The Return of Swamp Thing (1989)

As previously reported, there was much ado about Swamp Thing between the 1982 release of Wes Craven’s film adaptation and its belated 1989 sequel—on the back of that original movie, DC relaunched the comic series, and a year or two into that run, it was given to Alan Moore, John Totleben, Stephen Bissette, Rick Veitch, et. al., who reinvented the character through their journeys into “Sophisticated Suspense.” The opening credits for The Return of Swamp Thing features a montage of comics covers from the entire series run, showcasing striking images by Totleben, Bissette, Richard Corben, and character co-creator Bernie Wrightson, among others—playing over that montage is, of course, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou”, indicating that the tone of this movie is probably nothing like those comics. Nor is it anything like Wes Craven’s movie, which was sincere to a fault, while, for better or for worse, this doesn’t have a sincere bone in its swamp debris body.

Swamp Thing (1982)

1982 turned out to be one of the most influential years in genre filmmaking, hosting movies that reverberated whether they were an initial box office success or not. In a time when ET, Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and Poltergeist all premiered within weeks of each other, there was also John Carpenter’s The Thing, a critical and financial failure at the time that nonetheless ushered in a new wave of revisionist monster movies, taking the ideas from the classic creature features of the fifties and revitalizing them with dark humour and special effects that realized or exceeded people’s imaginations. Later that same year you also saw Q -The Winged Serpent, another movie in that vein, but the real kick-off for this trend was Wes Craven’s adaptation of Swamp Thing—and while just as indebted to the classic tropes of the old monster movies as The Thing (and was also a financial disappointment at release, leaving Craven in career doldrums until he started working on something called A Nightmare on Elm Street), it represents a very different sort of revisionist take. While The Thing took the paranoia and unknowable monstrosity of its fifties predecessor (and the short story it’s based on) to its utmost extreme, Swamp Thing is a movie about a tragic accident of science, as many of the classic monsters were, who then becomes a hero, playing into the sympathies of a whole generation who questioned why the Creature From the Black Lagoon and Frankenstein had to die before the movie ended.

Monster Multimedia: “It”

We have now entered It Month, where every post will be about its across the ages. Please be forewarned, though, that this does not include Cousin Itt, because it’s an Itt and not an it. Got it?

I wrote about Theodore Sturgeon’s “Killdozer!” two-and-a-half years ago, but as I mentioned in that post, it’s not the only influential monster story he wrote during his early years, but it is the only one with a title on the level of “Killdozer!” On the other hand, while “Killdozer!” has many singular fixations in the history of monster stories, Sturgeon’s 1940 short story “It” (starting the trend of excitable one-word titles that separate his work from the rest) has been imitated, or outright plagiarized, since it debuted—it is the story that introduced the world to the idea of an animate mass of vegetable matter stalking the wilderness, an idea that seems so obvious that you’d think it’d been around for all of recorded literary history. But it was in fact one of Sturgeon’s many innovations, and while the story itself is simpler than than much of his later oeuvre, it’s also one with a selection of strange ideas that raise it up past a basic pulp horror story, including giving us the perspective of the monster “It”self.