Main Feature Synopsis – The Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954)
On an expedition in the Amazon, scientists uncover what appear to be the remains of a missing link between fish and man.  Soon a new expedition is launched in an effort to find out if a living specimen can be located and captured, but the expedition encounters more than it bargained for.  Entering a habitat known as The Black Lagoon, where legend has it no one has successfully returned from, the scientists find what they are looking for but the creature has plans of its own, involving a beautiful young female scientist.  Julie Adams and Richard Carlson star in this Universal classic.

Cary’s Impressions
For over twenty years I spent a few days every summer dropping into the 75° F water of the Ichetucknee River in North Florida with nothing more than my wetsuit, a mask, a snorkel and a pair of fins.  The water was crystal clear and the river ran through protected forest.  If I went early enough in the morning, I could be the first one on the river with nary an inner tube or canoe in sight.  The current would carry me for miles and there was literally nothing out there except me, a few curious raccoons (they liked to follow along on the bank and watch me) and a ton of turtles, fish and the occasional alligator.  It was a pristine world, something that is becoming rarer and rarer all the time, and also one of the many locations in North Florida where my favorite series of horror movies in the Universal canon, The Creature From The Black Lagoon and its sequels, were shot. 

Swimming/drifting along in that cold water, with nothing but silence or bird calls around me, it was really easy to imagine that the vegetation would part below me and the Gill Man would shoot up and drag me to my doom.  In fact, part of the beauty of the experience was knowing that I was literally miles away from anyone who could help me.  That sense of isolation is a key part of why the original movie is frightening to this very day.

The Creature From The Black Lagoon is the last of the classic Universal monsters and some would say that its popularity hinges on the elaborate and innovative make-up used to create the beast.  However, I would argue that The Creature From The Black Lagoon is comparable in script, acting and presentation to any of the Frankenstein films or even Tod Browning’s Dracula.  It’s an amazingly well put together horror film that still gets scares 52 years after its initial release. 

The film’s innovation is unquestionable.  First, the creature costume is a full body, functional suit; the first of its kind.  As one historian puts it, this is the kind of technology that eventually led to techniques used in films like Alien and Predator.  It doesn’t look like rubber.  It looks real.  It was built to fit the actors so exactly that neither of the two men who played the creature were allowed to gain even so much as one pound durring shooting.  It flexes with each movement and even the gills move (thanks to air bladders and a separate head for out-of-water scenes). 

No suit could be innovative enough to carry a film though.  That’s why you should learn and know the name Ricou Browning.  Browning was not a professional actor.  In fact, other than the three creature movies and some Flipper episodes, he worked mostly behind the scenes, directing underwater sequences or writing.  However, while taking some studio executives on a location scouting trip his distinct swimming style impressed them so much that they offered him the role.  Underwater, there is no better creature than Ricou Browning.  His twisting, turning style is both graceful and savage. 

Appropriately, his out of water counterpart, Ben Chapman, played the creature as a shuffling, somewhat awkward menace.  He was still scary and dangerous but out of his element.  The mix of the two styles adds realism to the character that few “creature” films ever achieve.

Equally groundbreaking was the camerawork.  A major portion of the film is shot underwater and is done with incredible artistry.  Originally the film was shot in 3-D but even without that effect, the movie looks brilliant.  There are shots here that have been copied in everything from Lake Placid to Jaws.  

The script, while a direct rip-off of King Kong, is also strong.  Importantly, it was the first of its kind to promote the scientist character as the hero instead of as a power-mad doctor or a raving maniac.  The formula would be repeated in every science fiction movie for decades to come.  It also painted the character who wanted the creature dead as a bad guy, being perhaps the first horror movie in history to promote conservation to some small degree.  This was unheard of in the 1950s. 

As far as the acting, it doesn’t get much better than this.  Richard Carlson is fantastic as the lead.  He would go on to play a similar character in other great sci-fi classics of the 1950’s but his performance here still holds up today.  The best part of the cast though has to be Julie Adams.  She is remarkably beautiful and puts in a fantastic performance in this film.

Finally, and most importantly, the direction here is as strong as any of the Universal classics from the 1930s and 1940s.  Jack Arnold’s direction is spot-on throughout this movie.  He balances romance, horror and adventure amazingly well for the entire picture.  There is no way I can comment on this film without bringing up something taught in every Intro to Film class worth a damn.  That would be how to properly manage the tension scale in a horror film or thriller.  The tension scale is a concept that illustrates how much a director can get away with in keeping an audience on the edge of their seats through the entire length of a film.

With horror films, it’s a delicate line to walk.  If you show too little, you bore your audience.  If you show too much, you blow their sense of anticipation and ruin their trust in you as a director.  In directing The Creature From The Black Lagoon, Jack Arnold walks that line from beginning to end and never misses a step.  First, he refrains from showing you the creature in its entirety for a full third of the film.  This makes for some truly scary sequences (like the killing in the tent toward the beginning).  Secondly, his innovative shot set ups (he storyboarded everything) allowed for surprises even after the creature had been revealed.  Witness the scene where Julie Adams is taking an afternoon swim while the Creature watches from mere feet beneath her.  There aren’t a lot of scenes out there that can compare with that kind of tension.

The Creature From The Black Lagoon is arguably my favorite horror film of all time and I would suggest that if you haven’t seen it already, make it your pick for Halloween night.

Shawn’s Impression
The Creature, affectionately called “Gill Man” by those who study him, is a bit of an anomaly in the Universal collection of monster films. He isn’t a macabre figure. He’s simply a creature who lives in a black lagoon and who people keep screwing with. Of all Universal’s characters, he is the only one who never talks and furthermore, he’s arguably the most sympathetic, which is no small feat for a humanoid fish.

While the actor(s) under the make-up isn’t/aren’t as prominent or recognizable as those from Universal’s other series, that doesn’t make Gill Man any less human. In fact, this humanity is what elevates the Creature from being as forgettable as any number of sci-fi/horror monsters that the 1950’s produced. What I find most effective is the Creature’s gaze. Whenever we see him, silently waiting at the bottom of the lagoon, looking at the ship, or at the human debris floating above, or longingly at Julie Adams, it’s obvious what he is thinking. Usually, it isn’t much more than “Leave me the hell alone”, “Oh shit, you pissed me off now” or “Let’s get it on, baby” but regardless of the situation, his reactions are easy to read on his face... and you can’t help but agree with the monster every time.

The creature makeup is among the best in Hollywood’s history. The Gill Man costume is perfect from head to foot and completely believable. The big selling point for me is how the gills move in and out. It’s this touch that makes it more than an outfit; the Creature becomes completely real the moment you see those gills move.

The score is incredibly powerful as well, with the Creature’s theme performed very loud in relation to the other ambient sound effects and that adds an extra dramatic punch, even if it is a bit forced. The constant background noise of Amazonian animal chatter is also great for setting mood of the location. The sounds of loons and cranes constantly going in the background at seemingly random moments add to the overall sense of realism.

I rewatched Creature From The Black Lagoon for the first time in a long time for DIMP's Universal Horror Week. I think it’s been about a decade since I saw it last. Ten years wiser, the ecological message of the story is very appearent to me. Creature From The Black Lagoon goes out of its way to show how we are a part of our environment and how we can easily destroy it. It's a little surprising that this angle isn’t brought up in more critical discussions of the film since it's so heavy handed. One scene has the scientists dropping a drug into the lagoon that makes the fish die almost instantaneously of suffocation. Another has a character casually flicking a cigarette butt into the water. It’s oddly compelling that the last of the big Universal monsters, wasn’t the Gill Man, but his human pursuers.

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