Halloween Monster Memories: The Creature from the Black Lagoon

It's no secret to long-time readers of the blog that I grew up a Universal Horrors-loving fool. Back in the days before DVD box sets, before VHS rentals and recorders, even before cable and satellite, my older brother and I combed the TV listings a week in advance, searching for monsters. We would take naps on Friday afternoons and binge on sugared, caffeinated sodas in order to give ourselves the stamina to stay up for the Late Late Creature Feature, not knowing whether we'd be discovering a yet-unseen gem of the golden age or a soporific z-grade turkey. We had our share of the latter, but every now and then we'd get lucky, and one of the true Classics would play out before our bleary eyes, making us giddy with joy and prone to junk-food nightmares. Nights like that made it all worthwhile.

You kids today. You don't know how good you've got it.

Every October I regress in age to that wide-eyed, still blessedly un-diabetic boy, with an insatiable craving for peanut-butter taffy and a strong desire to revisit those flicks that made me love horror in the first place. I've watched and re-watched them all over the years, and they never fail to return me to that innocent, enthusiastic place, where everything was yet to be discovered, and nothing--not even black-and-white films from the 30s, 40s, and 50s--was old.

So in honor of every horror geek's favorite month, I thought I'd take a day each week to consider the old school classics. For our inaugural reminiscence I'd like to revisit everyone's favorite amphibian, perhaps the last great Universal Horror icon: the Gillman, or as he's more poetically known, The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The Gillman and Julie Adams in a justly famous publicity still.

In his first outing, the Creature was explained as a living fossil, a parallel-evolutionary offshoot from a time when monsters ruled the earth. In almost the same way, as a cinematic entity the Gillman could be seen as the evolutionary link between the atmospheric, gothic horrors of Universal's 30s and 40s output, and the adventure-oriented sci-fi horrors of the following decade. As iconic as the Frankenstein Monster, as sympathetic as the Wolf Man, the Creature was nonetheless clearly a monster of a different stripe than both the vampires and ghouls that preceded him, and the atom-powered Bug-Eyed Monsters that were his successors.

In fact, the classic monster with whom the Gillman shares the most similarities is not a Universal Horror at all, but rather one of the biggest icons of would-be rival studio RKO: the Great Ape himself, King Kong. Beset by modern invaders in his untouched, pristine home jungle, he is hypnotized by the beauty of the lone woman on the offending expedition--a fascination that ultimately proves to be his undoing. It's a tale as old as time (song as old as rhyme): Beauty and the Beast. The two movies also share an emphasis on action and jungle adventure over atmospheric chills, relying instead on the sheer monstrosity of their title creatures to evoke fright.

Well, wouldn't YOU?

But let's back up and give a remedial course in Monsters 101 for those of you who might inexcusably be unfamiliar with the text.* In Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), anthropologists/archaelogists working on the banks of the Amazon discover the fossilized claw of a prehistoric creature previously unknown to science--seemingly a link between land and sea creatures--on the last day of their scheduled dig. When head researcher Dr. Carl Maia brings the fossil back to civilization, he convinces hotshot grant-seeker Dr. Mark Williams to put together an expedition to find rest of the fossil. Williams calls in straight-laced colleague Dr. Mark Reed and his ichthyologist/love interest Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams--a little girl from Little Rock!), hires river rat Lucas and his boat The Rita, and sets off in search of scientific immortality.

*There was a time when I thought you could take it as a given that any person running a horror blog or attending a fright convention would have to be conversant in the Universal Horrors, but hard experience has proved me wrong on more than one occasion. Kids today *grumble mumble*...

Unfortunately for the crew, the fossilized creature is NOT from an extinct species--a living specimen, the Gillman himself, doesn't take kindly to having his habitat disturbed, and starts picking off expendable extras almost from the get-go. I remember as a child being terrified by shots of the Creature's claw reaching slowly out of the black water, barely missing the Julie Andrews' ankle or closing powerfully around the face of a native hired hand. (I was too young to worry about the way the spiny claws bent as they were dragged across the dirt back to the river.) However, presumably never having seen a human female before, the Gillman is fascinated by Kay, leading to the justly famous "water ballet" scene in which the Creature swims mere feet below the oblivious beauty, almost but not quite touching her treading feet--a gesture of curiosity and longing that B-Movie scholar Joe Bob Briggs** reckons every 14-year-old boy in the audience could well relate to.

