• Based on a three-issue comic book miniseries under DC Comics’ Elseworlds imprint.

• Tagline: In a city forever in darkness an ancient horror awakens.

If you’re like me, there’s a lot of crossover in your fandom. That’s a commonplace experience these days. Mashups are the remixes of ideas that we might feel have been tapped for everything they’re worth, as a way to try and wring something new from the blending. There’s a scale of effectiveness for this sort of writing. I won’t belabor the point; The Doom that Came to Gotham is of mixed effectiveness. It stands firmly in the realm of a comic hero story, and then adds the elements it needs from Lovecraftian horror to tell the story it wishes to.

There are other ways to convey ideas about the Batman character. Ideas about what he represents, and to whom. Many new adaptations are explorations about who Bruce Wayne is, or indeed whether that is even who he truly is. Adding Lovecraftian elements to his world and his story does allow for some unique insights into the mind of a wealthy man who takes on the image of a leather-winged mammal in order to instill fear into the minds of criminals. But in this story it’s the physical and body horror that seems to take precedence, even in a genre known for exploiting psychologically terrifying ideas.

The movie’s short run time both helps and hinders it. Doom’s pace prevents the audience from really getting a chance to engage with some of its characters, and instead leans on our fully-immersed Batman brains to fill in the emotional gaps. We know all these characters already from a dozen other versions. So it dispenses with the expected amount of character development in favor of a more rapid clip. That pace, on the other hand, does prevent the audience from taking any time to ask bothersome questions about the plot or the mechanics of this new reality.

How much cosmic horror is in The Doom That Came to Gotham? Quite a lot, actually. The story is wrapped in all the usual trappings of Lovecraft. Madness, cults, otherworldly entities, dark histories, and horrific transformations are all represented. What the movie doesn’t do is pick one or two of these and tell an exceptional story with them, taking its time to explore the menace of an uncaring monstrosity, or the slow descent into madness that revelation may bring. Instead Doom throws everything into the mix, as if desperate to exude Lovecraft. It’s not a damning usage of the tropes, just an unfocused one.

One of the movie’s obsessions is re-imagining Batman’s rogue’s gallery through the lens of these cosmic horror tropes. And given the already monstrous nature of a lot of these characters, there’s no shortage of possible cameos. Unfortunately some of these villains only get a brief and ultimately pointless appearance, which leads to the feeling that more thought was put into style than purpose. There is an early plot point that seems important but ultimately leads nowhere and turns out to have been inconsequential; all apparently in service of bringing two more well-known Batman villains into the narrative.

A 1920s Batman, on its face, should be interesting enough. After all, his roots are very old indeed and run through early 20th century America. Bruce Wayne is another iteration of the pulp serialized hero as imagined throughout the 30s and 40s. His wealthy paternal approach to crime fighting certainly needs no introduction to the era of noir. And Lovecraft’s writings themselves are era-appropriate. Archaic as his prose was, Lovecraft wrote stories whose themes leaned forward, even if the origins stretched back uncounted eons. His was building on traditions of gothic horror, though, and stripping away the bounds of reality that keep Batman’s more grounded world sane and relatable for the mass audience. Lovecraft’s vision of horror wasn’t appreciated in his time the way he is now. So to blend these two genres is actually riskier than it sounds. Lovecraft says, your money doesn’t matter if an inhuman intelligence is bent on devouring the world. And to its credit, The Doom That Came to Gotham does actually bend to this premise.

3 / 5 mi-gos would recommend to genre fans of either