The Gill Man—as he was later nicknamed by fans—is the best reason to re-watch the original 1954 film, which was recently released on 4K by Universal in an “Icons of Horror Collection” along with “The Mummy,” “The Bride of Frankenstein,” and “Phantom of the Opera.” Ostensibly created by makeup artist Bud Westmore—who was working for Universal at the time, and who was part of the Westmore dynasty of movie effects artists, which has continued into the present day—the Creature was really a labor of love by Milicent Patrick, an artist and sculptor who came up with the Gill Man head and suit while employed by Universal’s special effects department. As chronicled in Mallory O’Meara’s book The Lady from the Black Lagoon, her contributions were minimized almost to the point of invisibility by Westmore, who by the common agreement of colleagues lacked the imagination and skills to create such a haunting design.
The second-best reason to watch the original is the filmmaking, which doesn’t invent anything, but polishes up familiar monster movie story beats and images with conviction, flair, and a voluptuous sense of atmosphere. It was directed by Jack Arnold, who had become one of Universal’s go-to horror filmmakers by the early ‘50s, and written by the team of Harry Essex and Arthur Ross, who specialized in horror, gangster pictures, and other genre movies. Together with the cast and crew, they keep the story chugging along. Even by the accelerated standards of modern features, the second half is enthralling: it’s a cat-and-mouse game pitting the boat crew against the Gill Man. The end result is a compact and intelligent genre piece that fuses elements of the jungle adventure, the horror film, and the environmental cautionary tale, plus trace elements of the original “King Kong,” an earlier classic about a prehistoric jungle creature who kidnaps a human woman from a band of explorers.
As explained in a Den of Geek piece by my friend Jim Knipfel, “Creature” was the brainchild of William Alland, a friend of Orson Welles who heard a cinematographer tell the story of “an amphibious humanoid creature who emerged from the Amazon once a year, grabbed a young woman from a local village, and then disappeared again. The other guests got a chuckle out of that, but the cinematographer insisted it was absolutely true, even offering to provide photographic evidence. It’s unclear if anyone ever took him up on that.” When Alland started producing movies for Universal, he wrote a treatment for a script that was essentially “King Kong, but with a human-sized amphibian,” beginning the story in the jungle and ending it in the city, where the monster escapes confinement and runs amok. The second half of the story was nixed when the film began production and hired proper screenwriters (it was probably un-doable anyway, given the limited budget), but it ended up being resuscitated and reshaped for the first sequel, “Revenge of the Creature,” in which the Gill Man becomes an “attraction” at a theme park. Shot and released in 3-D format at the height of the craze, “The Creature” was a surprise smash, earning back ten times its $500,000 production budget and becoming the first entry in a trilogy.