In the movie Aquaman, a flashback reveals that Arthur Curry’s dad had been reading the HP Love
In the movie Aquaman, a flashback reveals that Arthur Curry’s dad had been reading the HP Lovecraft novel the Dunwich Horror at some point, or at least was using it as a place to store his lighthouse snow globes.This makes for an odd choice of reference by director James Wan, as despite Lovecraft writing a ton of work involving underwater beasties, he decided to reference the book about rural New Englanders getting up to mischief by crossbreeding with magic space-monsters instead.I mean, thematically there are a ton of works that would fit more, the short story Dagon for example (dude gets lost at sea, washes up on a previously sunken island with a bunch of creepy fish statues on it), the Temple (WW1 German submarine gets stuck travelling deeper and deeper into the ocean, until they find the titular Temple…), or the Shadow Over Innsmouth (dude goes to a town of fish people in New England, is menaced, discovers that he is one), as three examples.Hm, I guess that while the plot of Aquaman is something of an inversion of the Shadow… (the movie featuring a guy who learned he was part fish-person early in his life, and rather than deciding to join the fish people to destroy the surface world like in the novel, he fight his racist half-brother to prevent him doing just that), Lovecraft being Lovecraft it IS racist against Pacific Islander people, two of which in real life include both Arthur’s actor Jason Mamoa and his character’s father Tom, played by Temuera Morrison.Oddly while the racism is mentioned within the original story as the explanation for why surrounding towns disliked the people of Innsmouth, due to their being of partial Pacific Islander descent, the content of the story suggests that the racists are actually right? Urgh.Either way, it’s an odd choice. Like if someone had a vampire movie and in one shot had a meaningful shot of Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm, which while a story by THE vampire novelist is a story that has no vampires in it. -- source link
#anotated dc#aquaman#horror fiction#dc comics