The Bite #48

How CREATURE from THE BLACK LAGOON Inspired Guillermo del Toro, and More!

March 05, 2019

In this Issue:

Horror History: Why We – and Guillermo del Toro – Love the Creature from the Black Lagoon
Image of the Week: Lethal Latte
Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
The States of Horror: South Dakota + Tennessee
A Very Shudder Book Club – What We’re Reading
Hey, That’s Us- Shudder in the News

HORROR HISTORY: WHY WE – AND GUILLERMO DEL TORO – LOVE THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

Today’s the 65th anniversary of the release of Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon. That film, along with Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), mark the last great Monster Movie franchise from Universal, the studio known for its Monster Movie franchises, like those featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, and the Wolf Man.

Yet of those monsters, The Creature, aka The Gill-Man, sticks out because he’s a natural monster — he’s not supernatural, and he wasn’t made in a lab. He’d been minding his own business in the Amazon, when a bunch of 1950s square-jaws came into his home. And therein lies the melancholy appeal of the Creature, which finds its way into modern iterations of the character, from Abe Sapien in the Hellboy comics and movies (directed by Guillermo del Toro) to the Deus Brânquia of del Toro’s Oscar-winning The Shape of Water.

As Marilyn Monroe said of the Creature in The Seven Year Itch, “I think he just craved a little affection, you know? A sense of being loved and needed and wanted.” He’s a lonely, sad, old monster, hence his fixation on the lovely, and recently deceased (and greatly missed) Julie Adams — a fixation that’d be expanded upon in The Shape of Water.

Del Toro had been dreaming of his own movie about the Creature ever since he saw the film when he was seven years old. When he pitched a remake to Universal, he wanted to tap that melancholy by telling the story from the Creature’s point of view, and he wanted the Creature to get the girl. Universal said no, but del Toro was able to take that premise to makeShape of Water and win Best Picture with it.

And for all that lovelorn hurt, the Creature is still fierce, as any animal would be if a boatload of humans messed with it. Embodying both melancholy and ferocity as it does, it’s little wonder the design of the Creature, primarily by former Disney artist Milicent Patrick, has become so iconic. The Creature is a humanoid monster with a lot of human in him, and it’s a testimonial to Patrick’s design that the Creature, above all else, is a character, not an effect.

Patrick’s contributions to the Creature’s legacy and her conflicts with Universal are chronicled in Mallory O’Meara’s book, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, out this week. It’s a story full of melancholy, of which the Creature himself would approve.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Lethal Latte

If you’re in one of The Ring movies and make the mistake of watching a cursed videotape, Sadako Yamamura will kill you a week later. But if you’re in a Taiwanese coffee shop with a talented latte artist, all she’ll kill … is your thirst.

TINY BITES

MEET THE NEW CANDYMAN, GREMLINS RETURNS & MORE

A24 released the first trailer for Midsommar, director Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary. We’re already spooked.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who played Aquaman villain Black Manta, will be the new Candyman in next year’s Jordan Peele-produced “spiritual sequel.”

Speaking of Peele, the international trailer for his upcoming Us makes it look even more terrifying thanGet Out.

Jessica Chastain promises It: Chapter 2 will deliver “the most blood that’s ever been in a horror film in a scene.” Bring it on!

Milla Jovovich makes her first appearance as the “Blood Queen,” trying to bring David Harbour’s half-demon over to the dark side in the new Hellboy trailer.

AMC says another Walking Dead spinoff series is in “active development.”

Hope you’re ready to fight more zombies, because the long-awaited World War Z first-person shooter is almost here.

Need to catch up on the Child’s Play saga? “The Evolution of Chucky,” an animated history of the franchise, is here for you.

There’s a Gremlins animated series in the works — and it’s bringing back Gizmo.

Voting has begun for the 17th Annual Rondo Hatton Awards, honoring “the best in classic horror research, creativity and film preservation.”

Clive Barker’s Nightbreed is getting an expanded 3-hour cut thanks to extra footage found on newly discovered VHS dailies.

Want free Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books? It’ll cost you some blood.

Two ads reveal how Scream and Psycho could have ended quite differently had Google been around.

Check out 10 Essential Tales of Terror by Women which you probably won’t find shelved in your bookstore’s horror section.

Hail Satan? Meet real-life Satanists in the trailer for this new documentary.

Voting has begun for the 17th Annual Rondo Hatton Awards, honoring “the best in classic horror research, creativity and film preservation.”

You can now buy BBQ at the at the Texas Chainsaw Massacre gas station. Road trip!

THE SATTES OF HORROR: SOUTH DAKOTA + TENNESSEE

By Sam Zimmerman

Today, we find offbeat, terrific American indie horror in South Dakota and Tennessee.

South Dakota: Imprint

Nearly ten years after Chris Eyre broke out with the road comedy Smoke Signals, a significant milestone in Native American filmmaking, he produced this native-focused thriller for writer-director, Michael Linn. Set in South Dakota and shot on the state’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Imprint is a twisty, distinctly American story, in which a Native American attorney struggling with her own identity returns home to work on a murder trial. While there, she is quickly subject to eerie visions and supernatural experiences.

Tennessee: Make-Out With Violence

A special piece of contemporary zombiedom (I know, they’re rare!), the Deagol Brothers’ darkly funny, oddly beautiful Make-Out With Violence is a must-see that’s flown under the radar far too long. Set and shot in Tennessee, the film is a small town tale of unrequited love, as a pair of twin teen brothers struggle with their friend Wendy’s disappearance. When Wendy turns up as a reanimated corpse, the brothers take her home in hopes of bringing her back to normal. If that sounds a bit familiar, don’t worry, this one’s not as gnarly as the grotesque Deadgirl.

A VERY SHUDDER BOOK CLUB – WHAT WE’RE READING

On TV, the Stranger Things saga began in 1983, when four Dungeons & Dragons-playing kids teamed up with the telekinetic Eleven to take on both an escaped Demogorgon from the Upside Down and the even more malevolent Dr. Brenner from Hawkins National Laboratory.

But Gwenda Bond’s Stranger Things prequel novel, Suspicious Minds, shows us that the story’s true beginnings were much earlier — the Summer of ’69, when Eleven’s mom-to-be was a young and curious college student who decided to enroll as an experimental test subject in Brenner’s newly opened lab.

Bond delivers an origin story which provides the same pleasures as the series itself, with a different set of young people taking on a seemingly unstoppable enemy, while also filling in the blanks for many of the show’s unanswered questions — including revelations about the character of Kali from the controversial Season 2 episode “The Lost Sister,” and the first glimpses of the Upside Down — referred to here as The Beneath by one of the other test subjects.

A second prequel novel — written by Adam Christopher and focused on Chief Hopper as a New York City homicide detective in 1977 — will be out in May.