[COLUMN] Aquaman Reimagines Lovecraftian Horror as Triumphant Spectacle (Patreon)

At one point in James Wan’s Aquaman, the villainous Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) spots Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) and Mera (Amber Heard) in Sicily. “Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men,” he muses, a lyrical line leading into one of the movie’s big action set pieces. It’s also a direct quotation from The Call of Cthulhu, one of the core texts written by legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

This is not the only Lovecraft reference in Aquaman. Early in the movie, as lonely lighthouse keeper Thomas Curry (Temuera Morrison) shelters lost underwater princess Atlanna (Nicole Kidman), the camera zooms in on a snow globe containing a picturesque lighthouse. The globe rests on a book: The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft. “A lot of the sea monsters in this were very Lovecraft inspired,” Wan admitted, such as the tentacled Karathen (Julie Andrews) and the beasts that lurk in the Trench.

This makes a certain amount of sense. After all, director James Wan is still known primarily as a horror director. He established himself with Saw. Even his lucrative long-term partnership with Warner Bros. is rooted in the success of The Conjuring, which is perhaps the second most successful shared universe in contemporary cinema. Wan’s affection for the genre hasn’t gone away. Between Aquaman and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Wan directed Malignant.

The Lovecraftian influence even carries over into The Lost Kingdom. “I don't know how to stay away from horror, you guys,” Wan remarked at the launch of the film’s trailer. “So the Lost Kingdom, we will be introduced to a lot of creepy, scary, Lovecraftian looking characters. And ultimately that's what our heroes have to work together to stop this Lovecraftian universe from breaking through into our own world.” The Lost Kingdom even features an extended riff on At the Mountains of Madness, with Black Manta finding an ancient evil hidden in the ice caps. Wan recently confirmed that he’s working on an adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu.

Of course, Lovecraft is a good fit for Aquaman. The animated series Justice League devoted a two-parter, “The Terror Beyond”, to Aquaman (Scott Rummell) teaming up with Doctor Fate (Oded Fehr) and Solomon Grundy (Mark Hamill) to fight a Lovecraftian terror in what was also an homage to the Marvel Comics team The Defenders. There is a popular internet meme, predating the movie and riffing on the character’s perceived “uselessness”, that finds the superhero summoning Cthulhu.

Even in the comics, there has been a long history of overlap between the aquatic superhero and the works of one of America’s great horror writers. J. Michael Straczynski and Jesus Saiz’s Night Gods (The Brave and the Bold #32) finds Aquaman teaming up with Etrigan the Demon to stop the water birth of a Lovecraftian god. Writer Geoff Johns introduced the Lovecraftian monsters of “the Trench” to Aquaman mythology in the New 52 reboot.

However, Wan’s Aquaman is not a horror film. It is a crowd-pleasing blockbuster. It is big, bold, bombastic, and bright. There is never any sense of real peril or stakes, and the threat never seems existential. Indeed, Aquaman is one of the most flamboyant and colorful entries in the larger DC shared universe, and less overtly horrific than any of Zack Snyder’s trilogy: Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice or Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

As such, these Lovecraft references initially seem a little out of place. They are at odds with the tone of the movie. It would be easy to dismiss them as in-jokes or easter eggs, nice little references that exist at an intersection of both Wan’s earlier career and the character’s aquatic background. However, these allusions to one of the most famous and influential American horror writers ultimately tie into the themes of the larger movie in an interesting and insightful way.

Aquaman is a story about a lost king returning to reclaim his throne. Arthur is the firstborn son of Atlanna, the Queen of Atlantis. However, he was born out of wedlock and as a hybrid. He is both an Atlantean and a human. As a result, the throne of Atlantis passed to Orm (Patrick Wilson), Atlanna’s second-born son, the product of her marriage to Orvax. Orm seeks to unite the ocean kingdoms against the surface world. Arthur seeks to depose Orm to prevent further bloodshed.

