James Wan seems to be signaling that his once-unlikely comic book movie franchise, Aquaman, is getting an injection of genre themes that only a directorial maestro of movie scares such as himself can administer. Indeed, while little to nothing is known about the 2022-scheduled sequel outside of its titular reference to a “Lost Kingdom” (more on that in a moment), his name-drop, made in an interview with Total Film, evoking the seemingly-random Planet of the Vampires certainly feels like a wild, left-field tease, especially for a sequel that has been described in the past as having a more serious tone than its predecessor. “Aquaman 2 is very heavily inspired by Planet of the Vampires,” Wan said. “You can take the boy out of horror but you can never take the horror out the boy.” While there’s a level of cheekiness to his statement, there are some concepts to which it can aptly apply. Contextually, Planet of the Vampires was released in 1965, manifesting as a schlocky (even for its time) Italian space sci-fi product of director Mario Bava. The film centers on the ordeal of two exploratory spaceships, in which mysterious, unseen alien life on the surface of planet Aura possess the bodies of some crew members, even reanimating the corpses of those already dead. Thusly, the rapidly-dwindling population of unpossessed members are thrust into a desperate struggle for survival. The film was the kind of double-feature fodder typical of the time, glaringly showcasing its production’s limited resources, strictly-organic scene elements, minimal optical effects and creaky wooden spaceship sets. Yet, the “horror” within himself that Wan mentioned earlier is a far cry from anything even closely resembling Planet of the Vampires, having successfully manifested in modern watershed classics in the genre, going back to his big break in 2004 with the original Saw, which laid the groundwork for the popular 2000s-era sub-genre that is derisively referred to as “torture porn.” However, he also branched off into supernatural-centric offerings like 2007’s Dead Silence, and, more notably, the sequel-spawning 2010 film Insidious and 2013’s The Conjuring, which spawned an entire shared universe of horror films—that notably bears its name—consisting of direct sequels and prequels, along with spinoffs such as the Annabelle movies and The Nun, with more to come. Consequently, the hiring of Wan for a DC tentpole the scope of Aquaman was initially seen as a rather curious development, arguably akin to a scenario in which Ilya and Alexander Salkind hired The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper to head Superman instead of Richard Donner. So, how would such a campy film become relevantly compared to Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom? The answer potentially lies in the open-ended nature of its title, namely its reference to the Lost Kingdom. As Willem Dafoe’s Vulko explained in an expository scene in the first film, the planet’s ancient sea-dwelling people once lived continentally unified on the surface as a grand, prosperous society who enjoyed technological advancement during a time in which most of the world’s outsiders still thought the world was flat—notwithstanding some who, curiously enough, still do. However, complacency led to a disaster known as the Great Fall, in which misuse of the powerful Trident of Atlan created a wave of destruction that left their land shattered and sunken into the sea. Yet, the same catastrophe also imbued those people with the power to breathe underwater, resulting in the once-unified civilization becoming segmented into separate kingdoms—Atlantis, Xebel, Fisherman, Trench, Brine, Deserters, with the seventh one, the isolated Lost Kingdom, remaining an unseen mystery to the rest. Consequently, Wan has an open book for a potential horror-movie-inspired ordeal in which Momoa’s Arthur Curry/Aquaman has to protect Atlantis against possessed and/or zombified people from the Lost Kingdom. “Well, the first movie took a lot of people by surprise, right?” Wan said. “And that’s partially because they were not familiar with the comic book, which deals in this very lurid, strange world. People were taken aback that I didn’t throw all that stuff away and make a dark, heavy film. But I didn’t feel that would have been right for it. So, with the second film, I feel it will be easier for people to accept where we go because I’ve already laid the foundation.” Wan certainly has experience overcoming expectations, with 2018’s Aquaman having proven that he has a clear and widely accessible vision for superhero cinema. Indeed, in a bit of trivia that still manages to surprise, the film stands as the highest-earning film in Warner’s entire DC Extended Universe continuity of films, having grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide—a take that tops the $822.8 million made by its widely-regarded crown jewel, 2017’s Wonder Woman, and the $657.9 million of its subsequent underperforming team-up megamovie, 2017’s Justice League. Consequently, while many may not view Aquaman as the DCEU’s most prominent hero, he currently stands as its clear breadwinner, which makes his solo sequel arguably the continuity’s most crucial entry. Can a Planet of the Vampires style motif match such purported importance? Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is currently scheduled to hit theaters on Friday, December 16, 2022; a date safely distanced from the reach of the Delta variant and will hopefully remain unaffected by any other unwelcome pandemic developments.
