DEEP ONES(1936)

SOURCES: "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H. P. Lovecraft (1936)

DESCRIPTION: “And yet I saw them in a limitless stream - flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating - urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal ... and some were strangely robed ... and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head. I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly wed tar articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.” ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H. P. Lovecraft)

NOTES: The Deep Ones are a race of humans who change in adulthood into fish-frogs. This is because the inter-bred with a strange race of fish-men from Ponape decades ago.They live in Innsmouth, MA. within tight families such as the Marshes. They worship the Great Old Ones through their church the Esoteric Order of Dagon. The town of Innsmouth and Devil's Reef, just off shore, were blown up by the government in 1936. The Deep Ones may worship or be related to Dagon, a gigantic fish being.

HISTORY: The inspiration for the Deep Ones is pretty easy to trace: "Fishhead" (1911) by Irwin S. Cobb and The Moon Pool (1918) by A. Merritt. The Deep Ones continue to be written about. August Derleth uses them in The Trail of Cthulhu (1962) and other stories. Fred Chapel wrote Dagon in 1968. Most recently James A. Moore's novel Deeper (2008). Deep Ones appeared briefly in the rather confused film Cthulhu (2007). The best thing in the entire movie ia long shot of Deep Ones on a beach. The other 120 minutes....