“What I like about your films more than anything is the humor. This film, Dagon, and with all due respect, the one thing that I noticed about this film is that it's a bit somber.” I asked Stuart Gordon at the CF3 Fest in Chicago on June 1, 2002.

     Gordon is the director of such just plain cool films like 1985’s Re-Animator and 1993’s Fortress.

     “I think it has it's funny moments, though.” Gordon responded. Rusty White and I sat in a corner of the lobby of the wonderful Gateway Theater. The festival in its first year was devoted to fantastic films. Dagon, Mr. Gordon’s latest offering would be screening at the Gateway that night. Lion’s Gate was nice enough to provide Rusty and I with screening copies so that we could speak intelligently (if possible) with Gordon about the picture.

     “Yes, that bit with the lock.” I said. Paul, the main character in Dagon, attempts to bar the door to his hotel room by employing a tiny dead bolt. Paul is played by Ezra Godden and is chased throughout the film by slithering fish folk.

     “Uh huh, that actually comes from the Lovecraft story. He gets into it; he has the guy do that in the story.” Said Gordon.

     Dagon is another H. P. Lovecraft adaptation for Gordon whose previous Lovecraft pictures include Re-Animator, Castle Freak, and From Beyond.

     “Yeah,” Gordon continued, “it's funny because it looks like such an insubstantial little lock, you know. But I think at that moment, my favorite moment there is when they [fish cretins] knock at the door and he [Paul] goes, ‘Can I help you?’ Because it's like, what do you do in a situation like that? If there's someone who is stalking around your house, you’re going to try to keep the situation as polite as possible.”

     “Godden, who plays Paul, looks a lot like Jeffrey Combs in the film, don’t you think?” I asked. Rusty and I both thought there was a resemblance. For those who don’t know, Jeffrey Combs is a tweaked actor similar to Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead). Combs has a face for horror films and comedy which makes him perfect for Gordon‘s comedic gore fests. Godden plays Paul in Dagon with black horn-rimmed glasses and a nerdish disposition ala Combs’ characterization of the mad-scientist-in-training Herbert West in Re-Animator.

     “It's funny, I’ve also heard that he looks like Bruce Campbell. At the time we were shooting, I never thought of him that way, because I think he's very different. He plays the role very differently than Jeffrey would have.” Gordon had heard this before. We critics (Rusty and I may qualify) tend to judge one movie or performance against another.

     “He didn’t seem to be as schizophrenic as Combs can be.” Rusty said.

     “Yeah, well he, he's actually a British actor.” Said Gordon.

     “Oh, really?” Rusty said surprised. Godden pulls off an American accent nicely in Dagon.

     “Yeah, and he did the whole movie with an American accent. It was so funny because he was never out of it. You know, as soon as we cut, he was right back to his real accent. But he is a big fan of the silent movie comic Harold Lloyd. And when I found that out, I said ‘why don't you play him as Harold Lloyd?’ That's where the glasses came from and a lot of the physical comedy.” Gordon told us.

     “So you didn’t originally have the glasses?” I asked.

     “No, it was not in the script.” Gordon answered. “Although once we decided to do it, I called Dennis Paoli and asked him if he could give us some glasses shtick that we can throw in. So, Dennis came up with some of the stuff like the glasses getting lost in the toilet bowl and things like that.”

     “The script, it was written 15 years ago, what did you have to do to bring it up to the current time?” I asked.

     “Well, the main thing we did was to reset it in Spain. The original story takes place in New England, where Lovecraft’s story was set in Massachusetts. I scripted Maine because it made it to be kind of a remote location. But when we discovered that Brian wanted to shoot it in Spain, I thought rather than pretending that we were in America, let's take advantage of being there. So, we did a lot of, I went and did a lot of location scouting, and we incorporated what I saw into the re-write.”

     “And the town?” I asked.

     “The town is really, it really looks like that. It's a very, on a cloudy day it can be a very creepy place. When the sun comes out it's lovely.” Gordan told us. The town is particularly creepy in Dagon especially early on in the film--clouds roll in above the sea-side village eerily setting the tone for things to come.

     “It's a very atmospheric place, with the shadows and the darkness.” Said Rusty.

     “We had a great director of photography, Carlos Suarez, and he really helped with the look. And we, also, had a great production designer named Llorenç Miquel who made the town look even more creepy--boarding up windows and stuff. One of the biggest things that we probably had was that we wanted to get rid of all the crosses; they had them all over the place. So, we had to figure out a way to turn them into tridents.”

