Dagon and Dagoth

[setsuled]

Watch on YouTube

On Wednesday, walking to and from work, I listened to The Shadow Over Innsmouth read by Dagoth Ur. It seemed an appropriate enough way to begin October. Dagoth Ur is the villain with a distinctive voice from the 2002 Elder Scrolls game Morrowind. Someone doing an impression of the voice has been uploading recordings of him saying or reading various things, including a number of HP Lovecraft texts in their entirety. It was funny at first but now I seem to be enjoying it unironically. Dagoth Ur, as a reader, hits a nice medium between performance and straightforward oratory. I like how he gives the colloquial speech of Zadok just a little bit of an accent instead of trying to extrapolate Lovecraft's theoretical, ancient New England dialect.

One of the obvious reasons The Shadow Over Innsmouth hasn't had a film adaptation that captures the novella's power is Lovecraft's ability to conjure mood through suggestion. The best example being the people of Innsmouth and their famous "Innsmouthian look".

He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm.

It would be difficult to show this in film without going too extreme or too subtle. The human mind has a powerful capacity to quickly rationalise the bizarre in real life but is less inclined to do so when watching a film. In prose, the reader can imagine the Innsmouthian look within his or her own conceptions of plausibility, within the realm in which one might reasonably expect a community of human/fish monster hybrids to live relatively undetected in a seaside American town for more than a century. That line is going to be different for everyone so it would be difficult to capture in film in a way that's as satisfying as Lovecraft captured it in prose.