Tasked with putting out a follow-up to Creature From the Black Lagoonjust over a year later, producer William Alland, director Jack Arnold, and screenwriter Martin Berkeley (who also co-wrote the Arnold-directed Tarantula) took what was probably the most logical path: if the the first Creature film seemed directly inspired by the voyage to a prehistoric world as seen in King Kong, then a second one should take cues from the New York climax. In Revenge of the Creature, the once dominant life form in a secluded natural habitat is forcibly transplanted to our modern world—rather than a film about entering an unreal world of evolutionary alternatives, it’s about the unreal entrapped by more recognizable surroundings. By itself, this storytelling decision de-mystifies the monster by taking him out of his element and making it a lone aberration interrupting normalcy—but, intentionally or not, the rest of the movie degrades and diminishes it to such a degree that it may be an even more pitiable figure than in the first movie.
Most people seem to accept that Creature From the Black Lagoon is part of the classic Universal Monsters line-up, sitting alongside Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy on home video covers, in theme park attractions, and on twelve-packs of soda and bags of potato chips—but in terms of context and content, it is at a removed from the films of the thirties and forties. Those films carried a certain Victorian literary flair (even when they ostensibly took place in “modern” times), set in a Gothic version of Europe (and maybe some other places) frozen in time, full of old foreboding castles and supernatural curses; the 1950s, often favoured science-based horror, and not the theatrical mad science of Frankenstein or The Invisible Man, but the kind that discovered and unleashed the atomic bomb, or that probed deeper into the prehistoric past or into outer space, and finding signs of man’s ultimate insignificance. In that sense, Black Lagoon is closer in spirit to its contemporaries, the less-commented-upon run of Sci-Fi monster movies put out by Universal that spanned everything from It Came From Outer Space and This Island Earth to Tarantula and even something like The Monolith Monsters. These films were about contemporary scientific thought—or, as close as movies like these actually get to it—and grapple with the idea that the more we learn about our universe, the more strange and terrifying it becomes, which is something a bit different from the otherworldly horrors of older stories.
But Black Lagoon still feels like a bridge between the “classic” monsters, which were gaining a new following thanks to television re-airings, and the new breed of mutants and space aliens haunting horror films—while the style of fifties-style monsters and the “classics” differed, that’s not to say that they were completely incompatible. This movies demonstrates that there are, in fact, many places where the two eras both diverge and meet: while steeped in the modern conventions and trends of the day, it maintains a good deal of the spirit of its predecessors, especially in characterizing its lead monster as an individual, tragic figure as well as a terrifying force. There is indeed a reason why this Creature gets to be part of the gang.
I write about monster apes as a crucial part of the monster enterprise, but the contradiction at the heart of that is that apes are not monsters—they are us. Once upon a time, pointing out the striking similarities between humans and the great apes was a shocking but intriguing idea, a source of merriment and thought experiments…and then it simply became incontrovertible that humans aren’t just similar to the great apes. To some people, this realization has been a source of enlightenment, a recognition of the interconnected nature of all living things on this planet. To others, however, from the earliest days of evolutionary theory to now, it only creates this grotesque mirror, a backwards mockery of human exceptionalism and civilization in animal form. Those two approaches is where the central complication of “apes-as-monster” comes together: we see ourselves in these animals, and sometimes that makes us want to sympathize with them (maybe that’s why ape movies have their own distinct following), and other times, it makes us fear them. In both cases, it’s because of what their very existence says about us.
Carl Linnaeus was the first to suggest that humans were directly related to other primates in the eighteenth century, and as great apes like chimpanzees and orangutans became more well-known in the western world in the subsequent years, the connection was increasingly a central fascination among fantasists. While many early depictions of apes in fiction were meant to play their relationship with humanity for satire, among the most famous early stories about an ape was Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The story is probably more well-known as the first true detective story, portraying a genius private citizen using deductive reasoning (Poe called it “ratiocination”) to solve a seemingly impossible crime, much to the astonishment of the bumbling local police—but it is also a likely inspiration for the apes-as-monster stories that would follow, the one that showed how an ape could be a figure of fear. Sure, it’s “only” an orangutan—normal-sized, no kung-fu skills—but to the people reading it in 1841, an orangutan was something unusual, something they’d probably never seen before (even if they read about it), something that didn’t sound real. In the twentieth century, ape fiction was still trying to maintain that mysterious and unsettling air, but since we knew more about them then, they started exaggerating them in different ways. In any case, Poe used the limited public exposure of apes like orangutans to make something memorably gruesome.
