Swamp Thing director compares his movie to Frankenstein and RoboCop

One of the more surprising and also intriguing projects from the upcoming rebooted DC Universe is James Mangold's Swamp Thing. While everything else seems to be aiming for a more traditional superhero audience, this is supposed to be more of a horror movie without obvious connections to the rest of the universe.

Speaking to ComicBook.com, Mangold explains how the project came to be as he called James Gunn to ask him if he would be interested in "making a gothic horror film" based on Swamp Thing:

"Basically, the second I heard DC was going through some leadership convulsion and James was taking over, I just saw it as an opportunity to throw my hat down in the most — I mean I just called them and I said, 'In all the stuff you're doing, if the idea of me making a gothic horror film, origin story of Swamp Thing fits in, tell me."

It turns out Mangold also has a pretty unique view on the character Swamp Thing, and compares him to both Frankenstein and RoboCop, perhaps giving us some indications on what to expect from the movie:

"I've always been interested in doing a version of Frankenstein, basically, and, yet, I feel, 'It's alive!' has been done enough, but Swamp Thing always occurred to me as this wonderful version of a Frankenstein story, much in the way one of my favorite pop films of growing up, Robocop, the original one. This guy who just wakes up and he's been turned into, he finds he's become this machine, was also something I was fascinated with with Logan, obviously."

He continues by explaining that he is going for a "horror-noir film", and the fact that the character doesn't really know who he is, is a part of the story:

"There's an amnesiac quality of, 'How did I get here and who did this to me?' So I'm envisioning a horror-noir film following a creature that can't be seen, trying to piece together from fragments of memories, what happened and who did it. And none of this runs counter to the Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson and all the great work that went on...I'm just framing it up in a new movie context, but that's all they were exploring in these comics and so beautifully."

Sounds like we're in for a treat. The first movie in the new DC Universe is Superman: Legacy, which premieres in July 2025. Swamp Thing doesn't even have a planned release year yet, but late 2025 or 2026 is a reasonable guess.