Whatever You Do, Don’t Say “Cthulhu”

Dagon (2001) is both odd and wonderful. The wonderful part is that it is a more or less faithful adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story (“Dagon” and “Shadow over Innsmouth”). The odd is that it seems to be a Spanish TV production.

It stars Ezra Godden as a nerdy young new tycoon, vacationing in a sailboat off the Spanish coast with his girlfriend and another couple. It begins with him diving, discovering a cyclopean stone hole on the seabed. When he descends, he finds a beautiful mermaid (Macarena Gomez) who lures him close and then shows her monstrous teeth. But it’s only a dream, and he wakes up in bed with his girlfriend, Raquel Merono. But a storm is brewer going and they soon find themselves on the rocks. Worse, the woman from the other couple has her leg caught and bleeding. Her husband stays with her while Godden and Merono take the dinghy to the (strangely deserted looking) village they spot.

When they get to the village, they can’t find anyone to help. They find a church, but not a Christian church. The priest suggests that one of them should go to the next town where there’s a phone, while one goes out to the wreck in a fishing boat. Godden goes out to the wreck with some sullen fisherfolk, and discovers that it is empty. When he comes back the priest tells him his girlfriend will meet him in the hotel.

The hotel is disgusting, but also Godden starts noticing shambling, misshapen figures milling around, maybe forming a mob. And this is all before he hears the chanting: “Ia Ia Cthulhu fhtagn!”

Later he forms an alliance with Francisco Rabal, a Spanish character actor in his last role. Rabal is a drunk who claims to be the last human left in the village. Everyone else have given themselves to Dagon!

There is some very gruesome stuff in this movie (SPOILER - Rabal has his face slowly skinned off his skull), but some silly stuff too. In the hotel, Godden notices that there is no latch on the door, so as the weird mob slowly advances, he uses the screwdriver on his pocket knife to unscrew the latch on a cupboard and painstakingly screw it onto the door. There are a lot of scenes where he holds onto the knife with its 2-inch blade for protection. I don’t know if this is in the original stories, but it does remind you that Lovecraft was a sickly type, not strong or heroic.

I’ll leave out the rest of the spoilers, but mention that, while everyone around him is dying horribly, Godden almost gets away. Almost.

In conclusion, it doesn’t seem to matter much that this is made in Spain, except that the eldritch shambles mutter in a foreign language, and the village is called “Imboca”, Spanish for “Innsmouth.”