Forget the Babadook. The ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ is the true gay icon
#31DaysOfHorror: October 24
This October, I’ll be reviewing 31 horror movies in 31 days! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
This past summer, during Pride Month, certain corners of the internet were overtaken by everyone having the simultaneous realization that Mister Babadook (from the movie The Babadook, of course) is a gay icon. He showed up in memes all over twitter, tumblr, and the like, extolling the virtues of his baba-lewk and forcing into all manner of Rupaul’s Drag Race references.
J. Bryan Lowder’s explainer at Slate gets to the heart of why gay people spent the entire summer saying “Baba-yaaassss!” when he writes:
This connection arises from a perverse sort of simpatico: Queer people have long been demonized by Anita Bryant-types as horrific aberrations, a dark force working to corrupt the polished sanctity of the heterosexual family. Is it any surprise, then, that we find ourselves somehow at home in fractured minds and disquieted basements, among the wreckers and the rot? That feeling of exclusion, as it festers, can lead to a certain glee taken in what I think of as queer cultural terrorism: the aggressive hijacking or cooption of straight culture in a manner meant to tweak or antagonize… The Babadook himself acts as a queer terrorist (in a Victorian banshee kind of way), raining havoc on the moral seriousness of love, both between a (recently broken) heterosexual couple and a mother and her child… If that seems overly nasty, know there’s a spirit of celebration in the mix as well. Queers have a way of effervescing around the objects and figures we claim as our icons, often to an excessive degree. Cults of diva worship are founded on this, and the skill with which we can recite chapter and verse from our camp-captured movies arises from it as well.
I too spent the entirety of Summer 2017 feeling #babashook. But, today, rewatching my favorite Universal monster movie, I felt like that guy in this (awfully misguided) video from 2011… To paraphrase, “Gill-Man from The Creature from the Black Lagoon is the true gay icon!”
How do I love Gill-Man? Let me count the ways.
Creature from the Black Lagoon is the story of an ill-fated expedition into the Amazon to search for the remainder of a strange and mysterious fossil that suggests a type of aquatic human once lived in the region. Instead, they find a living, breathing version of the amphibious man, a creature who they nickname Gill-Man. The movie is about their attempts to capture the creature, and then, when they realize that’s not going to work, to escape him.
At the center of the film is a woman named Kay and the two men who are ostensibly in love with her, Mark and David. I say “ostensibly” because it’s also quite clear that there is a lot of tension between the two men. Mark in particular seems to resent Kay’s presence on the expedition, voicing his displeasure at having a woman along several times. In other words, he clearly wishes there were just men on the boat. At one point, he scoffs at David for paying too much attention to Kay, sniping, “Come on, you can play house later!” He has a tendency to interrupt their intimate moments by waving phallic weaponry around at crotch-level, and whenever David strips down to his swimsuit to go swimming or diving in the lagoon, Mark insists on going with him.
In Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the horror film, Harry Benshoff discusses films where a monstrous figure represents a threat to heterosexual order, “queering” the relationship; Gill-Man certainly applies. For much of the movie, he is beneath the surface of the water, lurking in the murky depths of the lagoon; as Benshoff notes, the movie was promoted by describing the creature as “raging with pent-up passions.” In other words, at any moment, this phallic-shaped creature is threatening to rise to the surface and erupt in a release of “pent-up passions” that breaks apart the heterosexual couple.
My favorite sequence in the film, which most clearly shows that the creature is representing repressed sexuality, is the famous sequence where Kay goes for a swim and the creature glides along underneath her, mirroring her movements, drinking in the way she looks at the surface.
This is clearly a case of diva worship. Gill-Man just wants to look at Julie Adams all day without those pesky men interrupting him, rather than anything untoward like sexual assault. When he kidnaps her near the end of the film, he doesn’t maul her or rape her; he places her on a pedestal in the center of his grotto, where he can admire her without being hunted for it.
The Creature’s actual, brutal, physical attacks always tend to happen to shirtless, muscular men. There’s this, toward the beginning:
Benshoff writes, “When a male monster approaches a male victim and the film cuts away from the scene, the audience is left to speculate upon the precise nature of the attack: is it sexual, violent, or both? For a spectator predisposed towards a queer reading protocol, these narrative ellipses open up a range of possible meanings.” As they say, when the tent starts a’rockin…
Then, there’s the way the creature finally takes down Max, the explorer who seems like what he really wants to explore is David. They go for aroll along the lagoon floor, followed by the creature taking Max’s dangling oxygen tube into his mouth. Buy a guy some dinner!
Finally, to get revenge for the creature killing his friend, David comes up with a plan. They’ll drug Gill-Man so they can escape, and of course the best way to drug him is to pump what Benshoff describes as a “creamy liquid” from a long rod!
The Creature from the Black Lagoon has already inspired a super-gay musical. Can The Babadook say that? Creature From the Black Lagoon: The Musical ran for roughly a month back in 2009 at Universal Studios Hollywood before closing due to “lack of interest.” Why do straight people refuse to support queer art?
Check out this killer song from the musical scene inspired by the film’s swimming sequence described above. (I don’t know why the Creature’s head looks like a leftover Predator prop. Ignore that.)
“Slay Me!” The ballad is called “Slay Me.” Does it have to be any more obvious that Gill-Man deserves our adoration, and, really, our gratitude?
Like The Babadook and the fact of his being the embodiment of a deep, dark secret that a family wants to shove into the closet, many queer people can identify with Gill-Man’s desire for acceptance by the (muscular, beautiful) humans he idolizes on the surface. In The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn Monroe and her date leave a theater showing Creature from the Black Lagoon; she turns to her date and says that she feels sorry for the Creature. “He wasn’t really all bad. I think he just craved a little affection, you know? A sense of being loved and needed and wanted.” And then, a subway passes underneath, lifting up her dress.
Universal Studios sees it. Noted gay icon Marilyn Monroe sees it. How else can I prove that the Creature from the Black Lagoon is a queer monster deserving of icon status? …Did I mention that this is what the actor who played Gill-Man looks like underneath the mask?
Slay Me, indeed.
But where can I watch it? The Creature from the Black Lagoon is available for streaming on STARZ.
