Big Picture: Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Part of August's BIG PICTURE: HELTER SWELTER
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1h 19m / G / Horror, Sci-Fi
TRAILER:
VENUE: Historic Duncan Auditorium
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The monster in The Shape of Water wasn’t a coincidence; that film started as a true Creature from the Black Lagoon remake that Universal rejected. Remakes of this movie have been in the works since the early ‘80s. Directors like John Landis and John Carpenter and Ivan Reitman have been attached. As recently as last year, it was announced that James Wan was in talks to direct. What is it (besides the valuable IP) that keeps filmmakers coming back to the story of a man-shaped monster who lives underwater?

All of the old-fashioned monster movies, really all of the old-fashioned monster stories, are premised in the fear of a failure of control. Human appetites that sometimes take over humans: the vampire hungers, the werewolf wants to K*ll, Frankenstein’s monster wants to belong, the invisible man wants to see but be unseen. To tell those stories, one must accept that, at our worst, people are capable of monstrous acts too. That’s what makes the stories scary. The first times we see the Creature K*ll are impulsive, just interlopers that happen to surprise him. But the reason he keeps attacking is lust. Like King Kong, Creature from the Black Lagoon is inspired by Beauty and the Beast; like King Kong, Creature is made almost entirely by men, in an entirely patriarchal context, that seem to have missed a critical point: Beauty falls in love with the Beast, too. This Creature wants a woman as a possession, as prey.

Two suits were made – one, for filming on land or on the surface of the water, was mossy gray-green. Subtler than the poster images, less garish, to pick up light and shadow in filming. The other suit was flat bright yellow, for filming underwater. It’s dark under there. Light won’t penetrate. A real creature in those natural colors would disappear completely.

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• This Saturday, 16th August, 01:00 pm, Summer Member Party: The Birdcage (1996) in Tampa
• This Sunday, 17th August, 03:00 pm, Roman Holiday (1953) in Tampa
• Next Wednesday, 20th August, 07:30 pm, Big Picture: No Country For Old Men (2007) in Tampa

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