The Shape of Water is one of the most beautiful, heart-rending, perfect monster movies I've ever seen.
But let's back up — WAY up — to the release of The Creature From the Black Lagoon — and let's pause, for a moment, on the Universal monster family: Dracula. The Mummy. Wolfman.
Gill Man.
He was awesome, right? Whether you fell in the Ben Chapman (ugh) or Ricou Browning (yay!) camp, people loved this B-movie. This 1954 film was easily the best horror film of the 1950s (no disrespect to The Deadly Mantis). The Gill Man, portrayed as an Amazonian monster that must be destroyed, has the audacity to fall in love with the Kay Lawrence (the fetching Julia Adams) and secret her away to his lair. She, of course, is repulsed by him, and her boyfriend, Dr. David Reed (the hunky Richard Carlson), along with rest of the expedition, rewards Gill Man's capacity for love by filling his scaly body with bullets.
Film sensitives have changed over the past 70 years, and while we still crave horror films, Guillermo del Toro has reimagined this classic through the lens of a more sensitive society. As we evolve, our best auteurs offer fresh and changing perspectives through storytelling (The Birth of a Nation comes to mind), forcing us to examine our own prejudices.
This is not to suppose for even a moment that a classic horror film reimagined has the same message as a look at our issues with race in America… or is it?
The poignant cinematography aside, the sheer beauty of the screenplay discarded for a moment, consider the Amphibian Man (Doug Jones). There is no way to deny this is a more recent incarnation of the Gill Man, from the reuse of the same Amazonian legend to the character's physical manifestation (albeit more puppy-like at times, the one detractor from the film's thread of sexuality). And this time, instead of this monster targeting a scientist's girlfriend, it's the mute, sexually aware (we first meet her as she masturbates in her bathtub) Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) who seeks out Amphibian Man.
Guillermo del Toro both asks and answers the question, What would happen if Gill Man fell in love with a woman who had the capacity to love him back?
This is not your typical monster flick.
Everything — absolutely everything — about this film delights and enchants. It allows us to disappear into a dream where it's not the attractive-enough Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), but the easily-dismissed, diminutive Esposito who emerges as the hero. It forces us to see a society where brute force, born of the fear of what we don't understand, fails, and love, born of compassion, triumphs. It shows us a world where cruelty exists but is recognized and beat back by the thinkers, the artists and lovers. It is a film where the successful white man is the villain, defeated by a mute, a black woman, a gay man and a Russian.
This is not a horror movie; it's an elegy to the 1954 classic, yes, but it's also a larger allegory for what our society can be. Go see The Shape of Water; then re-watch Creature from the Black Lagoon, but ask yourself:
What if the lady fell in love with the Gill Man? What then?
Cathy Salustri is the arts + entertainment editor for Creative Loafing Tampa and also a passionate Creature from the Black Lagoon fan who firmly believes Ricou Browning was the real Gill Man. (Ricou, if you read this, call me!) Get in touch with her here.
This article appears in Dec 14-21, 2017.