By Todd Garbarini
One
of the most iconic of all monster movie images is most certainly Universal
Pictures’ Creature from the Black Lagoon, as depicted by numerous actors in the
film of the same name. Although
Universal’s previous monsters – the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, The Wolf Man
and The Mummy – all had their genesis in the world of literature, the Gill Man,
as the Creature is alternatively known, is largely a cinematic concoction and his
story is no doubt patterned after the King himself, Kong. While the similarities between the largest
inhabitant of Skull Island and the Gill Man are undeniable, the method of
bringing these two nightmare-inducing monsters to the screen is not. While the former was a combination of
stop-motion animation and large-scale mechanics, the latter is the cinema’s
first depiction of a monster in a beautifully-designed, full-body suit
inhabited by an actor, most notably swimmer Ricou Browning in the underwater
scenes of not only the original film, but in two sequels.
In
1954, Dragon Books in the United Kingdom published the novelization, or movie
“tie-in,†of Creature from the Black
Lagoon (1954), written by John Russell Fearn under the pseudonym of Vargo
Statten. It featured colorful cover art
by artist John Richards and is very rare, commanding between $1K and $6K
dollars depending upon its condition. Now,
DreamHaven Books has reprinted this tie-in here in the United States with a
beautiful cover by Bob Eggleton. What
you will find in this beautifully designed new book, in addition to the
novelization, is an excellent introduction by David J. Schow, himself a Creature historian. He provides not only
a valuable look into the making of the film, but also the procedures that were
in place at Universal Pictures and the team of artists who were tasked with
designing, creating and building a suit that would look like a living,
breathing creature, under the supervision of make-up head Bud Westmore. The
more that I read about this, the more I wished that Creature had been filmed in color; unfortunately, Universal
wouldn’t spend the additional $100K required to do that. This is a shame as the Gill Man is a truly
beautiful creation.
Mr.
Schow also illustrates the finer points of writing a movie tie-in, and how
authors of such materials were generally hired on a contractual, per-project
basis, and were based upon drafts of the script that were often changed later
on thereby making the novelization radically different than its usually far
superior cinematic counterpart. Such
books were produced within a quick timeframe, and one can only imagine the possibilities
today of utilizing a dictation software package to bang out a few of these
books on a laptop in a matter of months, technology only dreamed of fifty years
ago.
The
novelization of Creature goes a few
steps further than the film by not only introducing further dialog into the mix
to pad out the story and flesh out the characters, but also brings the reader
inside the Gill Man’s head and gets inside his thoughts, especially in his
captivation of Kay Lawrence, portrayed in the film by Julie Adams, and his
desire to win her over. There are also
57 beautiful behind-the-scenes shots of the making of the film and, as a bonus
each, of the book’s nine chapters is prefaced with a publicity still.
The
book is rounded out with a terrific afterword about author Fearn, written by
Philip Harbottle, chronicling Mr. Fearn’s early life in the cotton business,
which he abandoned after two years to pursue writing. It also covers his stint
as a motion picture theatre projectionist.
This
is a must-have for Creature fans and
is highly recommended for horror fans who want to broaden their knowledge of
this fascinating progenitor of many subsequent man-in-the-suit horrors, Dan
O’Bannon’s titular Alien being the
most obvious and arguably the most frightening in the cinema.
Click
here to order.