**In his indispensible book, Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies that Changed History!

Beautiful.

In fact there's a strong sexual subtext to much of the flick, whether embodied by the Creature's curiosity or by the tensions between Mark, Kay, and David, the latter of whom is clearly miffed that Kay has spurned his previous advances in favor of Mark's bland heroism. (Nota Bene: sometimes a spear gun is NOT just a spear gun.) I think it's going too far to claim the monster wants Kay for his mate--if there's one thing that's a clear difference between Kong and the Gillman, apart from size, it's that whatever's going on behind those unblinking eyes, he is NOT LIKE US, and is not having mammalian thoughts--but he's clearly not seeing her as food either, and his desire for her can be imprinted upon, if not entirely understood.

I used to feel that the movie was ahead of its time pseudo-science wise, what with all the frank talk about evolution and the possible environmental undertones. (Whether you see Kay's floating cigarette and the poison/pollution trap as a trigger for the Creature's violence or not, they're clearly spoiling an unspoiled land.) Of course maybe I felt this way because I was raised in the American South, where teaching evolution to grade schoolers is still considered "controversial"; or maybe it's just that I was used to these old movies hitting hard on the "things God didn't want man to meddle in" schtick. Still, as pseudo-science goes, I think it holds up pretty well; I never thought for a minute that these people weren't serious scientists looking for serious knowledge, and never felt the tragedy was due so much to a jealous God than to basic human misunderstanding of what they were dealing with.

The Man Behind the Mask: Ricou Browning as the Creature

Two icons came out of the flick. One of course was the Gillman himself, who I believe still holds the title as most-merchandised Universal Monster of all time. Rubber bendy toys, Aurora models, t-shirts, Halloween door-hangings, masks, resin busts, and tattoos--people love the Creature, and want to put him everywhere. The other was of course Julie Adams, whose bullet-bra swimsuit, delicious gams, attractive (and believable!) intelligence, and frankly gorgeous face make such a stunning contrast to the Creature's amphibian visage. (As most everyone knows, that's NOT Adams in the famous water ballet scene, but a body double [and what a body!] who was a stronger swimmer. But that's all her screaming on the posters and draped over the Creature's arms, baby.) Though she didn't do much more horror work after that--making her mark instead in movie and TV westerns--she'll forever be associated with the flick, and rightly so.

The movie was successful, and spawned an almost immediate sequel, Revenge of the Creature (1955), helmed like the first one by the revered sci-fi director Jack Arnold. The second movie continues in the King Kong vein, with another expedition going to the Amazon and this time successfully capturing the Gillman and bringing him back to a Seaworld-style aquarium/research center in Florida. The love triangle set-up is used again, this time with Professor Clete Ferguson and shapely ichthyology student Helen Dobson, with Gillman-keeper Joe Hayes as the grumpy third wheel. If you've seen King Kong you know what happens when they bring the monster back to civilization--he breaks free and goes on a rampage! (The Creature's initial escape and menace of the tourist crowds is a real treat.) He also makes off with the girl, and has to be put down at the end.

The Creature takes some Revenge. Note the goggle-eyes added in the second film to aid the swimmer's visibility. Not all scenes feature these "improvements," as some underwater footage was recycled from the first movie.

People often call this the better of the two sequels, and I can understand their point of view, even if I don't entirely agree. There's more monster mayhem here, both in that aforementioned escape and in the scene where the creature nabs Helen out of a seafood restaurant. We get to see some of the Gillman's phenomenal power (shown obliquely in the first film by his ripping a hole in the fishing net and nearly breaking the boom with his swimming strength), and who doesn't love a couple of good rampage scenes? However, I often feel the movie doesn't add much--it picks up, hits its mark, and rushes toward the expected conclusion. It's more of the same--which is not necessarily a bad thing, but seems almost like empty calories.

(I'd be drummed out of horror criticism if I didn't stop here to make the obligatory mention of the Clint Eastwood cameo in Revenge of the Creature--in his first screen appearance, Clint plays a bumbling lab assistant who can't keep track of his white mice. Not exactly Dirty Harry, but all the more entertaining for that.)

"Well gosh, Clint--did you have 6 mice in the cage, or only 5?"

