Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom may be a superhero movie – the final entry in the DCEU, in fact – but it also allows director James Wan to return to his horror roots.
“It is James tapping into that incredible scary movie filmmaker side of his mind,” says Aquaman producer and DC Studios co-chairman Peter Safran in IGN’s exclusive behind-the-scenes featurette that can be viewed via the player above or the embed below.
Producer Rob Cowan adds, “It takes us into James’ roots coming out of the ghosts and horror world. It’s also a throwback to the DC comics.”
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom finds Atlantean king Arthur Curry (once again played by Jason Momoa) on a journey to explore what happened to the titular lost seventh underwater kingdom.
“The Lost Kingdom is lost for a very specific reason. It's a darker world that should not be discovered,” Wan told IGN in a recent virtual interview. The very nature of the Lost Kingdom – Necrus – allowed Wan to “lean a little bit more into my scarier, darker aesthetic [of] filmmaking. … I enjoy monsters and I enjoy creating creatures and stuff like that. And so this storyline afforded me that freedom to do so.”
In this film, Arthur teams with his deposed, imprisoned brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) to track down the mythical Black Trident, an ancient weapon capable of unleashing a malevolent force that is also sought by the vengeful Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). This dark force has affected life under the sea, creating horrific creatures Wan refers to as “water zombies”.
“They're kind of like humans that have been afflicted by magical darkness to them, and over the years they're underwater and they've kind of morphed, they've metamorphosized into kind of something else. And so yeah, I guess ‘water zombie’ is not that incorrect. It's pretty apt.”
The monstrous species known as the Trench makes a return appearance in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom after Warner Bros. canceled a Trench spin-off film that would’ve secretly been a Black Manta solo movie. But not all the undersea creatures depicted in the sequel are baddies. Wan says Aquaman’s Silver Age octopus pal Topo, who was briefly seen in the first film playing the drums, has a “bigger presence” in the sequel.
Wan also promises viewers will see more of Atlantis itself this time: “We have a chase sequence that takes us through Atlantis, and then we get to visit different areas of Atlantis, and that's just fun. That allows me to come up with really fun visuals that we didn't see in the first film.”
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom opens only in theaters on December 22.
