Dragonhead is a Lovecraftian film that doesn’t really know that it’s a Lovecraftian film. If the original author of the manga, Minetaro Mochizuki, isn’t a fan of Lovecraft, then he’s done a startingly good job of invoking some of his themes.

I should mention that this review has total spoilers for the movie, so be warned.

What’s it about? A class of Japanese students are riding back from a field trip aboard a commuter train, when a sudden earthquake collapses large parts of the tunnel and causes the deaths of everybody aboard – except for three students. Two of them remain relatively sane; the third, a perpetually bullied Testuoesque weenie, apparently decides that there’s no better time to into a psychopathic fugue than when there’s no possible way to escape him. While the two sane kids are trying to find a way out, he’s building a shrine out of the dead bodies of the people who made fun of him; while they’re trying to get food and an escape route, he’s covering himself in pseudo-tribal markings with lipstick. Both of the sane kids – Teru and Aku – are injured, hungry, thirsty and delirious with fear, while Nabuo avenges his mistreatment by proving that he deserved every single minute of it. Meanwhile, the tunnel’s growing unnaturally hot…

I have to admit a certain prejudice here; I read the first three parts of the manga before I saw the movie, and was irritated with both the glacial pacing of the story and Nabuo’s madness. Nabuo struck me as a good example of a bad villain; he’s tedious, irrational, mortally aggrieved over his mistreatment and only scary because “ooooh, he’s nuts.” Tetsuo had some depth as a character beyond just being a stereotypical weenie; Nabuo’s just irritating.

What kept my interest in the manga was an offhand comment by one of the characters – that before the train entered the tunnel, they thought that they saw a weird cloud in the distance, just for a second, and maybe a red light. It’s an excellent example of suggesting something sinister, and then letting the reader do the rest of the work himself – the same way that Jacob’s Ladder let you catch a glimpse of something strange, but never enough to let you be sure of what it was.

The movie really becomes interesting once the kids manage to find their way out of the tunnel, at around the forty-minute mark. When they reach the surface, Japan isn’t there anymore; just an endless sea of gray, volcanic ash and a steady snowfall of same. There’s no sun, just billowing gray clouds. There’s no landmarks, no trees, no roads, no nothing – nothing but ash. It looks approximately like this:

The strength of Dragonhead isn’t in its stories, or in its characters; as a matter of fact, its two main characters are pretty much featureless blanks. Teru wants to get back to see if his family is okay, while Aku follows Teru, or perhaps chases after the carrot on the stick that’s been attached to her forehead. Also, they both stumble fall down a lot, usually to express the complex emotion of “stumbling and falling down”. It’s very difficult to relate to them as people.

The real strength of Dragonhead is in its set pieces. For instance, when they finally find civilization, the first thing that they meet are a group of townspeople who who regret their arrival – they’ve been killing their own on a regular basis, and Teru and Aku arrived just in time to fit into the schedule. The National Defense soldiers who arrive in the nick of time to rescue them are just as odd – one’s panicked and hysterical, the other is smugly content to watch everybody die. The Dragon’s Head of the title is the massive underground lava network that’s erupted everywhere – and the resultant magnetic pulse is driving everybody insane.

The world’s been destroyed, everybody’s insane, people are being ritually sacrificed for no particular reason – Lovecraft’s vision in a nutshell. If you want to see what the return of the Great Old Ones might look like, you can rent this movie and see. (One of the soldiers even suggests that madness is mankind’s natural state, and that the magnetic disruptions are simply a return to the way things are supposed to be. At least, that’s what I got from the translations.)

But it’s the quiet moments that are the most creepy. The highlight of the movie comes around its middle, when Teru, Aku and the soldiers discover a pair of children in in an underground shelter. There’s helium balloons everywhere, chocolate, candy – but the children’s shaved heads show signs of massive brain surgery, and they pay no attention to their parents, now dead and dying. Their father operated on them to remove their sense of fear entirely, resulting in children who can feel no emotions at all – their father’s gift to survive in the post-eruption world. There’ve been dozens of ham-handed attempts by horror directors to use the trappings of childhood to creep people out, but it’s never, ever worked quite so well as it does here. The warm yellow light seems claustrophobic and sickly; the balloons shroud the bodies of the dead parents, crowding the room with their rotten colors and empty plastic space; the kids simply play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on a piano, mechanically, without real interest.

There’s other moments. A confrontation on a bare bluff ends with a sudden, localized volcanic eruption, transforming the yellow hues of the scene into a gray, ashy hell. Visibility drops to zero in seconds, broken only by the sudden flare of lava bombs smashing into the ground. A helicopter ride allows us to meet a few other survivors, and to realize just how much the magnetic pulse has screwed everybody up. Some are catatonic, some cautiously hopeful, but nobody feels normal. It doesn’t last as long as it should, and it seems like there should have been some narratives from the other people to fill in some gaps; it’s a moment that feels like it should have been filled in.

The movie doesn’t really end so much as it (I assume) outpaces the manga. The survivors who have gathered in Tokyo have found food, but it’s some kind of experimental foodstuff found in a bomb shelter that contains a mood-flattening drug, turning everybody into the same sort of disinterested zombie as the children. This is as about as close to a message as the movie comes to, which is kind of lame. (Is it better to be scared out of your goddamn mind all the time than to be a zombie? Couldn’t we just find a happy medium by popping a couple of Xanax, or something?)

The movie ends with a spectacular sequence in which an enormous volcano bursts from underneath Tokyo, as Teru and Aku watch from a distance; and there’s a narrated conclusion which basically declares that they may or may not continue to live, depending on if they can continue to stumble and fall down fast enough to get away from the volcanos.

At one point, I believe that some guys at Pagan Publishing were discussing creating a project involving playing in a world where the Great Old Ones were rising – one scenario was about a principal who decided to start shooting schoolchildren in order to spare them the horrors to come, while the PC teachers decided what to do. Dragonhead has the same feel to it – the world has come to an end, the survivors can’t trust each other, there’s almost no information or mass communication and the devastation is total. If you’re looking for an inspiration for a Call of Cthulhu game, or just want to see some creepy scenes spread along the semblance of a plot, it’s worth checking out. I’d Netflix it, though.

One other thing: There’s a good review of the movie contained here, which is well worth your time. I also have to thank this review for pointing out that Teru and Aku tend to be a little clumsy on their feet.

-Darren MacLennan