Funny thing about classic horror films like Creature From the Black Lagoon--even with today's mega-million-dollar lizard epics replete with CGI animation, that old horror flick just seems to get better and better. In fact, one could say that even after almost 45 years...

By Dave Duggins

(Dave Duggins is a new contributor to HORROR-WOOD, but he is a published horror writer. Two of his short stories appear in the hardback "Best of Cemetery Dance" anthology, now available from CD Press. It's an anthology featuring Stephen King, Dean Koontz and many other top horror writers. He's in great company there, and most welcome to the ranks of HORROR-WOOD's legion of scary scribblers.)

I didn't actually get an opportunity to see Creature From the Black Lagoon until I was in college. I was twenty years old. I knew a lot about the film from constantly reading about horror movies, but as there were no second-run or drive-in theaters in my small town, I was a late in seeing many of the classics.

This was, as it turns out, to my advantage. When I did get to see the film, I saw it in a movie theater, not chopped and cropped for television.

I watched from a dark place. A cave, not at all unlike the creature's lair.

Perfect.

Seeing a film like Creature as an adult is an altogether different experience from seeing a monster movie as a kid. As a kid, you don't have far to go to achieve suspension of disbelief; kids exist in a perpetual state of half-belief in everything until maturity commands them to start questioning, doubting, shoving imagination away.

I've never been able to do that. The pictures in my head are too vivid, the sound effects too loud to deny. So I'm still sort of stuck between the adult and the kid, and I saw the film with two sets of eyes that night.

The adult eyes were fascinated with the subtext, archetypes and Lovecraftian overtones in the story. This was a pretty big budget flick in its day; so far as I know, it's the only film that borrows from Lovecraft that isn't actually a "B" picture (see The Dunwich Horror if you want a good example of what "B" movies did to Lovecraft, turning one of the cosmically terrible Old Ones into a comically horrible cheapie monster that would have embarrassed Irwin Allen). The quasi-amphibian creature is straight out of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

As an adult, it's great to make those kinds of connections, to see the influences of one artist in others -- to see those big, bold archetypes at play in a new setting, new time, given new life. In this case, it was seeing one set of archetypes play against another: the Lovecraftian and the popular fifties image of the monster with a girl in his arms. Creature spun off a couple of sequels of its own, and is responsible for countless homages and outright ripoffs since. Everything from the modern classic Jaws to the non-classic Humanoids from the Deep owes a debt to the Black Lagoon's watery denizen.

So, while the adult was making all these value judgments and grooving on thepop culture resonance, the kid set of eyes saw Creature with the kind of total involvement that only kids can bring to the experience of film. The theater disappeared; I was in that cave, under the water looking up through rippling tiger stripes of sunlight at the bottom of a boat, at the alien and ominous forms of humans in scuba gear ... and at one particularly intriguing human in a one-piece white bathing suit.

Neither the kid or the adult had any problem believing in the reality of this half-fish thing with gold eyes, gills, webbed hands and a scaly lizardlike skin. I've seen the movie half a hundred times by now, and I cannot see any seams in that suit. Hats off to the designers, and to diver Ricou Browning for making the underwater scenes so effective.

There are actually two costumes used in the film; the one for the underwater sequences is slightly less creepy than the one for the fish-out-of-water shots, if only because the eerie gold eyes are not visible.

The visual illusion is made even more effective by the intelligence of the thing. A smart monsters is always scarier. He may not look like much, but who knows? Maybe he's even smarter than you. Now that's scary.

Man, I'd love to try that suit on. Just for a little while. I know some people who deserve a good scare. That's a big part of the appeal -- the ability to cast yourself as the monster. You're the werewolf; you're a giant ape tearing a major city apart; you're the creature ogling the pretty girls from the dark water. And you can breathe under there! It's a safe, harmless power play -- until the final reel, that is. And even then, at least you get a cool death scene.

Casting yourself as the monster in this flick is particularly interesting. None of the beasties derived from the Creature has the sympathetic human quality that our gill-man has. With all that's going on in the film, you still find yourself feeling sorry for the guy. After all, he's just protecting his home. Imagine how you'd feel if somebody came into your house with a pickaxe and started whacking chunks out of your living room wall.

Imagine how you'd feel if someone trespassed on your family plot ... and dug up the grave of your grandfather. That's what happens in the opening scene. It's not done in the name of grave-robbing; it's done by well-intentioned archeologists conducting scientific studies of the area. From the Creature's point of view, however, they're homewreckers. Plain and simple.

Don't get me wrong here: the concept of a monster you can feel sorry for is not a new idea, either. There's a lineage you become aware of if you watch a lot of horror films, and there are echoes of Frankenstein and King Kong here, as well as older stories about often misunderstood werewolves and benevolent golems torched by rabid mobs of incensed townspeople.

In this case, the heroes don't actually kill the monster, as they do in the last reel of Kong. They let him go. We presume that he dies; the last shot we get of him is of his still body drifting to the bottom of the lagoon, half-obscured by a cloud of his own blood. He looks pretty bad, doesn't he? But not bad enough to prevent Universal from turning a profit on a couple of sequels. It's an old, proud tradition, resurrecting monsters.

Value judgements about sequels aside, the original is not a classic for no reason. It looks great, primarily due to Jack Arnold's experienced direction. Arnold wrote, produced and directed a slew of genre films, including It Came From Outer Space (1953), Tarantula (1955) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). One of the great touches in Black Lagoon is the look and feel of the creature and his surroundings. Black and white is the perfect medium for claustrophobic, tight jungle settings; King Kong benefited from this as well. Most of what you get is a general impression of chaos -- vines and creepers, impenetrably dense undergrowth. And there's the lagoon itself.

The design, the direction, that monster suit, a great script -- they all come together to make for a memorable film experience. That's the stuff all us film buffs like to roll around in.

But this is the question that always gets asked when I show this movie to my non-film buff friends:

Would you go swimming in that water?

Thanks, Dave! I know I wouldn't swim in that water...it's hard to catch flies when you're splashing around, fending off Gill-men...of course, if Julia Adams was also in that water...well...

Article copyright Dave Duggins. "Creature Magazine" animated gif from John Jordan. Used with permission.

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