AS WE CONTINUE WITH OUR SERIES – Wes Craven – The Early Years discussions, we now draw our attention to his fourth outing in the director’s chair.

Swamp Thing would be the first non-Batman or Superman related live-action movie for DC and it would fall on the shoulders of Craven to turn this around.

It would follow Richard Donner’s Superman movies, so there were a lot of expectations resting on the films success.

Once pointed out by film critic, Roger Ebert that Swamp Thing was a thing of beauty if you knew where to look, which I can’t help but feel that he may have been referring to a certain scene involving its leading lady, Adrienne Barbeau (Escape From New York, The Fog).
Joining Barbeau in the cast would be a number of other faces, namely Ray Wise (Twin Peaks) and Louis Jourdan (Octopussy) the film drew heavily on the comics of the time and would generate another comic book series and even a sequel to the movie.

Essentially though, this was a ‘paint by numbers’ job for Craven who would took on the project to show Hollywood that he could handle set pieces and action sequences.

Essentially, it boils down to a man in a monster suit movie, arcing back to the days of Universal Monsters.

For more thoughts and views on Swamp Thing, check out the surgeons of horror podcast below.

https://player.whooshkaa.com/player/episode/id/98478?visual=true

Also available in iTunes.

– Paul Farrell