Posted in: Movies | Tagged: entertainment, Etrigan the Demon, film, Jason Blood, Jay Oliva, justice league dark

There Can Be Only One Jason Blood

Published Sun, 27 Nov 2016 14:15:24 -0600

The new animated film Justice League Dark pulls together the mystic and macabre side of the DCU and gives moments to shine for characters like Swamp Thing, Black Orchid, Zatanna and more. But according to director Jay Oliva, the film may be a bit skewed towards the enigmatic Jason Blood and his darker half Etrigan the Demon. Olivia told Empire:

Basically this is the Demon that we all know and love, but the nice thing is we do tie in Jason Blood to the storyline. He's actually in it a lot. It's probably, as much as it's a Constantine movie, it's kind of a Demon movie as well. Jason Blood and Constantine have run into each other a lot, and just like Swamp Thing, they don't really like each other very much. What's funny is that, now that I look back at the Dark movie, nobody likes Constantine.

Poor John, but Oliva got back to talking about Jason Blood:

Like I said, I think this is a Jason Blood/Demon film more than anything. You're going to see his origin. I wanted to try to play up this whole Highlander feel to him, in the sense that Jason Blood is cursed, and he's cursed that he cannot die until something happens, and so he's basically walking the Earth. And he's kind of like The Hulk. When he loses his temper or whatever, he turns into the Demon, and he's trying *not to turn into the Demon, because the Demon is really his curse. He has to carry the Demon within him to stop this evil, if the evil should ever arise. Now, this happened back in the time of King Arthur, and hundreds of years later, he's, like, "When is this evil going to show up? I need to find peace."

This is how I was putting it. The luster of being this superhero faded and now he's a little jaded. He wants to distance himself from the Demon part of him. He just wants to find peace. Actually, he wants to die, because he realizes that he's lived too long, and he's seen the world change from the idyllic Arthurian legend into what it is today, and he's a little disenfranchised. That's how we've played him up, and I thought it's kind of an interesting take. That's what I like about his character, is that he's a man out of time, but instead of what we would expect him to be, like, "I'm going to be a hero," for the most part he's stayed back and just let humankind almost destroy itself, because he's been waiting for this other thing — this thing that is an even greater threat than us killing each other.

So it sounds like this is how you make an Etrigan The Demon animated film, you call it Justice League Dark. I'm okay with that. Blood and Etrigan are being voiced by Ray Chase.

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