Innsmouth has a strange reputation, and very few outsiders go there. The Shadow Over Innsmouth, written in 1931, is one of Lovecraft’s most exciting and terrifying stories, detailing an unnamed narrator (they’re always unnamed) as he goes on a genealogy tour of the Massachusetts fishing hamlet of Innsmouth.

For my money, Gordon’s Dagon, written by his longtime collaborator Dennis Paoli, is one of the more faithful adaptations of Lovecraft, and is the only “mainstream” movie to directly deal with the Cthulhu Mythos, on even a minor level. Lovecraft short stories, and in truth, the film is an adaptation of Innsmouth, though the ancient being Dagon does feature. “Dagon” is the title of one of the very earliest H.P. Gordon followed up Re-Animator with From Beyond, and he had meant to complete his Lovecraft trilogy with an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth in 1991, but that fell through for a decade until he made Dagon. Though he was not the first to bring a Lovecraft story to the screen (that would be Roger Corman with his 1963 movie The Haunted Palace), but it was Gordon’s 1985 films Re-Animator that ushered in a brief renaissance of Lovecraft movies, where the author’s name above the title would actually mean something, much the same way Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King’s still do. Gordon is rightly hailed as the father of Lovecraft cinema. Luckily, Vestron Video has released two quite different but certainly interesting films adapted from his work: Stuart Gordon’s 2001 movie Dagon, and Brian Yuzna’s 2003 movie Beyond Re-Animator. While great films have been made over the years, the vast majority of them are not very good, or don’t capture the Lovecraft spirit or sense of impending doom, especially with regard to his famed Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft‘s writing continues to be insanely popular and spark inspiration and creativity in other writers and artists, but it remains incredibly difficult to adapt him directly. Lovecraft’s stories that deserve to be big movies, and even why there aren’t that many direct adaptations. I’ve written about how various movies utilize his themes of cosmic nihilism and human insignificance, about Stephen King’s use of cosmic deities, about several of H.P. In Ugaritic, the word dgn means 'grain.I’ve written a lot about Lovecraftian horror for this publication.

Dagon has become a popular figure in recent literature, movies, and the fantasy-role-playing game genre.ĭagon's name appears in Hebrew as דגון (transcribed Dagon or sometimes 'Dagan'), in Ugaritic as dgn (probably vocalized as Dagnu), and in Akkadian as Dagana, Daguna.

Dagon and cthulhu