Director Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film The Shape of Water was born from a desire to retell the story of The Creature from the Black Lagoon films from the 1950s. Del Toro had always wanted the Gill-man and the human woman he falls for to be romantically together in the end[1]. Getting to such a wishful happy ending required more than just a change to the final outcome. Del Toro’s updated, aquatic “beauty and the beast” inverts much in the Creature narrative, expressing changes in the cultural values and entertainment needs of audiences today. We are no longer expected to fear the monster but to sympathize with him and to desire him. It is the institutions of government and science that are now monstrous.
After the success of The Creature From the Black Lagoon in 1954, producer William Alland quickly began developing a sequel, The Revenge of the Creature, released in 1955. The two films together succeed in Alland’s intent to more-or-less remake King Kong.[2] A fantastic monster is discovered in a remote location far from civilization. It becomes fascinated with a human woman before being captured and dragged back to civilization and put on display. The monster escapes, carrying off his human love, only to be gunned down. Alland had no ideas or interest in a third Creature film, but the continued popularity of the series demanded one.[3] In the 1956 The Creature Walks Among Us, the Gill-man is again hunted down and captured, this time becoming the subject of scientific experiments to remake him into a land-based creature and, in the process, reveal the secret of how to transform humanity into beings capable of traveling to the stars.
Del Toro’s film revisits, revises, and reconstructs elements from all three Creature films. We begin with the “Amphibian Man,” as the film’s credits name him, already abducted from his home in the Amazon jungle and brought to a secret lab in a US military base. The manager of the program, Colonel Strickland, sees him as an “asset” with the potential to place the USA ahead of the Soviet Union in the Space Race. In Revenge of the Creature, the apparently well-meaning scientist, Prof. Ferguson, believes the way to understand the Gill-man is to study his responses and ability to communicate — which to him means training him like a performing dolphin and conditioning him through electric shocks. Strickland uses similar methods, including a cattle prod as well, though here it is pure sadism, as if the Amphibian Man could be tortured into submitting to his own degradation and inevitable dissection.
Revenge of the Creature (1955)
Del Toro begins to take the story in a new direction by introducing not a female scientist in a white swimsuit, like Kay Lawrence from the first Creature film, but the meek, voiceless maintenance worker Elisa. A lonely orphan left mute from (apparently) a childhood injury to her throat, she has, even before meeting the Amphibian Man, a deep attraction and erotic affinity to water and things aquatic. When she accidentally finds him being held in the facility where she works, it feels not so much like a shocking discovery as the achieving of something Elisa has been looking for all her life. She has been as alone and isolated as the Gill-man was in his lagoon.
Kay and the other female co-stars of the Creature films, of course, never fall in love with the Gill-man. They might have some honest scientific curiosity about him and even some compassion — but they all scream and run when the Creature is coming their way. Elisa, rather than being the object of pursuit by a monster, is the active agent in The Shape of Water, risking her job and her safety by making contact with the Amphibian Man and teaching him to communicate in sign language. To her there is never any doubt that he is a sentient being held against his will and subjected to inhuman treatment. In reversing the premise of the Creature narrative, the suspense is not about whether the monster will carry off the maiden, but whether the maiden will carry off the monster — and in this variant, the monster wants to be carried off. It’s rescue, not rape.
In the first Creature film, the Gill-man brings Kay to his aquatic grotto. Elisa tucks the Amphibian Man away in the bathroom of her apartment — where another type of reversal develops. Any sexual subtext in the earlier films is very much the text of del Toro’s story. It isn’t long before Elisa initiates an intimate relationship with her guest. The film is never subtle about this, including a scene where Elisa describes how the Amphibian Man’s genitalia function. Their mutually fulfilling relationship is not only a major plot point (and an image used to sell the film, as the marketing art makes clear) but is in contrast to the socially unacceptable and dangerous situation of Elisa’s homosexual friend Giles, and Strickland’s physically brutal relationship with his wife.
Just as the Gill-man and his would-be brides could have no real hope of being together — in The Revenge of the Creature, the Gill-man is able to be tracked down and killed due to the necessity of staying close to shore so that his captive can have a chance to breathe — Elisa and her love could never find a place in the world of 1960s America. The very water-filled love chamber Elisa sets up in her bathroom threatens to burst and expose what they are doing. Like many mortals who encounter a magical being from another realm, Elisa must sacrifice her own feelings to give her beloved freedom and help him escape back to his aquatic home. Del Toro’s fantasy-fulfilling twist is for Elisa to become an aquatic being herself, although the film suggests that she has actually always been one, trapped on dry land and finding her own freedom and way home through the Amphibian Man. The Gill-man never gets this opportunity, even when, in another contrasting reversal, he is surgically made into a land being in The Creature Walks Among Us.
For all their parallels and mirroring, it is this ending that highlights the major difference between the Creature films and The Shape of Water. The Creature films are products of the 1950s, when science fiction monsters had replaced the gothic horrors of Dracula, the Wolf-man, and the other earlier Universal Studio monsters. It was a time when the hegemonic authority of scientists and soldiers offered the hope that reason and progress could defeat or contain monsters and thus preserve the ever-improving lifestyle of the American Dream. The Shape of Water looks back on that earlier time with critical condemnation. The audiences of today are presumed to be more disillusioned with reality. Institutions and government have failed to fulfill the dreams they offered, and those in power are mostly interested in securing their own status, dominance, and decaying ambitions. The narration of the film is direct in referring to Strickland as the “monster” of this story. The Amphibian Man, who becomes only more magical as the narrative progresses, is not a science fiction entity, but a wish fulfilling fantasy figure. To follow him is to escape this world, into the realm of dreams.
[1] “Love and Danger on the ‘Water’ Front,” Variety, January 10, 2018.
[2] Tom Weaver, David Schecter, and Steve Kronenberg, The Creature Chronicles (McFarland: 2017), chap.1, Kindle.
[3] Weaver, Schecter, and Kronenberg, chap.3, Kindle.
Samuel Crider is a graduate student in the Media and Cinema Studies program at DePaul University in Chicago Illinois, and teaches courses in computer graphics and visual effects at Columbia College Chicago. His research interests include monster theory, fandom studies, and alternative narrative forms. He returned to academic studies and teaching after nearly 25 years working in the video game industry on such titles as Mortal Kombat and Injustice. His writing on topics such as Godzilla, Ultraman, and gaming is at www.samuelcrider.com.
