If you like tentacle-based body horror then James Wan’s Swamp Thing, which is set to debut on May 31st on the DC Universe streaming network, will be right up your alley. The full trailer reveal for the limited run show is nothing like the original 1980s movies at all.
The minute and 46 second long trailer doesn’t reveal or giveaway anything. It’s extremely cryptic (which is a good thing), leaving viewers desperately trying to figure out what the heck is going on. It’s impossible to tell who is good or bad in the trailer, but we definitely find out that a lot of people seem to end up on the wrong end of some horrific looking body-mutilation, which completely took me by the surprise. You can check out the trailer below, courtesy of FilmStop Trailers.
So the trailer avoids showing any of the aftermath or any of the outcomes from the tentacle-vines that seem to lace their way through animate and inanimate objects alike.
The brief clip at the beginning of the trailer where we follow the vines weaving in and out of the water like a shark on the prowl is really cool effect. We later see these vines poking and prying through a mutilated cadaver, which it manages to revive and raise up off a cold steel slab. The effect for the monster looks like something akin to the practical effects from John Carpenter’s The Thing.
There’s a lot of little glimpses of this kind of disturbing imagery sprinkled throughout the trailer in all the right ways.
The beginning clip of what looks like a guy hacking and sawing at someone’s limbs inside of a dank, decrepit house would have made most people think that this was an Eli Roth flick, but the combination of fantasy elements and the appearance of Swamp Thing at the end of the trailer dashes those expectations.
But speaking of expectations… the full trailer actually easily exceeded what I was expecting from the series. It’s actually much better. Hopefully the shortened order of episodes from DC wasn’t the company prematurely etiolating Swamp Thing before it had a chance to shine.
It’s very possible that they cut the episodes short to get people hooked and then they’re planning to go for something bigger and better next season, or it’s because the show is hot garbage and they’re trying to spare themselves the embarrassment from the cast and crew. However, it’s hard for me to see how the show could fail looking as solid as it does in the trailer. It would take an extra measure of incompetence to make something like that fail.
Anyway, you can look for Swamp Thing to air in full on the DC Universe streaming service starting May 31st.
