BONUS: The Lush and Dangerous Natural World of "Creature From the Black Lagoon"
I Recently Saw It in 3D, Which Rocked!
This is just a short bonus post to complete last week’s run of Criterion Channel’s Universal Horror series, so no viewing four-pack, sorry.
As far as my intentions in terms of doing more bonus posts like this, I would say they’re not likely. If anything, I need to spend less time writing these and more figuring out how to make them better/more visible. I’m not ready to reduce my output—I still enjoy having an excuse to talk about film, after all—but it would definitely behoove me to figure out how to do more with this platform I gave myself. I should at least figure out how to incorporate graphics; for some reason, that’s just de rigueur for stuff we post online, nevermind that when you pick up an actual book you would feel condescended to by pictures. Well, unless it’s a biography, as those tend to have pictures of the subject worked in. Anyway, I will get around to making this newsletter look nice...soon.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
The Universal Pictures formula proves resilient in the science-keen Atomic Age of horror filmmaking
Universal Pictures essentially set the mold for horror at the start of the sound era when they put out their one-two punch of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931. (This is true for American filmmaking, which, for the extent of this article, is what we’re talking about when we talk about film, because I don’t feel like adding the same damn qualifier throughout this bonus post.) In doing so, they broke from a common approach to the uncanny in the genre that had been set during the silent era by embracing the supernatural (the preternatural in the case of Frankenstein, but reanimating the dead gives the affair a kind of mystical bent). In other words, while the villains were revealed to be of mundane origin before we had sound, the arrival of the 1930s brought on bona fide monsters. (I feel like I should go back to the “American” thing again, because someone, somewhere is going to be inclined to bring up Nosferatu, which was also about a genuine vampire, but was not made in America. Please, please say nothing to me about Nosferatu in response to this newsletter.) (I’ll stop with the parentheticals if you promise me you understand what they’re trying to convey.)
As the decades passed, Universal had more hits, but other studios fed audiences different kinds of horror. By the 1950s, a world where two atomic bombs had been dropped and technology was a front in the Cold War, the Atomic Age of horror brought us back to a natural, albeit fantastic, kind of scary story. Enter The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon is the last of the significant Universal monsters to arrive. Released in 1954, it arrived thirteen years after The Wolf Man, which is the debut of that specific type of werewolf, but not of werewolves to the studio, as they had already released Werewolf of London and She-Wolf of London. While fantastic in nature, the creature, also referred to as Gill-man, was technically of the natural world, being a primitive evolutionary holdout. Its existence is first teased by the discovery of a fossilized ancestor, which leads to an expedition to a deeper part of the Amazon than your stock intrepid researcher types tended to go. Which worked out in the sense of finding evidence of this bizarre humanoid water-dweller, but not so much in the sense of not getting multiple people killed.
As much as The Creature from the Black Lagoon sticks with a formula that made Universal synonymous with horror, it has a few significant departures, namely in its location and origin. There’s no need for the pan-European village featured in so many of the past films, as we spend most of the runtime on or near the Amazon River. We also lose the magic and mysticism; this makes sense considering how scientific our fears had and would still become. We were at risk from radiation, from the discovery of extraterrestrial menaces, and from progress itself (which actually brings us back to Frankenstein, but we discussed that already).
(Okay, so The Invisible Man is also rooted in science, but it’s still an outlier, and still the kind of soft science fiction that’s interchangeable with magic. Then again, so is the kind of atomic power that can make ants the size of whales in Them!, but what’s really important here is recognizing that this is a bonus post, I’m not breaking my back laboring on this one.)
However, in crucial ways, the formula still holds. For starters, we have another visually striking monster (the backstory of his design and designer, Milicent Patrick, is an interesting one, and fortunately one that’s already been documented in the book The Lady from the Black Lagoon, which is well worth a read). While inscrutable and certainly destructive, there’s more to the Gill-man than just malice. It isn’t clear how intelligent he is, but he exercises basic cunning in killing his human foes, and by the end of the film it’s possible he’s operating out of self-preservation as much as out of mere murderous intent. If he isn’t sympathetic, he at least has an inscrutability that works in his favor. The same could arguably be said of Frankenstein’s monster, at least in the first film; both mute fiends arguably just want to be left alone, and their wish is denied at the peril of interlopers.
The location, while certainly different from what we’re used to from the studio’s past works, still manages to light up the more anxious corners of our imaginations. Dark caverns offer murky hideaways and perfect avenues for tense hunts, and the characters’ underwater movements presage the arrival of a film like Jaws for understanding how tense a swim can be when we know something lurks below.
More than twenty years removed from the films that sparked one of the most fruitful runs in horror, The Creature from the Black Lagoon entered Universal’s catalogue as easily as a goldfish plopping into a freshly filled bowl. Fun frights, striking visuals, and a memorable monster all prove essential to the classic template for the monster movie, even as science and the fear of what we’ll discover would go on to supplant the uncanny and unknowable.