Aquaman director James Wan has long shown an interest in blending the superhero genre with horror. This intention was evident in the Blade film he pitched to Marvel several years ago, along with the Batman horror flick that he briefly considered. The filmmaker even claims to have pitched Arthur Curry’s solo debut as “a horror monster movie,” but in the upcoming Swamp Thing series, we could be seeing Wan’s clearest attempt yet to blend the two genres.
The Insidious helmsman will serve as executive producer on the DC Universe show, and in a press junket for Aquaman, Wan told Comic Book Resources that he intends to bring out the more Gothic elements of the comic book source material.
“We want to lean more into the Gothic horror/romance aspect of it. It’s a human story. Basically, it’s Beauty and the Beast. It’s about this guy struggling to find his humanity as he’s transforming and becoming more and more of a monster.”
Wan isn’t the first popular horror filmmaker to bring Swamp Thing to the screen, with A Nightmare on Elm Street director Wes Craven offering a campy take on the saga in his 1982 movie of the same name. Still, as evidenced by Aquaman and Furious 7, Wan is also a noted action movie fan, and it’ll be interesting to see whether these two sides to the producer’s taste come across in the eventual show.
In any case, Swamp Thing is set to launch exclusively on DC Universe some time this year, but in the meantime, Aquaman is still in the midst of a phenomenal run at the box office, with Wan’s flick currently sitting at a global gross total of $846.3 million. You can expect Arthur Curry to have more monsters to fight when the inevitable sequel comes along, but first, we’ll be finding out how Annabelle: Creation helmsman David F. Sandberg fares in the transition between horror and superhero cinema when Shazam! comes out on April 5th, 2019.