I couldn’t decide if I should post this to the gaming community or movies community so I decided to split the difference and just post it here since I’m open to games, movies, or book suggestions.
I have an itch I seem to have trouble scratching. I want more pirate stories that involve dark fantasy elements (skeletons, krakens, ghosts, voodoo, etc.) yet there seem to be very few of these. The best example of what I’m looking for is of course the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but those have diminishing returns. Even though it’s exactly what I want, each movie is worse than the last.
I just finished playing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew and that was also exactly what I wanted. And I’m unreasonably excited for DAVY x JONES to come out. And yet… that’s all I can find. Those are the only properties I know of that actually scratch my itch. And I’m shocked at how few entries there are in this genre.
I don’t want a straight-forward pirate adventure like Cutthroat Island or Black Sails, or… I don’t know, Muppet Treasure Island; I want something with dark fantasy elements in it. I recently watched a Korean movie on Netflix called The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure and while it had the adventure/comedy feel of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, there were no fantasy elements in it at all.
Is there a name for this sub-genre that I just haven’t stumbled across? Are there really so few entries in this sub-genre? I created a [email protected] community awhile back, and I guess I’m really just looking for the pirate equivalent of the Weird West genre. I guess the Vampirates book series meets my criteria, but it’s at a middle school reading level and that just isn’t for me. Maybe I should just re-watch Pirates of Dark Water…
So can anyone here help me out? Is there a better term to search for than just ‘pirate fantasy’? Are there any other movies, books, or games you know of that might scratch my itch?
To answer your question. Not officially. You can find those maybe through: Nautical Dark Fantasy, Dark Nautical Fiction. Or just Dark fantasy with pirates.
ISBN: 978-1-78664-556-2
It’s a collection of multiple stories on that topics, by various authors. If you like, then I could take a photo of the list of contents.A part of Dracula (I don’t think you need an ISBN for that 😅) also takes place at sea, but I can recommend the whole book. There is also a movie that focuses on that part, it’s called The Last Voyage of the Demeter, but I haven’t seen it yet. (I just noticed that the ratings aren’t that good…)
Recently I watched The Lighthouse which is quite something… Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for, but definitely dark fantasy.
It’s a very limited genre. Seriously, there was about 15 years from the 1930s to 1950s when swashbuckling pirate movies were a thing, then the genre vanished until POTC came out. Those movies are exactly why Walt Disney made the ride Pirates, they were popular movies at the time that Disneyland opened in 1953. The modern POTC series literally invented pirate dark fantasy film genre. Even George RR Martin trying to force it into ASOIF wasn’t successful.
It’s certainly not dark, but some of the early movies might be worth a watch. The Crimson Pirate (1952) or The Black Swan (1942) are iconic for the genre. But the magic and danger and broodiness just aren’t there.
Far more cheesey, but Ice Pirates is just…odd sci-fi, but might also be worth a watch. And I didn’t see anyone mention Hook yet. It’s pretty classically Gothic in a sense, but in a weird 90s way.
The problem with the pirate genre is that it doesn’t connect with most modern people, while the postapocalyptic genre does, and supplanted it after the 1960s. Mad Max 2 and Thunderdome are dark pirate stories on dirt. A New Hope is pirates and magic in space. Hell, Waterworld might actually be the best middle ground possible there. It’s dark AF, but the magic is just evolution.
Best of luck to you, matey.
The modern POTC series literally invented pirate dark fantasy film genre.
See, this is crazy to me. I can’t believe that the Weird West genre has been around since the 1950s and yet an equivalent “weird pirates” genre wasn’t created until 2003 by Disney! But I can’t think of a single work prior to that which fits the description. I know Weird West isn’t a huge genre, but I was able to come up with at least 50 posts for [email protected] . It’s so weird for an equivalent pirate genre to have what, 5 entries? I feel like there must be more out there and I just can’t find them. This isn’t like, say, the creation of cyberpunk, which couldn’t really be created until after computers existed; pirates and zombie stories have been around for centuries and yet they were never brought together??
Sorry, I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying, I just wanted to go on a rant of disbelief. I made this post because I felt like I was missing something but you just confirmed I really wasn’t.
Yeah, I understand your shock at this. And don’t give Disney too much credit - Jerry Bruckheimer and the screenwriters made an objectively great movie with Black Pearl. One screenwriter wrote Aladdin, (story for) Treasure Planet, and Zorro movies, so swashbuckling movies were already his jam.
Personally, I think it makes sense that dark fantasy pirate media is so meager compared to dark westerns. The 30’s to 50’s had a lot of pulp media and adventure movies that were churned out at an insane rate. Pirate movies were a tiny portion of that because they’re expensive to make. You need, at the very least, one big-ass wooden ship. Maybe two. Plus a bunch of sets. Westerns are much, much cheaper, and could be filmed in a studio lot within the Los Angeles city limits, or even just a 30 minute drive north or east. If you look at the most expensive Westerns ever made, it’s mostly just salaries, none topping $200 million adjusted for inflation. And those are rare, with being animated anyway. Black Pearl cost $140 million to make, and then every one after is between $225 million and $410 million.
