Soul of the Future: The Creature Among Us--and Within Us

There were many different expressions of atomic anxiety in popular films (ignored by serious people, of course) in the 1950s and 60s.  In addition to the atomic monster films like Gojira and Them!, there were notable creature features in the 1950s that had nothing directly to do with atomic bombs, yet involved related issues.

The best of these were The Creature From the Black Lagoon and its two sequels, released in a row in the mid- 1950s.  As a concept, these films had an intriguing pedigree. William Alland was an actor in Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre company in the late 1930s and early 40s. He participated in the famous radio "panic broadcast” of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds and had a part in Citizen Kane as the reporter who narrates the tale, but whose face is never clearly seen.

Alland was a guest at a small dinner party hosted by Orson Welles, perhaps during the making of Kane.  Other guests were actor Delores Del Rio (Welles' girlfriend at the time) and Gabriel Figueroa, a Mexican cinematographer already embarked on a distinguished career: he shot Luis Bunuel's Mexican films and won an Oscar for the Hollywood film of Tennessee Williams' play Night of the Iguana.

Gabriel Figueroa

During the party Figueroa told what he said was a true story about a half-man, half-fish who lived outside a village in the Amazon. The creature left the villagers alone except for once a year, when he took one of the village maidens. When others laughed at him, Figueroa became indignant, claiming he’d even seen a photograph.

A decade or so later Alland was a producer for Universal Pictures, which made an earlier generation of monsters and monster movies like Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy.  After commissioning Ray Bradbury to write a treatment for what became the 1953 movie It Came From Outer Space, Alland worked on his own film story based on the tale he'd heard at that dinner.

The tale Alland heard--of a monster that accepts the annual sacrifice of a young woman --is similar to much older tales as well as the Gojira legend and the gold standard in monster movies, King Kong.  In his story notes, Alland pretty much copied the plot of King Kong (an unknown and age-old monster in an isolated place with an attraction to a human woman is captured by a showman and displayed in the US, until he escapes, kidnaps the woman and is killed.)  Alland transposed the location from a jungle to underwater, and the creature from a giant ape to the half-man, half-fish eventually called "the gill-man."

The concept was a cinematic natural.  Expensive effects weren't necessary: the creature could be played by a man in a costume. Plus the water environment meant that the female attraction could legitimately be shown, early and often, in a bathing suit.

 Universal picked the young actress under contract with the best legs (Julie Adams), and Alland hired the lead actor (Richard Carlson), writer (Harry Essex) and the director (Jack Arnold) from It Came From Outer Space. The studio set about creating a spectacle to further exploit their latest gimmick--3-D--to best advantage, in the film eventually called Creature From the Black Lagoon.

But once the writers (Essex and Arthur Ross) and particularly director Jack Arnold got the story ready to film, it went beyond the King Kong themes (with its often referenced but superficial resemblance to the Beauty and the Beast story) to express various 1950s anxieties related to the Bomb, including profoundly mixed attitudes towards science and scientists in relation to society and the natural world.  The two sequels expanded on some of these themes.

The opening of Creature From the Black Lagoon sets the premise with admirable efficiency.  The brief prologue, not uncommon in 1950s science fiction films, also suggests how generally accepted Darwinian evolution was, even among established religions.  It begins with Genesis, the imagery of a newly forming planet and the words: "In the beginning God created heaven and Earth, and the Earth was without form and void."  To the appropriate imagery the narration continued: the planet cools, the oceans form, "living things appear" in great variety, and move from water to land.  "The record of life is written on the land, where 15 million years later, in the upper regions of the Amazon, man is still trying to read it."

We see a geologist ( Dr. Maia, played by Antonio Moreno) unearthing a fossil hand with webbing between the fingers.  As he goes off to get it identified, we see the same hand emerge from nearby water and scratch at the land.  The creature and his lineage are revealed in a few minutes of film.

Visiting scientists to a South American Institute cannot identify the fossil, and decide to form an expedition to search for the rest of the fossil body.  They are main characters Dr. David Reed (played by Richard Carlson), Dr. Mark Williams (Richard Denning) and Dr. Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams), plus Dr. Maia and Dr. Thompson (Whit Bissell.)  They recognize that this fossil could represent a "missing link" between water and land creatures, perhaps even a water-breathing humanoid, a gill-man.

The conflict that builds throughout the movie is between Carlson's character, whose interest is knowledge and research, and Denning's, who is after fame and money to support the institute he runs, and that the others work for.  In addition, Carlson's is involved with Julie Adams', even though Denning's met her first, adding to the tension.

Richard Carlson, Julie Adams, Richard Denning, Whit Bissell

Before they leave, Carlson adds an odd rationale.  They should study past adaptations, he says, because it may help humans adapt to other planets when they travel in outer space.  Learning how evolution works on Earth, "with that knowledge perhaps we can teach men how to adapt to some new world of the future."

It's a fairly nonsensical reason, but worth mentioning because outer space comes up again in the movie and the series, and it may suggest a kind of apocalyptic feeling about the fate of the Earth that becomes explicit in the final gill-man movie.

