“There is great beauty in the swamp… if you know where to look”: Swamp Thing and the Aiken-Rhett House

Dorian Cole, WPAMC ’24

Charleston is a city of layers, buildings on top of buildings on top of bodies. As part of a local ghost tour, a guide assures visitors in a cemetery that they shouldn’t worry about stepping on the graves because “no matter where you stand in this city, you’re stepping on someone’s grave.” In Charleston, the Civil War sits stiffly on the lap of the Revolution. Lost Cause monuments share a park with the grave of a legendary pirate hanged on the site back when it was just seawater. As the city’s landscape changed, its history just kept building up like a hundred years of wallpaper.

At the Aiken-Rhett House, the wallpaper hangs in long unkempt strips from the walls. This historic house museum is dedicated to preservation rather than restoration. After all, with so many layers of history to contend with, to what period would one even restore a house occupied from 1820 to 1975? Preserving the site “as is” lends it the air of a dilapidated haunted house (much to the chagrin of several Trip Advisor users), but it also opens up the space for the visitor’s imagination. The house becomes a magic eye poster, shifting through time depending on where you direct your focus. The team at the Aiken-Rhett House has directed their focus very intentionally, beginning every tour with spaces occupied by the enslaved people who lived alongside the family for whom the house was named. This interpretational strategy centers the stories and lives of enslaved people to an admirable degree. In a way, Aiken-Rhett is a haunted house. Every morning, manager of Education and Programming Carin Bloom greets the enslaved people who once lived in the rooms she now works in. She says she wants to do right by them.

Other details of the house’s preserved interior speak to more recent histories. The dingy gray of one parlor’s painted walls is not some quirk of Victorian taste, but the work of Wes Craven, who shot some of the climactic scenes of his nearly universally panned 1982 Swamp Thing in the historic house. Swamp Thing was not a good film. The New York Times compared the titular Thing to “John Foster Dulles permanently stuck inside a scuba diver’s cast-off wet suit” and described the female lead as going “through the entire movie with one expression and three costumes.”¹ However hokey the movie may have been, its setting and story are interesting, particularly given the mark filming left on the Aiken-Rhett House. Swamp Thing is as much about the swamp as it is about the Thing. My classmate Austin Losada mentioned Swamp Thing in his post last year about colonialism and the swamp climate. In this post, I take a deeper look at how the film itself presents swamps and the relationships between human beings and their climates.

Though based on a 1971 comic series, Swamp Thing is not a comic book movie. In the hands of a famed horror director, Swamp Thing became a meditation on classic monster movies and ideas of individual transformation. The film follows Dr. Alec Holland, a government scientist working on a project to provide more food to a growing world population by creating hardier crops. Using samples he’s found in the swamp, Alec has created a serum that he hopes will produce “a tomato that could grow in the desert or soybeans that could thrive in Biafra.” The quest to grow produce where it would not normally survive recalls the efforts of Southern plantation owners to create farms in the middle of swamp land. At plantations like Somerset Place in Washington County, NC, enslaved individuals were forced to dig a canal and cross-ditches, not only to transport and irrigate crops, but also to provide drainage. The cross-ditches leached water from the swampy soil, creating contained puddles that allowed the rest of the land to remain dry enough to be suitable for farming. Given this history, it is notable that Alec’s serum, which will allow him to change the farming landscape without the need for physical labor, is sourced from the swamp itself.

Even before he becomes Swamp Thing, Alec is defined by his love for the swamp. He sees beauty in it where others, like his love interest Alice Cable, are disgusted by the muck and the wildlife. By the end of the film, Cable has come around on the swamp. In falling in love with Swamp Thing, she has also begun to see the natural beauty in the surrounding environment. While in the comics, the swamp in question has classically been located in Louisiana, the swamp of Wes Craven’s film was almost entirely shot on location in South Carolina. In the canon of the film, the location of the swamp is never specified. It is referred to in the title card as “the unexplored reaches of an unmapped swamp,” but a prominent boat later in the film is painted with the words “The Regina Savhanna” [sic], which helps to identify the landscape as distinctly South Carolina rather than nebulously Louisiana. The cast and crew who worked on the film were not nearly as fond of the South Carolina swamps they filmed in as their characters. Stunt doubles Dick Durock and Ben Bates struggled with the oppressive heat in their big rubber costumes, which got so bad that Bates fainted in the middle of a scene.² In his commentary track for the 2013 Blu-ray release of the film Wes Craven recollects that filming “was during a ferociously hot summer with very, very high humidity, and there was a black caterpillar plague, so they were in the trees in big clumps and would drop down on your head and sting you.”³ Caterpillars weren’t the only wildlife the cast had to deal with. “There were alligators everywhere,” Craven says, “People in South Carolina just sort of treat them like New Yorkers would treat pigeons.”⁴