     “Okay, fish, I told Rusty as we were driving up here that the thing that scares me most about fish is that they are in the water. How were you able to make the fish on land scary?”

     “It was funny, because the reason that this movie took so long to get made was that when we would tell people, a town where the people are turning into fish, they would laugh.” Answered Gordon. “They would say that's ridiculous, you can't make that scary, but Lovecraft manages in his story. We just followed his lead on that and there's something about the way Lovecraft was that he says, ‘all life came out of the water.’ So, the idea of going back into the water, a reverse evolution, is great, kind of creepy. But he also hated fish. That was the thing, Lovecraft would not eat, you know, if he went to someone's house and they were serving fish for dinner, he would just leave. He thought they were the most disgusting things on Earth.”

     “Rusty ate fish last night in your honor.” I said. We had shrimp at this cool Thai place with sweet squishy noodles.

     “Oh good, I like fish myself, you know.” Said Gordon, laughing.

     “You know, Howard Stern has a character on his radio show, kind of a strange person that they tie to a chair and they torture because he is scared of fish.” Said Rusty. “They had a boxing match yesterday and this guy sang America the Beautiful into a fish microphone and he was screaming and screaming at Howard, ‘no, no, no.’ I wonder if Lovecraft was this extreme?”

     “I think Lovecraft was, he used fish in a lot of his stories. He created the Deep Ones, and that goes into a lot of stories, over and over again.” Answered Gordon.

     “We read the very short story of Lovecraft’s also called Dagon on the way up here. A lot of the terror is hidden from the reader who is left to imagine things.” I said.

     “My film was actually based on that and another story which is called the Shadow of Innsmouth. I love that story, it's a great story, one of my favorite Lovecraft stories. In a movie, you have to get more specific. You have to put things in initial terms, you really have to show something. What I tried to do in this movie was to show enough so that the audience got the idea but not too much so that they got used to things.”

     “How do you go about getting a budget set for a film? What was the budget for Dagon?” I asked.

     “It was about 3 million dollars.” Answered Gordon. “It came from, the company that produced it was a Spanish company called Filmax. They raised the money through international pre-sales, which means that they went to other countries and sold it to the distributors in those countries before the movie was made.”

     “Like they did for Rambo.” Stated Rusty.

     “Yeah, a lot of my films have been done that way, Fortress and Space Truckers were produced that way.”

     “Space Truckers looked so good. What was the budget there?” I asked.

     “About 30 million to 28 million dollars. The biggest budget I’ve had.”

     “Was that a direct to cable? That‘s where I caught the film.”

     “Well, it was a theatrical film, and it was shown theatrical all over the world but here there was a fight between the Producers.” Answered Gordon. “So, you guys being attorneys know about this; it ended up sitting on the shelf for a year while they worked it all out. But Universal wanted to distribute it theatrically, but by the time the dust settled it was too late and it ended up getting a premier on HBO.”

     “I think it's your best work.” I said. A 1997 film, Space Truckers featured a heroic turn for Dennis Hopper who was joined by Stephen Dorff and a really yummy Debi Mazar.

     “Oh yeah, thank you.” Said Gordon.

     “I don't know how you feel about it but….” I started to say.

     “I liked it, it's a funny film I think.” Gordon stated.

     “It was a complete film. What you did was you had the first section with the doctor and the robot getting loose and everything and then it came full circle all the way back to the political subplot at the end. To me, that is what good sci-fi is all about. What's happened to modern science fiction anyway?” I said touching on one of my familiar themes.

     “Well, I think that every now and then there is some good stuff that's done, I wish that people would turn to books and the stories more than they do. Some of the best stuff has been like Philip Dick which Hollywood is afraid to do, but there's so many other writers out there.” Gordon was right. I wonder if he has caught Minority Report.

     “Did you catch that little documentary about Dick?” I asked.

     “No.” Gordon answered.

     “Yeah, The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick.” Said Rusty.

     “I just was on a project of Ray Bradbury, and wow, what a thrill that was--amazing guy. I got to know him when I was in theater in Chicago. We did The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and then got to meet him and we toured in Los Angeles and have been friends ever since.”

     “You know, they got a lot of bootleg copies of films over there.” I said motioning to the vendors area. As is not atypical at fan fest film festivals, you could actually purchase first run films (playing in theaters at the present time) on DVD and Video. “I noticed Battle Royale on DVD. I can’t even find that one on video anywhere in Atlanta. Maybe, they got one or two of your films in there.”