They travel by boat to the site where Dr. Maia found the fossil hand, and find that the two South American assistants he left behind have been murdered.  The boat captain suggests a jaguar attack because of the claw marks, but we in the audience know better.  We saw the gill-man's hand (and only his hand) do the deed, to the accompaniment of monster music, particularly the brief theme that is repeated literally more than a hundred times during the film.

Disappointed when they can't find more of the fossil, the group travels down the river to the Black Lagoon, where the current may have deposited further evidence.  As they prepare to test the age of rocks on the riverbed to match with the rocks at the site, we in the audience start seeing the gill-man underwater, watching them.  Then Carlson and Denning both catch a glimpse of him.

While the men are busy with their tests, Dr. Kay Lawrence decides to take a swim, setting up the most famous scenes in the movie.  While she swims on the surface, the gill-man is following her below, to the extent of mimicking her movements directly under her in a pas de deux simultaneously suspenseful, balletic and erotic.

The gill-man even touches her foot, but retreats quickly into hiding.  She makes it back to the boat safely.  So far the gill-man hasn't harmed anyone in the expedition.  Carlson and Denning decide to dive again--Carlson wants to take a photograph of the gill-man, but Denning is armed with a spear-gun.  "Why settle for a photo when we can get the real thing?"

Denning shoots a spear into the gill-man's back, setting up the back-and-forth violence of the rest of the film.  Eventually the gill-man kills him, and--weakened by drugs--tries to make off with Julie Adams (a rare case of this perennial poster image actually reflecting a scene in the movie.)  Carlson rescues her, and passes on the chance to finish off the gill-man, who floats away, perhaps dead, perhaps not.

Julie Adams in publicity shot that surprisingly reflects an actual scene in the film

Creature From the Black Lagoon did well at the box office, and two sequels quickly followed.   This first film set up themes underlying the creature feature spectacle that were augmented in the next two. Though the atomic bomb was never directly mentioned, and the Bomb had nothing to do with the monster itself, the movies nevertheless expressed related anxieties and themes.

In particular, all three spoke to the new dominance of science, and the public unease with science and scientists partly if not mostly due to the scientific fruit of the Bomb.  This relates to the sense of the Bomb as unnatural, and (as expressed in the advertising for The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms) an intrusion into forbidden knowledge that tempted retribution. The films also suggest complex human feelings about killing animals, and more generally about destroying life in the natural world. The Bomb's massive power to destroy indiscriminately added to this anxiety.

In addition, this film deliberately dealt with an emerging theme of the 1950s related to the new fact of nuclear weapons.  Enemies in war of any kind may tend to demonize each other, and this became prevalent in the Cold War as well.  Aided by Soviet isolation and control of information, Russians became contradictory stick figures--either primitive peasants deprived of cavity-fighting toothpaste, or mysterious supermen with unknown weapons and powers.  In particular they were possessed of an alien ideology called Communism, that was like an infection within the body politic.  They were the ultimate Other.

The first Other to humans were the animals, both like and unlike people, both beneficial and dangerous.

Though the scientists largely treated him as a wild animal, the gill-man was deliberately portrayed as close to human, with differences that made him fascinating to some, and threatening to others.  Director Jack Arnold confirmed in interviews that he intended to make this point:  Man's inhumanity to man extends to anything that's different.  "We have not progressed as human beings to differentiate between what is superficial [difference] and what is not.  Of course, the sooner we learn the lesson, the better off we will be."

As had happened before (and would again), he used a science fiction story to dramatize a social problem, because (he said) audiences wouldn't accept a polemic, and they'd walk out of the movie.  Or, he added, it would be investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

This last reference was not really a joke.  HUAC was actively investigating directors, writers and actors for crimes like supporting civil rights organizations or being "prematurely anti-Fascist."  The Hollywood Blacklist that banned people and ended careers because of the slightest suspicion was a fact of life in 1954.  It got much of its dark power from the reflexive fear of anyone who might be aiding enemies that could rain down nuclear bombs.

The creature was different, but not so very different.  Identifying with the monster had been part of the monster movie tradition.  It certainly extended to the gill-man, at least to the eight and nine year-olds in the audience like me and my friends.  I felt the revulsion towards creepy animals and the desire to dominate them that seemed part of Denning's motives.  But I recognized the commonality as well as the fascinating Otherness, and felt the empathy that Carlson's character expressed.  His words went into my developing ethical consciousness.

Revenge of the Creature, which essentially told the second half of Alland's King Kong story, was also shot in 3-D, but even though it was a striking effect when properly projected, problems for local theaters in exhibiting 3-D led to its demise, and Universal quickly distributed conventional prints. (I can personally attest to this.  I saw Revenge in 3-D as a nine year old, wearing the flimsy cardboard glasses provided at the door.  But the process required precise projection, and at my movie theater--as apparently at countless others--the projectionist wasn't up to it.  I would catch the 3-D effect once in awhile, but mostly it was distorted and annoying.)

