CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON has, to me, one of the most incredible origins, and legacies, of any movie. At a dinner party during the filming of CITIZEN KANE, a cinematographer tells one of the cast members of that film a story of a man-like fish living deep within the Amazon, and that cast member is so captivated by the story that he decides to produce a film about it.
The film gives us one of the most iconic monsters in movie history, designed by a woman named Milicent Patrick who would not get proper credit for her creation for decades. You have a film passed off as nothing but a drive-in B-Movie and absolutely marketed as such, too, even presented in 3D for extra shock value. And yet a young Guillermo del Toro sees this film as a boy, and sees the artistry in it, falls in love with it, and as an adult his 2017 love-letter to this movie, THE SHAPE OF WATER, wins the Oscar for Best Picture.
CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON follows an expedition into the Amazon in which a group of people search for, and find, the missing link between man and fish. It was released over twenty years after the initial 1931 Universal horror boom of DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN and because of that, some people argue that the Gill-Man doesn’t belong in the iconic lineup of Universal Monsters. But the themes shared by most of those monsters, of being an outsider, of a creature living an isolated existence, are still there, just updated for the time.
The GIll-Man is tragic in his own way. He is likely the last of its kind, he lives in an area largely untouched by people, and now people come into his home, and he is simply defending himself. There are absolutely themes of exoticism here. CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON is very much a movie about a creature being stolen from its natural habitat with the intent to display it for cheap, unethical entertainment in the name of preservation.
Not only is the underwater photography gorgeous, it features probably one of the greatest shots of any movie, period. I love when a film can be summed up by a single shot and the iconic sequence of Kay swimming on top of the water with the Gill-Man swimming just below her does that. On a primal, horror level, that shot expresses the fear of not knowing what’s lurking just below the surface. But it’s also more elegant. That is a shot of two partners engaged in a dance that one of them isn’t even aware of, and even though they’re only a few feet apart, there’s a whole world between them.