John Sherwood’s The Creature Walks Among Us, the capstone feature to Universal’s last great monster after having provided the world with a quarter-century of horror icons, posits the trilogy–as Jack Arnold established and transferred in his original and its sequel, Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature respectively–as a cautionary tale as he reinforces Arnold’s departure from his directorial predecessors in the field by issuing his audience an ultimatum (not unlike the warning issued at the climax of Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still): Confront its inherit human aggression or, like Arnold’s character of Mark in Creature from the Black Lagoon, die as a consequence of being unwilling to quell its own, ergo futile, hubris. He does so while agreeably completing the trilogy’s themes of evolution, animal rights, and ecology and, in so doing, casts his titular character as an excruciatingly sympathetic anti-hero/martyr while closing on one of the most downtrodden notes ever set to film.
A rich scientist, William Barton (Jeff Morrow), takes it upon himself to capture the Gill Man. After injuring the creature, Barton performs a tracheotomy, which deprives the Gill Man of the ability to breathe underwater. Forlorn and alone, the Creature is framed and must commit murder in order to save himself before fleeing back to the sea.
Many of the same themes established in Arnold’s original is brought forth in a strikingly similar manner to which they were presented two years prior. This is due to the screenplay being penned by one of the original writers of Creature from the Black Lagoon, Arthur Ross. Wisely, after Arnold completed his homage to King Kong in his sequel, Revenge of the Creature, Ross capitalized upon the freedom afforded him as he issues one of the most heartfelt and empathetic individuals to ever grace the silver screen. The franchise’s motif of evolution is concluded when the Creature suffers third degree burns, revealing a layer of human skin underneath. However, Ross not only has the Creature inherit an ever greater physical likeness to those around him, Thomas Morgan (Rex Reason) observes that the Creature’s sensitivity to pain has subsequently increased as well, thus subtly signaling an amplification of Dostoevskian consciousness due to an ever-expanding acquisition and comprehension of the human predicament.
As such, the pathos that the Creature evoked over the course of two years is permitted to generate ever greater audience sympathy as Sherwood turns the emotional thumbscrews by resuming the theme of animal rights that Arnold introduced in Creature from the Black Lagoon and expanded upon in great depth in his sequel. We watch as Morgan makes the proclamation, with a glimmer of megalomania in his eye, that the research team should attempt to genetically alter the Creature’s DNA for no other reason than to claim that he has forced evolution. Again, it is reiterated, this time by Morgan, that the Creature houses the capacity to reason after the scientists observe that, like a lion, the Gill Man anticipates the movement of his prey (though not completely sound, Sherwood’s retrospective implications via logistic aerobatics deserve applause). This notion is further perpetuated when Borg (Maurice Manson) reports that the Creature’s thought process was temporary absent during a brief period of asphyxiation, thus the inference is to be made that, under normal conditions, the Creature readily posits thoughts. We watch as the research team notes that the Creature also exhibits memory and that he is not merely reacting instinctually to stimuli. Yet, amid all of the epistemological deliberation and qualification, the most poignant, and masterfully clever, instance for the affirmation of animal rights occurs when Sherwood reinforces his aforementioned claim concerning the Creature and lion’s capacity to reason. The director induces audience sympathy by having the Creature stare out longingly through the bars of his cage at the nearby water as, ever so subtlety, sheep move to and fro in the background. Yet the moralistic dichotomy concerning whether or not animals deserve rights is exacerbated when the discussion of normative ethics arises in concurrence with the “Law of the Jungle,” as the line of demarcation separating murder and justified killing is subsequently blurred when Morgan and Barton allusively speak about the Creature and Man simultaneously, in ambiguous turns, as well as synonymously.
Interestingly, the crux of the film is not any of the abovementioned themes. The Creature Walks Among Us’s central focus is the martial troubles between Barton and his wife, Marcia (Leigh Snowden), pitched at an intensity akin to Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Alarmingly unapologetic given that the Hays Code was still in effect atop the fact that such was unabashedly presented in 1950s, Keeping Up with the Jones’s Era America, Sherwood–unlike Arnold in his sequel–builds a sense of suspense via the dysfunctional couple. (On a similar note, instead of the threat exponentially increasing with each subsequent sequel as is the unspoken rule regarding horror sequels, the only thing with increases in volume during the various productions is the boat in which the Creature is hunted as it gets proportionally larger with each installment.) Interestingly, the tension, rage, and anxiety exhibited in the film by way of the central leads metaphorically symbolizes humanity’s grappling with its own ego as the trilogy’s ecology motif is concluded in the cautionary, Burroughsian parable of Man needing to resolve his inner conflict, lest he have no hope of conquering his fear of the void that he will undoubtedly be forced to resort–Outer Space–which is verbosely encompassed in Morgan’s citation that “We all stand between the jungle and the stars, at a crossroads.” Scathingly, this is voiced after Morgan performs a tracheotomy upon the Creature, thereby confining him to land forever, due to what we are lead to assume is Morgan’s jealousy of the Creature’s ability to readily enjoy Prelapsarian bliss after Marcia’s notation that “Someone once said that swimming was like being born again.” (Also in reference to psychoanalytic interpretation is the possible reading that Morgan’s vicious motive stems from his envy of the Creature’s perpetual existence within the Freudian vaginal fluids of the deep, which Sherwood makes blatantly clear that Morgan is rarely ever permitted to experience with his disenchanted wife.)
Sadly, the Creature appears alongside a multitude of poorly presented, but nonetheless potent, ideas as Sherwood’s feature, much like Arnold’s sequel, is fraught with incongruities which jar the otherwise enjoyable proceedings. After two instances in which scientists, which are proclaimed even during the film to be strident supporters of empirical data, witness the Creature’s actions being prompted, in part, at the appearance of a female, we nonetheless open the film with a singular blonde which is permitted to enter the Creature’s abode unattended. Granted, much like Hamlet’s hesitation, without a justification for action there would be little grounds for a story, the logistics of the situation presented before us make it very difficult to suspend our disbelief. Yet this quibble with the film pales in comparison to a tracheotomy being performed by renowned doctors without gloves atop the disconcertingly disproportionate size of the Creature between the sequel and Sherwood’s concluding chapter. This says nothing of Morteno (Paul Fierro), a Hispanic local who was attacked by the Creature, whose accent and command of English fluctuates more readily than the tides surrounding the characters.
Though none of the three very brief chapters in the shortest of the Universal monster franchises may stand as cinematic masterpieces upon their on volition (yet the Creature does have to its credit that it never succumbed to appearing alongside one of its monster brethren in order to generate an audience), each of the Creature films is nonetheless a groundbreaking work due to the fact that, like Merian Cooper, Jack Arnold and John Sherwood not only present their audiences with numerous, oftentimes potentially volatile, ideas which many a director would doggedly avoid, they do so while simultaneously exploring the psychological, philosophical, cultural, scientific, and sociological ramifications of such with their unapologetically rigorous cinematic acumen.
Trivia tidbit: The Creature Walks Among Us is the only Creature film which was not shot in 3-D and was one of the first films to introduce the Doppler radar tracking system.
-Egregious Gurnow
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