Abusive husband and scientist William Barton (Jeff Morrow) sets off with his wife Marcia (Leigh Snowden) in search of the Gill-Man (Don Megowan and Ricou Browning) after the creature’s escape from a Florida theme park. Against the protests of fellow scientist Tom Morgan (Rex Reason), Barton captures the Gill-Man and experiments on the creature, stripping away his gills and activating his dormant lungs to force him to breathe oxygen before interring him in a private zoo.
If The Creature Walks Among Us sounds bleak, it is. When it’s not cripplingly dull, which its first half interminably is, this Creature is horrifyingly depressing. The first two movies introduced an intriguing new monster to the Universal canon, a creature who could garner our attention whether he was stalked by humans or was gleefully eradicating them. Director Jack Arnold, who helmed the first two, managed to create a compelling atmosphere of tension and terror (even if Revenge of the Creature took its sweet time getting there). With John Sherwood at the wheel, however, there is no fear, no terror, despite the heavy lifting done by Henry Mancini’s blaring, shrieking score. There is only pity – abject pity – for the Gill-Man.
You’re probably thinking one of two things: either you acknowledge that a Universal Monsters movie always has some degree of sympathy for the monster, or you’re incredulous that one could feel any sympathy for an unthinking murderous beast. On the former count, you would be absolutely right. We’ve always already felt sympathetic toward Frankenstein’s monster as he struggles to find his place in the world, and we couldn’t help but empathize with the Wolf Man when he wrestled with his own darkest impulses. But other monsters have also been entirely heartless, especially the more monstrous they became – Dracula and the mummies, for example, bear little semblance to their own long-dead humanity. They’re entertaining to watch, but it’s hard to root for them beyond that popcorn factor.
How, then, does one end up feeling so compassionate toward the Gill-Man, serial killer of the sea? The Creature Walks Among Us spends much of its nearly 80 minutes visiting torment and torture upon the body of the Gill-Man, reducing him to a tragic victim of a litany of violence he cannot understand. Indeed, of all the cinematic subgenres the Universal Monsters can be said to have inspired, this Creature might well be an early forerunner of modern-day torture porn. (Heads-up that I’ll need to spoil the film to explain fully the true horrors in this film.) After stalking the Creature and spearing him with no less than three harpoons, the so-called scientists light him on fire, melting away his outer scales. While the Gill-Man lies in pain, Barton begins to play Mengele by surgically “enhancing” the creature, performing a tracheotomy and essentially rewriting the beast’s DNA to turn him into a land creature. This process, we’re told, likely breaks the creature’s mind, and he cannot understand why he can no longer breathe underwater. Then the horror continues when the creature is jailed in an ad hoc zoo, where he spends his time blankly staring at the sea just beyond his reach. He’s then framed for murder and electrocuted before he tears down the electric fence, kills the mad scientist, and wades into the sea, presumably to drown.
The whole film is fairly numbing in its brutality, particularly because the film takes great pains to remind us that the Gill-man is unable to speak or to reason, especially after sustaining significant brain damage to match his new physical scars. Unlike Karloff’s Monster, the Gill-Man has no capacity to learn, no way to understand why his every waking moment has become agony once the scientists trap him in a body he cannot use. It’s truly horrifying to watch, which may be the whole point, but there’s no ethical center to the film beyond Dr. Morgan’s halfhearted and unheeded pleas that all this is wrong. What’s more, no one in the film is particularly bothered by the fate of the Gill-Man, and even his one redemptive act is tossed aside in a brief epilogue in which the characters rationalize away the plot. (Then again, killing Dr. Barton to save his put-upon bride is a far cry from the horny fish monster we met in Creature from the Black Lagoon.) Again, if the film identified any of them as complicit, it’d be a compelling moral claim about who the true monsters were – a hallmark of the Universal canon. Instead, the film is only interested in the violence visited upon the Gill-Man’s body insofar as it makes him more monstrous, more gruesome to behold.
Nobody’s likeable, the monster is pitiable to the point of pathetic, and it’s such an overall dour proceeding that it’s hard to find anything to appreciate in The Creature Walks Among Us. There’s a very compelling message in here somewhere about man’s capacity for destruction and the way that we build cages to imprison the things we love; there’s even an ecological reading about environmental destruction buried somewhere in the ruined body of the Gill-Man. But the film is mired by its own squandered potential – another sad tradition of the Universal Classic Monsters, especially the sequels. What could be an opportunity for fresh horror and a fitting conclusion for a trilogy quickly becomes the cinematic equivalent of rubbernecking at roadkill.
