First teaser for new Swamp Thing TV series brings on the straight-up horror

DC Universe has dropped the first teaser for its forthcoming TV adaption of Swamp Thing, and tonally it feels more like a horror film than your standard comic superhero fare. And that makes sense, given that one of the executive producers is Aquaman director James Wan, who brought us The Conjuring and Insidious franchises and (just last week) The Curse of La Llorana.

(Spoilers for the DC character below.)

The original Swamp Thing character was created in 1971 by comics writer Len Wein as he was riding the subway in Queens. ("I didn't have a title for it, so I kept referring to it as 'that swamp thing I'm working on.' And that's how it got its name," he told Wizard Entertainment in 2004.) Swamp Thing has had several human incarnations over the ensuing decades, but the best-known is Alec Holland, a scientist who invents a formula to solve the world's food-shortage problem. A criminal organization sets fire to his secret facility in Louisiana and he runs burning into the swamp, drenched in his own bioreactive formula and presumed dead.

Thanks to that formula, the swamp's plant life is imbued with his consciousness and memories. The plant life takes on human form as an Earth elemental. Among the adversaries in the Holland/Swamp Thing era are Anton Arcane, a mad scientist obsessed with immortality and building an army of "Un-Men." There's also the Sunderland Corporation, which seeks to capture Swamp Thing and study him in the hopes of recreating Holland's bioreactive formula. In 1982, filmmaker Wes Craven released his (rather campy) film version of Swamp Thing, largely following the Holland plot line.

DC Universe announced it was developing a Swamp Thing series in May 2018, with Mark Verheiden signing on as writer and executive producer. It takes place in a separate fictional universe than Titans, Doom Patrol, and DC's other live-action series. The original plan was to have 13 episodes, but production shut down prematurely last week due to "creative differences" between DC Universe and its parent company, Warner Media. (Warner is rumored to be developing a larger streaming platform.) So now there are going to be 10 episodes.

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