Swimming with Monsters: Why We Still Love ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’

By the 1950s, the Universal Monsters had become a punchline with most of them ending their onscreen careers meeting Abbott and Costello. Many of them had become victims of their own success, becoming so iconic that they had lost any ability to frighten anybody. Creatures from outer space, radioactive monsters, and giant bugs had taken over the throne as horror’s reigning attractions and anything that deviated from these felt passé and played out. Universal itself supplied plenty of its own creations into this theatrical landscape and relegated its classic monsters to the small screen. Into this environment came something new from the studio that all but created the modern horror film when Universal unleashed Creature from the Black Lagoon into the world.

There is much about the Creature that is similar to the Universal monsters that have come before. Like Lon Chaney’s Phantom, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster, and Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man, the Gill Man is a very sympathetic monster. It is his territory that has been invaded by strangers and he is merely defending his home. There is a strong Beauty and the Beast quality to the film which is evident throughout the classic monster cycle dating all the way back to The Phantom of the Opera in 1925, but also strongly evident in various forms in Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Wolf Man (1941), and the 1943 remake of Phantom starring Claude Rains in the titular role. Finally, Creature features an iconic monster design that has stood the test of time, this one by the brilliant Milicent Patrick and fabricated by a talented group of artisans. For all this and more, the Creature fits comfortably among the classic Universal Monsters, though he arrived over ten years after the next youngest member of the group.

There are several more reasons, however, why the Creature stands out from the others, and one of the biggest is the time that he came to be. In the 1950s, there was a marked move away from gothic horror and toward science fiction. So, unlike the nebulous time, vaguely eastern European setting of Creature’s predecessors, the film is clearly set in the modern day and a scientific rather than supernatural explanation is given for the existence of the Gill Man. The prologue offers an oddly religion-infused evolutionary history that posits that a human-like creature could have evolved from fish. The recently rediscovered lung fish is offered more than once as a real-world example of the possibility. Like much science fiction, Creature from the Black Lagoon is an extrapolation of existing theories taken to logical conclusions based on the information available. So naturally, the film’s protagonists are scientists, Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson), Dr. Mark Williams (Richard Denning), and Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams), who fulfills the dual role common to 50s science fiction of a knowledgeable scientist that is also able to play the damsel in distress. Fortunately, Adams manages to be more of the former than the latter.

Like great science fiction going all the way back to Mary Shelley, Creature explores the ethical questions surrounding scientific pursuits, in this case specifically as they relate to environmental impact. The human expedition repeatedly contaminates the Gill Man’s ecosystem while attempting to lure him out. They claim it is for the noble purposes of science and discovery, but in reality, their motives are purely selfish. As Mark tells David, “They won’t believe it back home. None of them. I wouldn’t have believed it myself. Sitting out here waiting for some monster to appear. That’s why we’ve got to take him…We must have the proof.” So, Mark’s entire reasoning for dropping poison in the water that kills the fish in the lagoon, shooting the Gill Man with a harpoon, and relentlessly pursuing him day after day is so that people won’t think he is crazy or lying to them. Later, David calls Mark out on this. When the Gill Man has built a dam to prevent their boat from leaving the lagoon, David decries Mark saying, “we’re trapped and fighting for our lives and you’re worried about whether people will believe us.” The environmentalism underlying Creature is unusual for the 1950s but the scientific ethics evident in the narrative are unmistakable.

Related to this is a subtext of colonialism. The Amazonian expedition is invading the Gill Man’s territory; it is only natural for him to fight back. In this sense, the Gill Man bears more similarity to another famous monster than any of his Universal kindred—King Kong. Like Kong, the Gill Man would not be a threat at all if he were simply left alone. He is only interpreted as a threat by those who wish, in both cases, to find him, capture him, and take him from his home. In a way, the second half of King Kong, in which he is taken from Skull Island to New York, is played out in Revenge of the Creature (1955), in which the Gill Man is taken to a Florida national park to be observed by scientists but also the general public. In both cases, the creatures run amok and pose a danger to “civilization” but only because of the unethical practices of those who took them from their natural environment in the first place.

Also like King Kong, Creature contains a strong Beauty and the Beast element with the creature falling in love with Kay during a memorable sequence in which she takes a swim. The scene has been called a kind of sexual encounter, or at least as much of one as could be depicted in 1954. Where Kong’s infatuation with Fay Wray’s character carries with it an unintended racial element, that is not really the case here. The Gill Man is lured by one who seems to be like him in a spiritual sense. Kay swims without the breathing apparatus that Mark and David wear. She does not carry any weapons or seem to pose any threat to him. He is undoubtedly enticed by her beauty but there is also a sense that he cares about her and sees her as something more like him than the others, something he wants to protect and perhaps even save from them.

To some extent, the Creature’s feelings are reciprocated by Kay who expresses great sympathy for him when he is captured in a makeshift cage by the male scientists after the Creature has killed a member of the expedition. Mark calls her out on it. “You sound as though you feel sorry for him. Why? He could have killed you just as easily.” Kay responds by saying, “But he didn’t.” As mentioned before, it is not uncommon for audiences to feel empathy for the monsters in the Universal films, but it is fairly unusual for characters in the films to do so. Kay is the voice of the audience in the film. Her love for the Creature is our love for the Creature, and that love has only grown in the seventy years since he first appeared on screen.

Milicent Patrick long went uncredited as the designer of the Gill Man, as she worked in a time when only the studio department heads received onscreen credit, but she created one of the true masterpieces of creature design. It is clear that the team that helped fabricate the suits did so pretty much exactly the way she drew them. Though Jack Pierce made some of the greatest designs of the 1930s and 40s, the Creature likely would have been beyond his abilities as he was reluctant to use the kinds of materials needed to realize such a design. To this day, the Gill Man feels so real. The design is so plausible for what a man that evolved from fish would look like. With his scales and spine of fins down his back, the gaping mouth, and the moving gills it is all so tangible. No wonder fans continue collect his image in statues, action figures, Pez dispensers, masks, on t-shirts, posters, and other various collectibles.

Sure, in the ensuing years the Creature became something of a punchline of his own. He didn’t meet Abbott and Costello in a movie, but he did meet them on television. He became Uncle Gilbert on The Munsters, and in that episode, he could talk. More recently, Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker) wore a Gill Man mask in a Halloween episode of The Office so he could sleep at his desk. But somehow, the Creature has managed to escape most of the more egregious iterations that befell his Universal brethren. Today, the Creature and the films he appeared in are among the most beloved of all the Universal Monster movies. Perhaps he escaped the slow descent into mediocrity and worse that occurred with some of the others by only appearing in a trilogy, one with a rather tragic conclusion in The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).

I think the reason for his enduring popularity comes down to the character of the Gill Man himself. He is more than just a brilliant design and costume brought to life by Ben Chapman on land and Ricou Browning underwater. There is an intangible to him that was also present in Karloff’s Frankenstein monster and Chaney’s Larry Talbot/Wolf Man that draws us to him. Perhaps it is a relatability about them all. We see ourselves in these creatures. Our hearts break for them because we have experienced the kinds of rejection they experience in these films. Some of us feel like the Gill Man—what others might call a “freak” being bullied by people who don’t understand that we just want to be left alone. The reality is, the Gill Man is not a freak but a unicorn, a creature that is totally unique in the world. That uniqueness brings him the kind of loneliness that we have all felt, but that doesn’t make him any less special. We realize what the other characters in the film don’t, that he is not something to be studied and gawked at, but should instead be allowed to thrive on his own terms. Maybe we are drawn to him not only because we understand the Creature, but because we in fact, are the Creature.