Throughout Aquaman, there is a repeated emphasis on racial purity. Orm refers to his half-brother as “the half-breed abomination” and “a half-breed bastard.” When Arthur confronts Karathen to claim the trident of King Atlan (Graham McTavish), the first King of Atlantis, the beast describes him as “a half-breed” with “tainted mongrel blood.” In contrast, Orm sees himself as “the pureblood.” This is fairly racially charged language for a four-quadrant family-friendly blockbuster.

This isn’t just the dialogue. It is reflected in the casting. Arthur is part human and part Atlantean, but he is played by a Hawaiian actor who is also of German, Irish and Native American extraction. Momoa’s casting is quite far-removed from the blonde-haired and blue-eyed hero in the comics. Indeed, Aquaman gives Orm bleached blonde hair, a conscious choice that contrasts with both Wilson’s natural brown hair and the comic book character’s traditionally dark hair.

In this sense, Aquaman is engaging with one of the core recurring themes of Lovecraft’s work. Lovecraft was terrified by the concept of “miscegenation”, of the blurring of racial boundaries. This was not just a metaphorical fear. Lovecraft was a well-documented racist, and his influence on American horror fiction casts a long shadow. In November 2015, the World Fantasy award remodeled its trophy in acknowledgement of Lovecraft’s tarnished legacy.

Lovecraft’s stories are populated with accounts of monstrous crossbreeding, of human beings mating with grotesque creatures to create horrific nightmares. “One way to read the Cthulhu mythos is this fictionalized version of the fragility of white supremacy,” argued author Matt Ruff in February 2016, “and Lovecraft’s fears about that, and his need to be on guard against miscegenation and race mixing and democracy and liberal ideas about all people being created equal.”

The 2010s saw something of a reckoning with these beliefs. Lovecraft is a massively influential author. His horror stories are classics. However, there is a question about how best to engage with those ideas when they are transparently rooted in racist ideology. It’s no coincidence that people began to ask these questions about Lovecraft’s work as the United States became more willing to acknowledge and confront the ways in which a history of racism is entwined with larger culture.

In recent years, there has been an attempt to play with Lovecraft’s ideas in a way that acknowledges this subtext: Providence by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrow, Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark, Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. James Wan’s Aquaman might be a bit less direct than many of these titles, but it is still part of the larger conversation. Wan has openly acknowledged that it was a conscious choice to put the words of "this talented xenophobe” into the mouth of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

However, Wan’s engagement with Lovecraft runs a bit deeper than that. After all, it’s interesting that Wan chooses to include The Dunwich Horror. After all, there are more obvious allusions that could be made to other Lovecraft stories. For example, The Shadow over Innsmouth features a seaport town in which the human inhabitants have been crossbred with “the Deep Ones” to produce a race of aquatic monstrosities. It would seem like a good fit for Thomas and Atlanna’s love story.

However, The Dunwich Horror has a couple of interesting parallels with the plot of Aquaman. Like Aquaman, The Dunwich Horror is the story of two brothers. There is a seemingly human man named Wilbur and a grotesque monster, both born of a union between a human woman named Lavinia Whateley and the god Yog-Sothoth. That parallels Arthur and Orm. In The Dunwich Horror, Yog-Sothoth created these children as a bridge between two worlds, to summon it into reality.

Aquaman is also about the intersection of two worlds. Arthur notes of his parents, “Their two worlds were never meant to meet, and I was a product of a love that never should've been.” Thomas argues that Atlanna wanted the same thing from Arthur that Yog-Sothoth wanted from its children, “She believed you'd be the one to unite our two worlds.” Mera urges Arthur, “You think you're unworthy to lead because you're of two different worlds. But that is exactly why you are worthy.”

However, while Lovecraft believed that this sort of hybridization and crosspollination was the stuff of apocalyptic nightmares, horror that could drive men mad, Aquaman instead reframes these themes as triumphant and crowd-pleasing public spectacle. Lovecraft’s protagonists were often horrified to discover their racial impurities. For Arthur, that diversity is ultimately a source of strength. What terrified Lovecraft becomes a cause for celebration. What was horrific becomes beautiful.