Kaiju History — The Journey of John Carpenter’s Unmade ‘Creature From the Black Lagoon’
Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein starts streaming soon and is merely the latest adaptation of The Modern Prometheus. It’s also one of two coming out within the next year when you count The Bride!). That has me realizing something I don’t think about too often: For a variety of reasons, remakes of the classic Universal Monsters are more prevalent than anyone cares to admit.
As much as many of us decry or dislike remakes on principle, the truth is they have been a thing as long as there has been cinema to circulate and proliferate. Certain stories resonate and get retold through the ages, which is why timeless literature is a common thread in routine adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula. Everyone and their mother who can amass a budget has tried to duplicate Universal’s success with those titles, starting with Hammer Films.
However, the constant reinterpretations didn’t stop there, as the entire Universal back catalog of creatures was swept up in the fervor over and over, all the way up to today. Well, all except one, officially; Universal’s quintessential “Creature” hasn’t appeared in a new movie since 1956. Just to put that into perspective, Godzilla was brand-new then, Alfred Hitchcock was still at the height of his career (not to mention years away from Psycho), and your parents probably weren’t even born yet.
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Still, other versions of the Gill-man notwithstanding, Universal’s original aquatic terror has not appeared in his own movie since The Creature Walks Among Us. As you can imagine, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Over the years, several renowned directors were attached to bringing the Gill-man back to the surface. Peter Jackson had a choice between him and Kong, and we know what he went with.
Del Toro circled a Creature project, too, but he took his ideas to another studio to make The Shape of Water, and that worked out swimmingly for him. However, he and Jackson aren’t the only ones to almost leave their stamp on Universal’s underwater attraction. John Carpenter was close to bringing his version of the monster to life (and ashore), and for a minute, his project seemed to have the best chance of happening.
It goes back to the 1990s when Carpenter was back in the horror genre’s good graces after They Live and Prince of Darkness. He wanted to bring the same level of energy to his Creature by upping the gore and deepening the mystery behind its lore and origins. Like Joe Johnston did years later with The Wolf Man, Carpenter was going to make the Gill Man a ferocious, animalistic force that showed no remorse to anyone who entered his domain, which would’ve taken inspiration from HP Lovecraft.
To facilitate this vision, Carpenter enlisted the special effects wizardry of the inimitable Rick Baker. Already a phenomenon in the practical effects world for his work on King Kong and An American Werewolf in London, Baker understood the assignment and set out to give Carpenter and fans a much more grotesque Creature than they’d heretofore seen. As existing photos and make-up tests attest, Baker’s design was going to be leaner and look angrier.
With antipathy and sorrow in its eyes, there was also less emphasis on the lips. Baker explained his design thusly (via Wicked Horror), “My designs for the Creature were kind of like my designs for [Johnston’s] Wolf Man; it was very much based on a love for the original material, and trying to stay true to that in a lot of ways. I think we had a creature that was updated, but you could still tell where it came from.”
Unfortunately, Universal had other ideas, put new tentative directors in place who didn’t pan out, and the two sides butted heads until Baker decided to split. The last straw was the rejection of his monster design. “They were making it part-dinosaur, part-every fish in the world. It wasn’t the Gill-man,” Baker said.
Carpenter’s involvement didn’t last nearly as long as Baker’s. Why is unclear, but most believe the failure of Memoirs of an Invisible Man (a comedic take on the James Whale/Claude Rains/HG Wells concept starring Chevy Chase) broke the studio’s faith in Carpenter and his ability to deliver. His Creature from the Black Lagoon was deep into development, but ultimately never green-lit without a satisfying explanation. As the man himself would say, “What’re you gonna do?”
It’s one of the most notorious unmade projects among monster movies and in Carpenter’s career, but not the last word in what could’ve been. Kaiju History is full of these tales. A new Creature feature is in development, but with few updates, we have to wait and see if it swims or sinks to join the annals of movies we never got to see.
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