When Ricou Browning passed away last year, I thought about the beautiful images he helped to create. Browning had been the underwater performer inside the Gill-man costume for Creature from the Black Lagoon and its two sequels, Revenge of the Creature and The Creature Walks Among Us. In the original 1954 film, Julie Adams’ Kay Lawrence swims alone in the fabled Black Lagoon of the Amazon River, one of several scientists searching for evidence of the Gill-man.
Beneath the water, the Gill-man approaches, immediately transfixed by her beauty and form. A kind of dance ensues, with Kay swimming on the water’s surface and the Gill-man mirroring her movements below. It remains one of the film’s most famous and affecting images.
Creature from the Black Lagoon is now 70 years old. I was first introduced to the film on my eighth birthday, when my parents gifted me the DVD. Immediately, the Gill-man became one of my favorite monsters, second only to Toho’s Godzilla. I was already familiar with Universal’s famous roster of classic horror films (1932’s The Mummy was, I think, one of the first horror films I ever saw), but the Gill-man was the greatest of the lot to me.
His look was incredible, a costume that inspired awe and fascination in equal measure, designed by the great Milicent Patrick. His three-note motif constantly echoes in my head to this day.
The Gill-man is, arguably, the last of the classic Universal monster lineup. Though recent merchandising campaigns tend to include the Metaluna Mutant (from 1955’s This Island Earth) and the Mole People (from the 1956 film of the same name), the Gill-man is still regularly grouped with his predecessors from the 1930s and ’40s: Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, and the like.
Having said that, the Gill-man aesthetically shares much with his later Universal brethren, the aforementioned Mutants and Mole People of the studio’s genre fare in the 1950s. The Gill-man harkens back and looks forward, a transitional monster for a transitional film in Universal’s horror and sci-fi output.
Firstly, the Gill-man is transitional in that he’s caught in time, a living boundary between life in the water and on land. His existence is a testament to the incredible forces of evolution and nature itself. But he is also an unknown, a yet-to-be-classified specimen in the eyes of the American scientists who’ve arrived to find and capture him – an endeavor that will kill half their crew.
And that which is unknown and/or unknowable is inevitably considered dangerous. Even Richard Carlson’s ostensibly well-meaning David, who wonders about mankind exploring the stars while knowing so little about our own planet, plays his part in the Gill-man’s destruction.
And so, the Gill-man’s preoccupation with Kay is significant because here is an emotion that is so knowable – so instantly recognizable – that his eventual death is especially upsetting. He’s found a connection. He reaches out when he swims beneath her, pulling away on contact as though shocked to find she’s real.
He’s the last of his kind, reaching out for companionship. Many years later, Julie Adams herself would deftly sum up the moment in a 2002 documentary. “You feel his heart,” she said; “he’s falling in love with this creature who’s swimming on top of the water… it’s really a love scene.”
But even before the Gill-man’s violent demise at the film’s end, Kay deals an even more painful blow. Watching the lagoon from aboard the crew’s ship, she casually tosses a cigarette into the water. And he sees it. The Gill-man watches below as his home is polluted. Her cigarette is not the only thing that pollutes the Gill-man’s home.
Chemical drugs are similarly dispersed to draw him to the surface in a disoriented state, and so the film’s underpinnings of ecological harm are tied to these characters’ inability to fully see the Gill-man as a thinking, feeling being.
The second facet of the Gill-man’s transitional nature lies in the film’s place in Universal’s horror history. The 1950s was the golden age for American science fiction cinema, and Universal was one of the only larger Hollywood studios to consistently produce products in the genre – confidently taking its horror heritage into the post-war arena.
A year before Creature from the Black Lagoon, the studio had stunned audiences with It Came from Outer Space, and a year after, it would challenge Warner Bros. (which had produced the marvelous Them!) for the title of “Best Giant Bug Film” with 1955’s Tarantula. The sensational titles and spectacular monsters of these films (and those of other outfits) reflect myriad Cold War fears.
Invasion narratives often reproduced Red Scare propaganda while inadvertently reflecting US foreign policy in the process. Giant monster stories turned everyday animals enormous as America reacted to a world made small by the scale of atomic weapons and their dreadful possibilities. Each one of these films carries its own specific themes and ideas.
The Gill-man, in form and delivery, breaks from the comparatively more human monsters of Universal’s ’30s and ’40s lineup. He is not guilt-ridden like Lon Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot, who’d rather die than live with the curse of lycanthropy. He is not the creation of scientific arrogance like Karloff’s heart-wrenching Frankenstein’s Monster. Nor does he have the refined image of Lugosi’s Count Dracula.
The Gill-man is louder, more aggressive, and more immediately stunning in appearance. His daring and bold monstrosity suits his era, one seemingly insane enough to insist on duck-and-cover drills in the face of weapons that could set you alight before you even had a chance to remember your training.
And the Universal monsters that followed the Gill-man – giant tarantulas, subterranean mole people, space mutants, and prehistoric college professors – were just as exaggerated, but they lacked his personable charm.
And that’s what still connects the Gill-man to the prior Universal monsters: he is so effortlessly charming. The Gill-man is lonely, and we feel his loneliness. We watch him cry out in pain, and it’s palpable. His solitude reflects that of Dracula, another soul whose life has withstood the passage of time. The Gill-man’s panic at the violence of others is shared with Frankenstein’s Monster, who never meant to hurt anyone. I think nearly all movie monsters are sympathetic, but those of Universal – and especially the Gill-man – are some of the most engaging and poignant.
Seventy years on, Creature from the Black Lagoon remains one of the most popular of Universal’s monster movies. It’s not hard to see why, particularly when – despite several failed attempts at a genuine remake – Guillermo del Toro effectively revived the film’s spirit in 2017’s The Shape of Water.
It’s a film where the filmmaker so evidently recognized the loneliness of the Gill-man and decided to finally give him a happy ending – albeit realized through a slightly different creature. The Gill-man is still one of my favorite monsters, and Creature from the Black Lagoon is still one of my favorite films. I’m sure that’ll stay the same for another 70 years.
Creature from the Black Lagoon is available in 4k as part of the Universal Classic Monsters Limited Edition Collection. You can also watch Creature from the Black Lagoon on VOD.