     “Yeah, if they’ve got Dagon in there then, yeah, I‘d be surprised.” Gordon responded. “Well, one of the funniest things that ever happened was one time I was at, I think it was a Fangoria Convention with Barbara Crampton. And when we had shot Re-Animator, she had it in her contract that there could be no still photographers on the set when we were doing her nude scene. So she's walking around and there's a guy selling 8x10's of her stretched out on the, yeah, she went over to him and it was the funniest thing I’ve ever saw. She said, ‘where did you get this?’ And he said, ‘uh…uh….’ She said, ‘How many of these do you have?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, I’ve got a few.’ She said, ‘Give them to me.’ He reaches down and pulls out a wad of photographs, like a stack, like a foot high, and hands them to her. She said, ‘I'm confiscating these, if I ever see you with them again, I will call the police.’”

     “The wrath of a woman.” I observed.

     “That's right. It was great to behold.” Stated Gordon.

     “The third Re-Animator film is in the making.” I said.

     “I think Brian Yuzna is going to start shooting it soon. I had nothing to do with that either.” Said Gordon.

     “There were a lot of great ideas in Bride of Re-Animator, but something didn’t just come together.” I said. Bride, also directed by Yuzna, is great eye-candy but lost my attention and failed to have the same eclectic over-the-top humor that made the first film so special.

     “You know, Bride was one of the first films that Brian directed. I think he's trying to feel his way a little bit.”

     “We were looking at Lovecraft films, and one of the movies that Rusty keeps mentioning that he liked was The Dunwich Horror. Have you seen that film?” I asked. Dunwich was made in 1970 and appears to be Curtis Hansen’s first writing credit.

     “Yeah, I have, I just got a copy of it on DVD.” Answered Gordon.

     “When it comes to Lovecraft, I find it easier to be scared by the Old Ones because the Old ones have a demonic twist.” Said Rusty. “I guess it's more familiar as opposed to the Deep Ones. I guess you ran into that a lot trying to get this movie made.”

     “Yeah, Lovecraft has got mythology, and he talks about a war between the Deep Ones and the Old Ones. That's what's really going on, they're trying to get control of the Earth. We're on opposing teams here.” Said Gordon.

     “The Devil is what scares the hell out of Rusty.” I chimed in. “I guess it scares the hell out of all of us.”

     “It's interesting because Lovecraft did not believe in the supernatural. So, the Devil never figured into Lovecraft's world.” Gordon informed me, a Lovecraft neophyte. Rusty shook his head affirmatively remembering the mythology.

     “There was a lot more analogies. It was my impression that these were beings from an alternate dimension.” Rusty observed.

     “Right.” Answered Gordon.

     “Within our dimension.” Continued Rusty.

     “I think he did some other planet.” Said Gordon. “They don't use space ships or anything like that. I think one of the things about Dunwich is that the movie was made shortly after Rosemary's Baby, and they were trying to link it up to that film as much as they could, which is why there is so much Devil stuff in the film, which really isn’t in the story. I think Lovecraft, in a lot of his stories, he had the legend of the story taking place thinking that it's ghosts or devils or this or that. Shadow of Innsmouth is about them being devils out of the ocean.”

     “What's next for you?” I asked.

     “I just executive produced a movie called Death Bed, which is going to be coming out in late August or September.” Answered Gordon. “It is Directed by Danny Draven, a very talented young director. It's about a haunted bed. I think it's a pretty scary movie. I'm about to start shooting a film called King of the Ants, which is, which it sounds like it should be about giant insects. It's really a kind of Reservoir Dogs movie about a house painter who becomes a hit man.”

     “It was a great pleasure.” I said, shaking Mr. Gordon’s hand.

     “Great talking to you guys. Pleasure meeting you both. I bet you got some great stories.” Gordon said.

     “Well, we talk to all kinds of crazy people, it's wonderful.” I said. Crazy can be wonderful, I thought.

     Although he is responsible for depictions of some pretty crazy things on film, in person, Stuart Gordon presented himself as a professional capable of handling many different genres by understanding the mythology (to borrow the term from our discussion) behind what makes the best of every genre work. Dagon is a film that Lovecraft fans will flock to because Gordon has taken the time to recreate the story and stay true to Lovecraft’s beliefs and theories.

     Rusty and I posed with Mr. Gordon for a few digital photos. Mr. Gordon kindly signed a few of the photos from our press kit. I’m really looking forward to King of the Ants. Perhaps, Gordon can bring to a hit man film the same zany energy that has become his trademark in the horror and science fiction arena.

Jonathan W. Hickman