Swamp Thing is my most anticipated upcoming show on Warner Bros.’ new streaming service, DC Universe. I’m a huge fan of the Alan Moore reinvention of the character in the 80s, and while he’s previously come to the screen courtesy of Wes Craven in 1982, it’s safe to say that film didn’t exactly capture the mystic horror of the character that Moore pulled off so well.
With a projected release date of sometime in 2019, the show has already started its shoot and now, we finally have the first set photos to feast on. Seen below are stars Andy Bean and Crystal Reed, who’re playing Alec Holland and Abby Arcane. Don’t get too used to Bean’s face, though, because very early on in the show he’s destined to meet a terrible fate that transforms him into the monstrous plant-monster Swamp Thing.
My fingers are crossed that the first season will tackle some of the themes that Moore introduced when he reworked the character’s origins. If it does, we’d see Holland spending much of the season searching for a way to regain his humanity, only to realize that he’s not a man who’s been mutated into a plant, but a plant with the memories of a man. From then on you can introduce the fact that his powers connect him to the ‘green,’ making him practically godlike in his connection to the environment.
The comic goes to some pretty gruesome areas while dealing with this, but given that the series is going to be a “hard R” according to showrunner Gary Dauberman, they should be able to translate the horror perfectly. In fact, here’s what he had to say about that not too long ago:
Because we’re doing it through the DC streaming service, they really pushed us, although they didn’t have to push hard, for us to go as extreme as we could. We really took our inspiration from the Alan Moore run in Swamp Thing, this landmark I think run. Fans of that series will know it gets pretty weird and extreme and scary. We really wanted to live up to that standard that Moore set up back in the ‘80s.”
Let’s just hope that the next leak we see shows off the Swamp Thing costume, eh?