Also, with the actual Wild West being simply “retro” close to the 1930s, this was alive and vibrant in people’s minds, Real cowboys were still around. Dude ranches, literally experiential travel to LARP being in a Western, were popular starting in the 1920’s. Most “Wild West” plots are (or should be) set between the Civil War and 1900, so that’s “Grandpa, were you a cowboy?” close to the post-WWII era. Contrast that with the Golden Age of Piracy, which took place in the century before the US was even established. Sailing ships were antiques by the time the Civil War rolls around, so pirate movies occupied a sort of middle ground between the Medieval age and Revolutionary War stories.
As for magic and the fantasy/sci-fi element, two factors IMO. First, that the poorly understood Native American traditional religion opened the door to magic as a plot device. Mystery is built in to the environment. With the market saturated for plots, it was worth a try for many writers. Second, that sci-fi picked up as a genre in the 1950s, so it’s a natural conclusion to mix the two. As westerns were often also about people living “wild” against the contrast of an industrializing country, they’ve remained popular, and are a fantasy themselves that people find attainable.
Also, that is just super niche to most people. Add to that the fantasy-magic element and you’re, as you’ve found, sub-categorized to a point where someone essentially created the genre by making the perfect genre-setting media, and setting the bar too high. Anything in that genre suddenly is “oh, so it’s Pirates of the Caribbean or something?” It can’t even be its own thing.
First of all, thank you for spending so much time and effort thinking about such a nonsense topic. I agree with everything you said but it got me thinking even more.
Pirate movies are definitely more cost-prohibitive than Westerns, but I wonder if that also led into a feedback loop of keeping Westerns in the public consciousness. Since Westerns kept being made, it kept people thinking about Westerns, which kept the desire for more Westerns alive. I also think there’s an aspect of the Hays Code at play where you were able to make righteous characters in Westerns (those boring John Wayne movies I can’t sit through) yet you can’t really make a “righteous pirate” character. So pirates were always delegated to the role of “bad guys”, if they were present at all. There just wasn’t a demand for pirate movies to expand into supernatural elements.
And yet none of that explains the lack of supernatural pirate stories in literature (or video games) where your imagination is the main limiting factor. Even if we ignore movies, there are very few dark fantasy pirate stories prior to PotC. And I guess this just comes down to my own lack of awareness to, I guess I’ll say ‘the zeitgeist’ even though that makes me sound pretentious. In my mind, I lump together gunslingers, pirates, and hackers as “outlaws glorified for living by their own code”. And yet it seems one of them is drastically less popular than the others. I never really thought about how few people actually care about pirates. Weird West and Cyberpunk are both niche genre fiction, yet dark fantasy pirate stories don’t even have a label. That’s a weird realization for me.
Oh, no problem. I think it’s kind of fascinating how we chose to do our storytelling. And plus I would also love to see more dark pirate fantasy fiction as a genre.
And one element is that while Hays Code pirates were just syrupy sweet sanitized romance and stupid action for the sake of it, history (which was ignored) is problematic for pirates. All the big names were literal rapists and murderers, and many executed, so lack of being a noble outlaw confirmed. No one named cities or bridges or anything after them. So while Jack Sparrow being fictional helps, even within the PotC universe he’s atypical for not being a thug. So it’s hard to really sanitize the whole group when the most notable real life pirates were terrible people, or mercenaries for the English or the Spanish. Then you get into geopolitical nuance. Also, there’s an awkward point if a child loves pirates that they start looking up IRL pirates and it can be a record-scratch realization that real pirates were filthy. Other than the comedy, The Monty Python-Adjacent movie Yellowbeard actually has some real and faithful depictions of pirates.
Personally, I think sci-fi does a better job with this because the limitation of a large crew needed to run a ship can be waved away. Once you get out of that limitation, get out of the period itself with cannons and flintlocks, things get a lot more open in terms of plot options. But it’s all the same dynamics to some degree.
You might be interested in watching the series “The Terror”. It’s not pirates in any way, but it chronicles the voyages and slow descent into madness of The Terror and The Erebus crews of Franklin’s lost polar expedition. It’s nautical, dark, has some supernatural elements, and may scratch your itch. I thought it was excellent.
Edit: there’s another supernatural nautical series called 1899. It was created by the same people as DARK (one of my all time top rated series ever). It wasn’t anywhere near as good as DARK, but it was an interesting watch. It’s rather hard to describe it without giving anything away, but it’s set on an oceanliner at sea in 1899, and strange things start happening. It’s similar in nature to The Terror so I thought I’d mention it. The Terror is far, far better IMO.
Wait, there’s a series? I only know the book by Dan Simmons 😯
Yes it just came out recently. It’s a single season, and it’s excellent. I think it’s on Netflix.
You kinda made me wonder how the “undead pirate” theme developed. Sounds like it might have been at least in part around The Flying Dutchman, though that’s not the only “supernatural maritime” folklore, and that specific story wasn’t originally about pirates.
Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), a friend of John Leyden’s, was the first to refer to the vessel as a pirate ship, writing in the notes to Rokeby (first published December 1812) that the ship was “originally a vessel loaded with great wealth, on board of which some horrid act of murder and piracy had been committed” and that the apparition of the ship “is considered by the mariners as the worst of all possible omens”.
https://fathomsdeepbeyond.substack.com/p/the-flying-dutchman
As to games, have you played the classic Monkey Island series? It’s not all that dark, but it is pirates and ghosts.
If you play the Total War: Warhammer games, there are undead pirate factions in the second game’s Curse of the Vampire Coast DLC. You can buy multiple games and use the factions from different titles in later games. I don’t know if that has enough story for you.
EDIT: TV Tropes calls it the “Ghost Pirate”:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GhostPirate
Despite the name, the Ghost Pirate trope includes all forms of undead pirates, including zombie or skeletal variants (literal skeleton crews).
EDIT2: I thought that the Flying Dutchman didn’t involve pirates at all, but WP says that it did become associated with pirates at some point; added reference above.
EDIT3: Going a bit out of genre, there’s Sunless Sea. That’s Lovecraftian and Victorian British naval stuff, but not really specifically undead and the player’s ship isn’t a pirate ship. Might be close enough in feel to make you happy, though. I’m not really a huge fan of the game, as I don’t like the gameplay much. It’s really about the ambience and feel, but it might be right up your alley.
Perfect, thank you! You’re right, “undead pirate” or “ghost pirate” is exactly the type of thing I’m looking for.
I’ve been aware of the Monkey Island games for awhile but I guess I never knew there were supernatural elements to it. And I’ve never played any of the Total War games so I guess I need to look into those too!
And I’ve never played any of the Total War games so I guess I need to look into those too!
Just to be clear, the Total War games make up a large collection that span many settings and themes (e.g. ancient Japan or Rome). It’s the Warhammer line of games within that collection that is specifically fantasy, and inside that, it’s specifically the Curse of the Vampire Coast stuff that has the undead pirates.
That’s not to say that the series is bad — it’s been a prominent strategy game series for a long time — but if what you’re looking for is specifically undead pirate stuff, only a small portion of that collection is relevant.
You might enjoy the Monkey Island games if you like point-and-click adventures.
1, 2, and Return are the best ones.
I guess I really missed out on the Monkey Island games, they seem to be getting mentioned here a lot.
Is it OK to start with Return or do I need to play the older games first?
I’d recommend the older ones first. Personally I found them better - and more in line with what you’re looking for than the later ones.
The first two parts work pretty well on mobile when you use SCUMM VM
Well now that’s interesting… I never really considered how well point & click adventure games would work on mobile devices. That’s a good idea.
1 and 2 both have remasters! Really one of my favorite franchises. You can have the rubber chicken with the pulley in the middle, the pulley squeaks.
You’d get more out of Return if you start with 1 and 2.
My kids didn’t play the first two, and they loved Return. On the other hand, I introduced a friend to 1 and she’d never played a P&C adventure before but she adored it.
I recommend the book On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers. Sounds like it’s exactly what you’re looking for.
Came here to say this. Better than the film.
Awesome, thank you! You’re right, that description sounds perfect!
In TTRPGs: Look for 7th Sea, it’s exactly what you want. They also have a boardgame
In Video games, The Monkey Island series is a classic, but it’s a comedy. There’s also Rogue Waters and Red Rogue Sea, which are recently released turn based strategy games with roguelite elements.
The Total War: Warhammer games (the second game in the trilogy specifically) have an undead pirate faction that could scratch that itch.
lich*
Hmm. I get why you’re saying dark fantasy, but I’m having trouble picturing non-dark fantasy pirates. Give narwhals magical unicorn powers, I guess?
Treasure planet?
I’d put soft sci-fi in another category yet.
For example, there’s a book series called Liveship Traders which I guess has pirates and magical living ships but it’s all “high fantasy”. At least, that’s my understanding (I haven’t read them). I’m also not looking for steampunk/airship pirates, which you could consider fantasy.
I guess I’m broadly looking for more “horror themed” fantasy elements, if that makes sense. I agree that most pirate settings would lean more towards horror elements, but it isn’t a guarantee. I mean, there’s a Tinkerbell movie called The Pirate Fairy. Not interested.
Interesting! Living ships would do it. And come to think of it, One Piece might also qualify.
The Peter Pan franchise is a bit of a weird case, because the pirates are the bad guys, and exist in opposition to the surrounding fantasy world with IIRC few magical aspects of their own.
For whatever reason, I think lawlessness just does lend itself more to the dark kind of fantasy, which is shared in common with the western example you gave. And at the other end, light fantasy is full of autocratic feudal nightmares painted as cool and just. It might be a hangover from the values of the original myth-makers.
Exactly, One Piece and Peter Pan are perfect examples of “pirate fantasy” but are missing that lawless aspect which (in my opinion) drives the romantic view of pirates (and the Wild West). Or maybe not “lawlessness” but the “living by their own code” aspect of it.
It’s strange how dark/light fantasy shouldn’t have any impact on whether the lawlessness of pirates is glorified, yet it seems to work out that way.