Only one good thing came out of the fiasco that was the big-budget Van Helsing movie, which was that it prompted Universal to release its Legacy DVD box sets, containing all the classic monster romps. In its second iteration, included was the Creature set, which allowed Gillfans to view not only the TV-staple sequel Revenge of the Creature, but also the little-seen third movie, The Creature Walks Among Us. I'm in the minority, I think, when I make the claim that this third film is the superior of the two sequels, if only because it takes things in a slightly skewed direction instead of playing it safe; yes--it makes the age-old mistake of trying something NEW.

Not having been killed at the end of the second film (contrary to all appearances, as usual), the Gillman has taken up residence in the Florida Everglades, which doubtless remind him of his Amazonian home. He is pursued there by scientist/adventurer Dr. William Barton, who manages to capture the Gillman after a fierce swamp battle in which the Creature throws boats around like toys (an exciting scene) and is thereafter set on fire by a kerosene lamp-cum-Maletov Cocktail! Barton has the badly-burned Creature taken back to his palatial estate, where his colleagues discover he has rudimentary lungs as well as his famous gills. A quick operation turns the Creature into a land-dweller; he is given clothes and locked in a cage for further research.

"Walk among me."

The series has always been awash in sexual tension, but here the filmmakers kick it up a notch by constructing a romantic quadrangle. Dr. Barton is married to a free-spirited, recklessly sexual woman named Marcia, of whom he is fiercely jealous. Marcia is wooed by swamp guide Jed Grant, who comes on too strong even for her, and also has her eye on straight-laced Dr. Tom Morgan, one of Barton's hired lab hands. When Barton's paranoia gets the better of him and he kills Jed in a jealous rage (after Jed has tried to force himself on Marcia in a rather icky scene), he decides to put the blame on the Gillman. Realizing her husband is a maniac, Marcia falls into Tom's arms, leading the jealous professor to set his sights on another of his wife's lovers...

What's really interesting to me here is that the Gillman is not really the main threat in the flick; rather, it's the ugliness of people's uncontrolled desires that cause most of the trouble. More than that, the Gillman seems to serve as a kind of externalized representation of the extremely flawed characters' ids. Every time one character gets sexual or violent (or frequently both) with another of the human characters, the Creature bursts free of his bonds and goes on a mini-rampage. Thought it's never made explicit, there is a definite connection between the humans' baser impulses coming to the fore and the Gillman's episodes of violence. Some would argue that monsters are ALWAYS manifestations of our dark, primal fears and desires, but here that metaphor is made absolutely literal. Check it out and see if I'm wrong.

"Da-da!"

Of course the movie doesn't have the production values nor the directorial skill of the previous two (Jack Arnold didn't return, handing the reins over to journeyman John Sherwood, who directed only one more film as head honcho, 1957's The Monolith Monsters), and the acting is all very broad and melodramatic. The Creature's iconic look is changed as well--his burn scars and shapeless ogre-clothing make him look less like the Gillman than like a noseless bodybuilder. However, the subtext-as-text really makes it work for me, and the final scene--with the air-breathing Gillman wading out into the surf--presumably on his way to an ironic death by drowning--tugs at the ol' heartstrings, I don't mind telling you.

Unlike vampires, werewolves, mummies, invisible men, and Frankenstein's Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon has not been revisited all that much since Universal called it a day on the series. You could see his influence on Corman's Humanoids from the Deep and maybe even CHUD, and he appeared along with everyone else in spoofs/homages like The Monster Squad and Saturday the 14th. But as a monster type, he hasn't recurred in the way those others have. Perhaps it's because, as in his movies, he's a one-of-a-kind specimen, the sole example of a unique class of being.

A big-budget remake has been on the slate for years now, with various directors and stars attached, but so far the surface of the Black Lagoon is still undisturbed by movement below. (Not counting the Universal Studios' theme park show, Creature from the Black Lagoon: The Musical!) And yet no horror fan out there would be at a loss to recognize him at a glance. Again, as in his films, he just won't go extinct.

It gets under your skin.

Final Note: I snagged all these stills off the Google in a bleary-eyed frenzy of image-snatching, and I'm ashamed to say I neglected to note the sources. Mea maxima culpa. :( If you recognize an image that belongs to you, please let me know and I'll gladly affix the appropriate credit, or take it down (if you're gonna be THAT way about it) and replace it with another stolen shot. :P I'm not intentionally being an asshole--it just comes naturally to me. ;)