James Mangold Compares His SWAMP THING Movie to ROBOCOP and Calls It a "Noir, Mystery, Horror Film

James Mangold has offered some additional details and thoughts on the Swamp Thing movie that he’s developing for DC Studios. The filmmaker previously described the movie as a “very simple, clean, Gothic horror movie.” He also explained that the movie is inspired by the classic Frankenstein story. Whent talking about approaching James Gunn and Peter Safran about the idea of making the movie, he told ComicBook:

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.

The filmmaker went on to say he has no agenda of building a cinematic universe for Swamp Thing, he just has a story that he wants to tell. He compares it to RoboCop,:

It’s no different speech than anyone else gets with me; I don’t have any agenda for a universe, I’m not building towards someone joining in some future. Have at it, but I’d just be interested in telling, 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.

Mangold went on to say that he likes the idea of making Swamp Thing a “noir, mystery, horror film about a guy who wakes up and he’s this thing.” He added:

“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.”

I absolutely love the direction that Mangold is looking to take the story, and this is going to be an awesome Swamp Thing film!