Director Stuart Gordon is much lauded for two adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, the incomparable Re-animator (1985) and its follow-up From Beyond (1986) but they weren’t the only times he took a crack at the writer’s work. As well as Dreams in the Witch-House, a 2005 episode of the Masters of Horror (2005-2007) television anthology series, there was also Dagon (2001). Lovecraft’s original story (first seen in the November 1919 edition of The Vagrant magazine) is a slight work running to barely 2200 words, hardly enough to make another television episode, so screenwriter Dennis Paoli (returning from Gordon’s previous adaptations) took the name of the story but for the bulk of his script he chose to adapt Lovecraft’s 1931 novella The Shadow over Innsmouth instead – fittingly enough as that story had featured a sect dedicated to the worship of Dagon who play a key role in this film adaptation.

While on a sailing holiday off the coast of Spain with his girlfriend, Barbara (Raquel Meroño), and their friends Vicki (Birgit Bofarull) and Howard (Brendan Price), Paul Ward (Ezra Godden) is haunted by a nightmare of an encounter with a mermaid-like creature that lunges at him with razor-sharp teeth. He doesn’t have a great deal of time to think about it before their boat is driven onto rocks by a sudden storm. Vicki is badly injured and trapped below deck and while Howard stays with her, Paul and Barbara set off in a dinghy to look for help. While they’re gone, Vicki and Howard are attacked by an unseen creature that rises out of the sea and boards the stranded vessel. Making landfall, Paul and Barbara find themselves in the seemingly deserted fishing town of Imboca, eventually finding a nervous priest (Ferran Lahoz) who helps secure then, a boat to return and rescue their friends. Paul finds the yacht deserted and returns to the village to find that Barbara too has gone missing. Later that night, the street fill with strange figures, part human, part fish, who shamble through the streets pursuing Paul into a tannery full of human skins, where he finds Howard’s remains. With the help of town drunk Ezequiel (Francisco Rabal) he pieces together the truth – years before during a lean fishing season, Captain Orpheus Cambarro (Alfredo Villa) had persuaded the locals to worship Dagon, a sea deity who gave them great wealth, but at a cost – the townspeople were to perform blood sacrifices and turn over young women for Dagon to breed with. With the town now overrun by Dagon’s offspring, the latest sacrifice is being prepared by Uxia (Macarena Gómez), the mermaid from Paul’s dreams ad a high priestess in the Esoteric Order of Dagon – and Barbara is to be the next victim.

The producer on the first two Gordon/Paoli/Lovecraft films had been Brian Yuzna who, in the years since From Beyond, had made his directorial debut with the startling “body horror” satire Society (1989) before decamping to Barcelona in Spain to set up his own production company, Fantastic Factory, and imprint of the well-established Filmax. It was to Yuzna that Gordon turned for financing for his new Lovecraft film, which explains the change of setting from Lovecraft’s Innsmouth, a former seaport in Massachusetts, to a remote village on the Spanish coast, and the predominantly Spanish cast.

Meroño, a popular Spanish television star, having appeared in almost 400 episodes of the teen drama Al salir de clase between 1998 and 2000 does a decent job in the imperilled heroine role though she’s written out of much of the middle of the film, returning as a sacrificial victim in the closing stages. British actor Godden (who went on to play Walter Gilman – how apt! – in Dreams of the Witch-House) is a bit too bland to make an effective lead, seemingly modelling his look and mannerisms on Jeffrey Combs in Re-Animator, and Spanish veteran Francisco Rabal, appearing in his last film role, relates an all-important flashback filling in the back story in such heavily accented English that he’s almost incomprehensible – subtitles are a must. But the real star is Macarena Gómez as Uxía Cambarro, her extraordinary, wide-eyed looks perfect for playing a supernatural creature like the murderous mermaid priestess of a cult dedicated to an ancient sea deity.

There’s an eeriness to the first half of the film that isn’t quite sustained into the second, but Gordon compensates with some gore and a relentless piling on if weird and uncanny incident. The scenes of Paul being pursued through the streets of Imboca (actually the town of Combarro, in Pontevedra, Galicia) are atmospherically lit by cinematographer Carlos Suárez and Gordon gets maximum suspense from shadowy, not-quite-right figures lurking in the pouring rain. Fittingly, water is everywhere in Dagon, from the constant downpours to the damp and leaking hotel rooms, from the sea itself to the well in the sect’s ritual room from which the octopus-like Dagon eventually emerges.

Unfortunately, while Dagon is realised in some shots by practical effects, Gordon chose, unwisely, to use CGI for some shots, notably of Uxia transformed into her natural mermaid state and of Dagon’s tentacles reaching up the well to claim a victim, shots that really don’t work given how primitive the state of CG was in 2001. The crudeness of the effects detracts from the carefully constructed atmosphere of the first half of the film. Dagon is not at its best during the effects scenes anyway, but when it’s following Paul and Barbara around those claustrophobic streets and it’s a shame that Gordon felt the need to go against Lovecraft’s tendency to not really describe his monstrosities. A barely glimpsed Dagon would have been preferable to the good look we get at it here.

Dagon seemed to baffle critics when it first opened. They often complained that it was too “relentless” or flirted dangerously with “camp” but it’s fared better as time has gone along and was always quite warmly received by fans who appreciated its eerie atmosphere and its attempts to bring some of Lovecraft’s much loved Cthulhu Mythos to the screen. Unfortunately, despite doing reasonable business at the box office, Gordon wouldn’t get to build on it in any further adaptations – he would only get to make three more films, King of the Ants (2003), Edmond (2005) and Stuck (2007), before his death in 2020 at the age of 72. although his reunion with Paoli and Yuzna never quite scales the heights of Re-animator or From Beyond (or even Castle Freak (1995) which is a Lovecraft film in all but name), Dagon is an often under-appreciated addition to the small canon of Lovecraft adaptations, a fine effort that it might be argued does a better job of capturing the essence of Lovecraft that it’s better-known predecessors.