Dr. Alec Holland is a brilliant altruist with hopes of creating a serum that will feed the growing population of the world. An equally brilliant egotist, Dr. Anton Arcane, is bent on stealing the serum to extend his life into immortality. An explosion in the midst of the theft bathes Holland in both flame and his own formula. He flees into the swamp, left to die horribly and painfully by Arcane. But Holland’s genius and compassion survive in a monstrous body regrown from the plant life of the swamp composited with a scientific miracle. A body that can never again live among the humans Holland so wished to help.
I know I’m the resident comic book guy for The Cinematropolis, but I still think my first brush with the DC Comics character Swamp Thing came in the 1982 Wes Craven film. That said, until I recently rediscovered it, I probably hadn’t seen it since the mid-80s. In fact, the 1989 Return of Swamp Thing stands much taller in my memory, probably thanks to endless replays on HBO. I remember the original as tragic and heart-wrenching. I recall the sequel as an enjoyable two-fisted, monster-punching romp.
It turns out I was wrong on both counts.
In this month of discussing misunderstood movie monsters at The Cinematropolis, I’m here to tell you that nobody misunderstood Swamp Thing more than the filmmakers.
The first movie is Wes Craven careening drunkenly between action set pieces meant to prove to the studio that he could handle stunts and stars while stumbling over weird little character pieces illustrating the oddity and tragedy of life in the bayou. Make no mistake, pathos does bubble up like swamp gas, but in some ways, it’s as out of place as that same miasma’s smell would be in your living room.
For instance, situated between cheap-looking monsters and mediocre government agent, Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeu), barely surviving a series of attacks until she can take an inadvisable bath in the bog, there’s a truly heartbreaking scene. Swamp Thing in the burnt husk of his lab tries to mix an antidote for this monstrosity. Beaker after beaker shatters in his inhuman grip until breaks down into wordless, moaning screams of frustration. Screams echoed by my own spirit as I watched.
There is also a philosophical moment where Swamp Thing tells Arcane that the reason the serum transformed him into a powerful monster and Arcane’s henchman into a weakling one is that it augments whatever is already inside the person. The compassion of Holland becomes a strength, the cowardice of the hired gun becomes a weakness. It’s a fascinating thought and, even though there is no story- scaffolding put in place before this moment to support this massive statement, I nevertheless perked up at the idea of what might come from the magnification of Arcane’s evil intellect into monstrous proportions.
Unfortunately, what comes is an ill-made boar monster who grabs, of all things, a sword off the wall and hares off into the bayou to battle Swamp Thing.
Of all the inexplicable choices in this movie, the sword stands out.
Okay, okay, so maybe I remembered all the gut punch parts because they made such an impression on a younger me and the intervening decades amplified them in my memory. That’s not Craven’s fault, I guess, although that doesn’t make the actual movie any better. But what of the sequel? I remember Return of Swamp Thing as hilarious and action-packed. Sure, they took a tragic figure and turned him into a pulp hero (pun intended), but at least they did a good job of it, right?
Not so much. Once again, my recollections magnified the parts I liked and diminished the parts I did not. Dick Durock as Swamp Thing is actually a smiling opposite to his tortured former self in a way I find compelling. He’s grown into a man-monster that has found his place in the world as a protector of the swamp and battler of mutants.
But unfortunately, he’s surrounded by lecherous idiots, “funny” kid sidekicks, and mad scientists who look like they own a white panel van and offer kids candy on their way home from school. Heather Locklear is wooden. Louis Jourdan returns as a version of Anton Arcane that would have been more at home on an episode of James Bond, Jr. And that’s before we see a script that treats story beats as negative space, an absence only given shape by more competently told stories you’ve heard throughout your life.
Mission Improbable
And it didn’t have to be this way! If nothing else, you have hundreds of comics the character has appeared in since his creation in 1972, many of them by big names with big ideas and receiving critical acclaim. I guess there’s further evidence in a top-rated television series from the USA Network in the early 90s. I can’t testify to that one as I never saw a single episode and, honestly, can’t understand why anybody else has based on the words “USA Network” and “early 90s.”
Nevertheless, there’s a lot of potential here. A brilliant and loving mind trapped in a bestial, unlovable form. A serum that will amplify your essential self to monstrous proportions is a philosophical playground of terrors. A Greedy Monster or Beast of Self Importance is an obvious pull, but what does a Cowardice Monster look like? Or an Intolerance Monster? And since Holland inadvertently created the means for these creatures, he’s now a lonely protector against humanity’s darkest impulses given terrible life through his work. That’s real philosophical horror right there.
Or let’s take a more topical look. Humanity is overrunning the planet, destroying ecosystems and demanding more and more of its homeworld. Dr. Holland is about to make a breakthrough in green science that will feed the growing human population while lessening the demand on Earth. Obviously, your Monsanto stand-in can’t allow that and, in an attempt sabotage, the formula causes an accident that turns Holland into Swamp Thing. When the Eviler Monsanto realizes what they have in the stolen formula, their irresponsible experiments seep into the local populace and wildlife. A depressed and angry Swamp Thing must come out of hiding to fight the rot he senses at the heart of the ecosystem with which he now shares an empathic link. He’s an eco-warrior tied even more obviously and directly to nature’s survival than the rest of us. He’s both a protector and, as he reflects the damage done to the swamp in his own body, a cautionary tale. Environmental horror by way of Cronenberg.
Instead of this, we could see something that was horrifying on purpose!
You make a movie like either of those and then you can come back in a sequel to find a Swamp Thing grown comfortable in his role as Alec Holland, a hero to the Green. Only then you have a villain capture and dissect him to discover that there is no Alec Holland inside the Swamp Thing and never has been. The plantlife absorbed his sense of self and memories as it reacted to the serum, creating a mental simulacrum of Alec Holland.
Now you’ve got a movie just as capable of asking fundamental questions about personhood similarly to Blade Runner or its sequel. Imagine if those questions of being have bleak and nihilistic answers. I’ve got shivers just thinking about a Swamp Thing who decides to go on doing his quixotic duty devoid of humanity or heroism solely because doing nothing is the only thing worse than doing something useless. It’s an existential horror.
I admit I stole some of this idea from Alan Moore, but it could be worse. It could be Snyder’s Watchmen.
And if you didn’t want to make a horror film of Swamp Thing, the apparently insatiable hunger for pure superhero movies gives us an easy answer. Audiences would appreciate the main character with a natural, rural backdrop rather than a metropolitan or intergalactic one. And Swamp Thing would face very different threats than the Avengers, both within and without.
But instead of any of those options, Swamp Thing is a monster so metafictionally misunderstood that two entirely different movies left him neither truly horrific nor heroic. Whether they did so because of external pressure or an internal succumbing to mediocrity, they squandered all the potential while giving brief glimpses of what could have been. As is so often the case, the Swamp Thing movies fall prey to the monster that I most often see plaguing adaptations: the terrifying pile of squandered opportunities.
Think about it…won’t you?