Released in 1955, Revenge of the Creature was also directed by Jack Arnold, whose genre work in the 50s produced several of the decade's characteristic classics.  His chief contribution to this one was pushing the inhumanity towards the Other theme even further, while further exploring the suspicious paradoxes of science and scientists.

Lori Nelson and the Creature

The basic story follows the King Kong template of capturing the Creature and putting him on exhibition.  But the difference is that he is pursued and captured by scientists (a different group from the first film), and held in a Florida oceanarium where tourists can gawk at him between dolphin shows, but also where an animal psychologist (played by John Agar) studies him, using questionable methods.

Agar tries to "train" the gill-man by shocking him with a kind of cattle prod to get him to obey commands, through the latest psychology of "negative conditioning."  Even by 1950s standards of how animals were treated, this was a shocking procedure to watch.  Since in fact it probably wasn't technically possible to cause an electrical shock underwater without harming unprotected humans, these scenes went a long way to make a point.

Otherwise there's not much new in this sequel--another love triangle, another pas de deux in the water by the Creature and the Girl (played by Lori Nelson), an absurd pursuit and attempted kidnap, and a final confrontation.  There's some added excitement when the Creature rampages through the tourists and tosses a few cars out of his way.  Once again, the Creature is left floating on the water at the end--the exact same shot as ended the first movie, all too apparent to those of us who saw this movie (again) at a double feature with the first.

The third and final gill-man movie was The Creature Walks Among Us, released in 1956.  Visually it's the dregs of the series but the paradox of science theme is at the center of the story.  Arnold didn't direct, but the co-writer of the first film, Arthur Ross (who went on to write a lot of television, and the 1980 Robert Redford feature Brubaker), wrote this thoughtful if not particularly artful screenplay.  

This film returns to the antagonism between two scientists being about more than rivalry for a female's attention.  Rex Reason plays a geneticist who wants to capture the Creature to "study it under controlled conditions."  But the surgeon played by Jeff Morrow wants to operate on the Creature to create a new human species (Reason and Morrow were fresh from making the 1955 sci-fi classic, This Island Earth, part of which was directed by Jack Arnold.)

Morrow's reasons are somewhat bizarre, but again (as in the first movie) relate to the future of human space travel.  "I've seen the imperfections of the human body," the surgeon says.  "Modern man is limited, earthbound to the planet which he devours and eventually which will fail to support him.  Yet he's bound to it because he's physically incapable of taking the next giant step...into outer space.  Well, we can make him physically capable."

"I disagree," the Reason geneticist says.  "We can learn from Nature, help Nature.  We can make this Earth a happier place by helping Nature select what is best in us.  And when man's ready, mentally, physically, he'll get to outer space.  But Doctor, there's no shortcut.  You can't bypass Nature."

Jeff Morrow (far left), Rex Reason (far right)

If not yet apparent, Morrow is eventually revealed to be mentally unbalanced, which edges this film into another popular sub-genre, the Mad Scientist movie. With this sequel, the gill-man series leaves King Kong behind, and enters Frankenstein/ The Island of Doctor Moreau territory.

Their disagreement is made moot by an accident during their capture of the Creature, when the gill-man is severely burned and must undergo surgery.  Under his fish-like skin is human-like skin, and while the burns have disabled his gills, it turns out he has lungs to breathe out of the water.

Morrow's Doctor exults: he believes they've created a new species by altering the Creature's metabolism.  Reason again disagrees.  "We only changed the skin, not the animal.  But we can bring out the best or worst in any living thing.  Environment does that.  If we threaten him, if he's afraid of us, he'll revert to the wanton killer.  That's why I've gone along with you-- I want to know for myself.  Because we all stand between the jungle and the stars, at a crossroads.  I think we better discover what brings out the best in humankind, and what brings out the worst.  Because it's the stars or the jungle."

This is a reasonably profound view through an evolutionary lens of the conundrum felt in the apocalyptic 50s, chiefly because of the Bomb.  Humanity was at a crossroads (and Crossroads happened to be the codename for the first postwar series of atomic tests, held for several days in 1946  that included the day I was born.)   The future was either going to have to be utopia or apocalypse, the stars or the jungle, with no third choice.

This movie headed directly for the jungle, as human violence enraged the now Frankenstein human-looking Creature, who escapes, heading for the nearby ocean. He has no place in the human world, but he can no longer return to the water.  He is left on the shore, staring at the sea.

As a coda to to the film, Reason repeats his analogy. Morrow's surgeon, insanely jealous of his blonde wife,  had killed an imagined rival, then tried to blame the Creature, and the enraged Creature killed him. "We're not so far from the jungle after all," another scientist comments.  "We're not so far from the stars either," Reason's scientist answers.  "The way we go depends on what we're willing to understand about ourselves."

"And what we're willing to admit," adds the Mad Scientist's wife.

 It is, in a sense, the creature within us that we need to recognize.  But not just the negative effects of the animal within (or even the human aspects of the unconscious) which we can act against only if we recognize them, but the positive animal (and unconscious) qualities that evoke our recognition and empathy, and love.  Perhaps this can help us act with compassion as well for the other animals outside us, including the human.