Adventure was set in the 1920s rather than the '30s, even though that was really the boom decade for pulps, was that I wanted not to have Nazis as stock villains and argued that the '20s offered a good range of alternatives. You can credit Rich Dansky with working some consciousness-raising fu on me over the years.

[bruceb]

I'm imagining that recapping and smiling.

And very strongly agreed about steering, or not: I tend to think in terms of setting up interesting situations, which we all then riff on.

[doctorcaligari]

I often wonder if the reason for the, hrm, lack of subtlety in the way the *Shadow over Innsmouth* reveal (a favorite pulp story of mine, btw, as much because of the various ick factors as despite them) had anything to do with HPL's being afraid that subtlety would fly over the heads of his pulp audience...or its being the early '30's, and it actually being inconceivable to the typical reader of that time that the reveal regarding a narrator they've been accepting as POV for the whole story could ever actually be THAT.

Or if it's just HP being pulpy purple HP again.

BTW, it is my (nonscholarly) understanding that it was more Himmler than Hitler who had a thing for the occult -- that supposedly, Hitler himself took a dismally pedestrian view of such things. Of course, it's more fun for fiction to make it Hitler himself.

[bruceb]

Hard to say, about "Shadow", and likely several things all at once. You know how it goes.

Blood Creek doesn't actually invoke Hitler. The guy dispatched to set the story going works for an allegedly independent organization of scholars that might or might not be the Thule Gesellschaft with new letterhead. (Thule isn't named; it's just the vibe.) The end-scene revelation, though, is just great in a very pulp horror kind of way. I may swipe it for my own use sometime.