According to historian Jennifer Van Horn, white settlers in the American South worried about this tough climate as more than just a source of discomfort. They saw the skin as a permeable barrier “through which external stimuli could affect the body’s humors and complexion.”⁵ Ideas about climate were bound up in ideas about race and the white supremacist rhetoric of civilization. For instance, in Natural History (1749), George-Louis Leclerc claimed that “Man, white in Europe, black in Africa… and red in America, is the same animal [only] tinctured with the colour peculiar to the climate.”⁶ In her book The Empire of Climate, Roxann Wheeler traces these associations between climate, color, and civilization to the ancient Greeks and Romans. She describes how “Eighteenth-century Europeans maintained great faith in the strong effects of climate on the body,” combining this idea with “Their other traditional frame of reference for skin color derived from Christian semiotics, which combined moral and aesthetic meanings, primarily in the binary pair pure white and sinful black.”⁷

The historical belief that climate can have a transformative effect on race provides an interesting intertext to the story of Swamp Thing. Rather than allowing him to grow crops in intemperate settings, Alec’s serum transforms him into a creature of the swamp. Ultimately, the film has little to say about race–it features only one prominent character of color who primarily serves as comedic relief–but the way that the swamp environment defines and transforms Alec’s body as he tries to harvest its natural resources recalls the climate anxieties of white settlers.

As Roger Ebert deftly pointed out in his own review, Swamp Thing references James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Russ Meyer’s Lorna (1964), and Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself, and God Against All (1974).⁸ Each of these references further elucidates the film’s perspective on transformation, namely that it’s a one-way ticket. While Alec is visually compared to Frankenstein, his love interest Cable bathes naked in the swamp as a visual reference to Lorna, a sexploitation film about a woman who discovers her own sexual desire after being raped in a river, disrupting her marriage. A character transformed into a monkey-like creature by Alec’s serum near the end of the film calls out the title of Warner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself, and God Against All as he helps Alec and Cable escape. Herzog’s film tells the story of a young man who grew up in confinement, attempts to rejoin society, and is eventually murdered. Each of these references makes clear that whatever transformation our characters have undergone within the swamp, they will not be recovering. In the final shot of the film, Alec walks back into the Swamp alone, leaving Cable to rejoin society without him. When she asks why he can’t become a scientist again, he simply shows her his scaly rubber skin and says, “With these hands?”

Beyond the swamp, the film’s use of the Aiken-Rhett House to represent the villain’s home, which the New York Times review identifies as “an antebellum mansion,” evokes the history of enslavement through which Southern plantations functioned.⁹ These elements cast a shadow over the film that it never reckons with. Vice-versa, the film has cast a shadow over the walls of the Aiken-Rhett house. For the European cut of the film, a few more scenes of gratuitous nudity were added to appease the producers, including a debauched party scene inside the Aiken-Rhett house, replete with bellydancers and topless women.¹⁰ Walking in on the filming of this scene, former curator of the Charleston Museum J. Kenneth Jones remembers: “All I could think of was that if the Museum Trustees or City Council ever heard about it I would be fired, Mr. Herold would be fired, and any other museum employee associated with the film would be in deep trouble. I soon found out the scene was for the European version and would not be released in this country. I never did tell the museum director.”¹¹ Unfortunately for Jones–and moms of seven-year-olds who rented the film at Blockbuster–when the first American DVD edition of Swamp Thing was released in 2000, the distribution company accidentally published the R-rated European cut of the film instead of the PG-rated American cut the DVD case promised. Some things just won’t stay buried.

The Aiken-Rhett house has changed a lot in its lifetime. According to the current curator Graham Long, the parlor where Swamp Thing’s risque nude scenes were filmed originally featured the house’s grand front door. In the 1830s, it was replaced with pocket doors, and the walls were carved out to make way for a set of large windows. These windows had a destabilizing effect on the surrounding walls. The stories of Aiken-Rhett are heavy; it can’t support its own weight. Despite a long history of attempts to keep South Carolina’s water at bay, the walls around these windows are Swamp Thing grey. And under the current preservation policy, they probably will be forever…

¹ Vincent Canby, “‘Swamp Thing’ Fun and Fright,” The New York Times, July 30th, 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/30/movies/swamp-thing-fun-and-fright.html.

² Swamp Thing, directed by Wes Craven (1982; Los Angeles: Shout Factory, 2013), DVD.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Jennifer Van Horn, “‘Painting’ Faces and ‘Dressing Tables’: Concealment in Colonial Dressing Furniture,” in A Material World: Culture Society, and the Life of Things in Early Anglo-America, ed. George W. Bourdeau and Margaretta Markle Lovell, 177-206 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2019): 185.

⁶ Georges-Louis Leclerc, Natural History: General and Particular (London: Printed for William Creech, 1780), 5:64, quoted in Jennifer Van Horn, “‘Painting’ Faces and ‘Dressing Tables,’” 184.

⁷ Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 2.

⁸ Roger Ebert, “Swamp Thing,” Ebert Digital LLC, January 1, 1982, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/swamp-thing-1982. 

⁹ Vincent Canby, “‘Swamp Thing’ Fun and Fright.”

¹⁰ Swamp Thing, directed by Wes Craven (1982; Los Angeles: Shout Factory, 2013), DVD.

¹¹ J. Kenneth Jones, “Recollections of the Aiken-Rhett House 1969-1984” (internal record), Microsoft Word file.