In my last post, I briefly touched on my childhood interest in folklore and mythology and how seeing the things I was learning about reflected in the wider culture was a unique thrill—it was an ever-expanding world of fantastical stories and bizarre monsters that felt endlessly rewarding. I’m not entirely sure what put me on that path to begin with, whether it was seeing references to mythology in video games like Final Fantasy or even Pokémon or finding books solely about mythological creatures in the school library (my parents even bought me a massive encyclopedia of Greek, Norse, and Celtic myths at that time), since those things overlapped and fed into each other, and when the Internet came into the picture, that put the whole thing into overdrive. Whatever the real originator of my fascination was, it is still very clear that that stuff can really hook a kid, especially when presented in a way that emphasizes the adventurous and strange nature of those stories and avoids the stuffy academic version of it that may make the youths think Beowulf is just a musty old poem and not the tale of a guy who rips a giant monster’s arm off.
Kids’ innate interest in the creepy creatures of legend has been exploited in pop culture off and on for decades (most of the books I read on the subject were clearly aimed at that demographic), but an interesting example of it from the early nineties were the Monster in My Pocket toys produced by Matchbox and Morrison Entertainment Group, if only because of how direct it was in marketing hordes of mythological monsters as something cool. Clearly taking inspiration from mono-colour collectible mini toys like M.U.S.C.L.E(which were imported Kinnikuman figures, a subject that, because I’m me, I’ve broached elsewhere) that had been popular in the eighties, MiMP came out in 1990, burned brightly for a year or two, and then disappeared off the face of the earth (except, apparently, in some parts of Europe, Central, and South America, and likely thousands of yard sales and flea markets), a veritable micro-phenomenon. Its business strategy was based on tried-and-true methods that still work to this day, cajoling kids into wanting to get as many possible (an early practitioner of “Gotta catch ’em all”), not just by offering a wide selection of different toys in blind or semi-blind packages and then making multiple colour variations of each one, but also by assigning them a “value” (here, a point system printed on the figures themselves) that serves no purpose but to make certain figures seem rarer or better than others based on nothing. It did everything you need to do to drive undiscerning young completists into a tizzy, yes, but I can also imagine that the subject matter also helped propel its early success: collectible monster toys were neat, but these ones were based on “real things”, which gave them an especially enticing angle. It was like one of those bestiaries I read, except in plastic form, which I guess some prefer.
When most people think of the Universal Monster movies, they think of them collectively, not as individual horror films that just happened to be put out by the same company and featuring many of the same actors. When you think of Dracula, chances are Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy are lurking around as well. This was something that Universal themselves leaned into, as their second era of monster movies in the 1940s eventually started just throwing in all the monsters, giving you the most bang for your buck. By the fifties, most kids experiencing these movies for the first time were either seeing them revived in theatres as double bills, aired on TV under the Shock Theatre banner, or featured prominently in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland—so, in the minds of generation after generation, the monsters were always hanging out in the same dusty castles and spooky moors, making them into a group not unlike how the yokai spirits of Japan are portrayed. The continuing existence of “The Monster Mash” makes that abundantly clear.
Speaking of Japan: despite coming from another continent, Konami’s Castlevania series is very much following the tradition of those monster mash-ups, reintroducing the classic creatures to a new generation of kids through a new medium (I’ve written about that before.) The original 1987 entry could basically be described as “Conan the Barbarian with a whip fights the Universal Monsters”, and as the series progressed, it developed more of its own style, as well as its own nonsense mythology and timeline (which somehow is able to include Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, even though the book is bereft of mummies and skeletons and fish-men), but never strayed that far from that original pitch. No matter who was fighting through the dark corridors and at what point in history, Castlevania has still been about Dracula and his castle housing an accumulation of monsters from all sorts of sources, and reappearing every century or so for another Monster Shindig. The atmosphere the games perfected was a fun celebration of every Gothic horror trope they could cram into one setting, pulling from not just the movies, but also literature, folklore, and demonology, making it seem sensible that all these disparate evil beings hang out together in this one big house. No other game franchise really has this very Halloween-y spirit.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 