The iconic, literally genre-defining run of horror films produced by Universal Pictures in the almost 15 years between 1931's Dracula and 1945's House of Dracula was largely founded on five pillars: the vampire Count Dracula, the hideous animated corpse created by the mad Dr. Frankenstein, a self-loathing Welsh werewolf, the ancient Egyptian mummies Imhotep and Kharis, and a handful of different invisible men driven psychotic by their experience. Scattered in there, we find a few other bits and pieces - Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, the radio-derived Inner Sanctum Mysteries, and decent couple of handfuls of one-offs. Oh, and of course, when every other drop had been wrung from Universal's horror output, there was always the possibility of meeting Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.

But in the main, the Universal Horror brand - and while it was not so branded a brand at the time, it was definitely conceived of as a major part of the studio's identity - hinged on those icons: Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man. They are, to this very day, conceived of as the movie monsters: just check out the headline cast of 2012's Hotel Transylvania and its sequel. Let us think of them from a slightly different angle, though: where did they come from? Three of them were born as adaptations from respectable 19th Century fiction - proper literature, even, in the case of the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Certified Classic Frankenstein. Werewolves have been part of folk lore for centuries all around the world - even in cultures where there aren't wolves, there are still stories of humans transforming into dangerous beasts. And while Universal may have come up with the idea of mummies as living corpses animated by their angry desire to murder, mummies themselves exist, of course, and were as visible in pop culture in the early '30s as ever before or since.

The point being, none of these monsters were new. And when you look over the history of the horror film, very few monsters - especially monsters that have become to any degree iconic on the level of Universal's Big 5 - are new themselves. They're taken out of literature and folklore; or maybe they're just awfully damn big versions of normal animals. Even Godzilla was nothing much but a modified allosaur with a stegogsaur's spikes and an unusual skill set. That, then, was the state of things in 1954, when Universal attempted to revive its horror filmmaking wing, dormant for almost a full decade. There'd been a few horror-ish thrillers right after WWII, a couple of Gothic mysteries with horror elements to kick of the '50s, and of course goddamned Abbott and Costello, and finally the 1953 It Came from Outer Space, the studio's first attempt at the sci-fi/horror hybridisation that would represent almost the entirety of what we could reasonably describe as "horror" cinema during the 1950s. That film was directed, in the flashy new fad of 3-D, by one Jack Arnold, and it was a comfortable hit for the studio; comfortable enough for Arnold to get the job directing a second 3-D sci-fi horror film, though one that would move somewhat closer to "horror", and infinitely closer to "monster movie".

That would be a certain Creature from the Black Lagoon, and quite a wonder it is: almost beyond debate the best horror movie in Universal's entire history directed by a person not named James Whale (Arnold's own The Incredible Shrinking Man gives it a run for its money, but that film is much less squarely situated in the horror genre), as well as being one of the best of the best 3-D movies of the 1950s or any other era, and possessed of a true marvel of a monster in the creature itself, the prehistoric Gill Man. And now you can guess why I went on and on about the literary and folkloric antecedents for all the great movie monsters, because the most splendid thing about the Gill Man is that he is, as far as I can make out, the first entirely-original movie monster to have made as huge a dent in the popular imagination as the likes of Dracula or the Wolf Man or King Kong. Not that he was entirely sui generis: producer William Alland first concocted the idea several years before the film finally went into production when he heard a secondhand account of South American legends of fish-men living in the Amazon. But the Gill Man himself is an entirely original creation, designed by former Disney animator Millicent Patrick (among the first women hired as an animator by that studio) and Universal make-up artist "Bud" Westmore, who receives the only onscreen credit on account of his angry politicking against the studio's attempt to promote Patrick's involvement. It's a sad note that this internecine crabbing should mar the creation of such a beauty of a monster, but also understandable; who wouldn't want to receive sole credit for the creation of the Gill Man? It's so perfect a piece of design that after more than six decades, the movies still haven't come up with an answer to the descriptor "fish-man" that deviates more than slightly from Patrick and Westmore's model. Along with H.R. Giger's venereal alien, it is the greatest of all brand-new monster designs in the movies.

Almost as impressive as the Gill Man himself is the fact that the move he's in manages to be worthy of him. Surely, plenty of credit for that can go to Arnold, one of the definitive genre directors in 1950s Hollywood: between this, It Came from Outer Space, and The Incredible Shrinking Man, you'd be hard-pressed to find any filmmaker from his generation with three equally-beloved horror titles on his CV. And in truth, much of what makes Creature from the Black Lagoon stand out from the crowd happens at the level of staging, pacing, and mood. Lord knows it's not in the scenario by Maurice Zimm, stretched out into a screenplay by Harry Essex and Arthur Ross, which isn't really all that different from dozens of other films from the same period. We have the typical dramatic narrator who explains to us in tones that are somehow staid and urgent at the same time some manner of science: evolution, in this case and how over the last 15 million years, life has crawled out of the sea and onto land (later dialogue will offer some rather more sophisticated and accurate dates). Then there's the discovery of Something Inexplicable in a Remote Place: the depths of Amazonia, where Dr. Carl Maia (Antonio Moreno) has found a fossilised claw, vaguely humanaoid but for its talons and the webbing between its fingers. He takes precious time away from his dig site to show this discovery to his former student, Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson) in the United States, who excitedly brings it to the attention of scientist and financier Dr. Mark Williams (Richard Dennings). Mark agrees to fund an expedition, and the three men, along with David's colleague/lover Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams), and Dr. Edwin Thompson (Whit Bissell), travel back to the Amazon to continue hunting for information about this miraculous extinct creature. Or maybe not-so-extinct; by the time they've agreed to head south, we've already seen the same taloned, webbed claw, very much not fossilised, and in fact attached to a living organism (the land-based creature is played by Ben Chapman), kill everyone at Carl's dig site.

In the jungle, captained by the gregarious Captain Lucas (Nestor Paiva) onboard his boat Rita, the expedition discovers the ruined camp and no more fossils; David has the brilliant idea to hunt downriver a bit, and Lucas shares the information that this particular tributary ends in the mysterious paradise called the Black Lagoon, heavily implying that death will befall them all if they push on. This is hardly going to scare off a group of scientists in a '50s horror picture, so on to the Black Lagoon they all go, tailed by same creature who killed the camp, and who has become instantly smitten with Kay.

It's not worth belaboring the rest of it; the Gill Man wants Kay, it takes a while before she or anybody figures out that there's a lurking presence, and when they do, they go a little bit crazy trying and failing to kill it, while it goes even crazier succeeding in killing most of the Rita's crew. Like I said, it's really not all that different from a host of '50s sci-fi/horror movies. It's just better. Arnold's direction of his actors, not to mention the relative richness of the script they've been given, results in one of the finest ensembles in any genre movie of that decade, with people who all seem largely like they might exist in the real world, mostly in the way that we see them here: Kay, in particular, has nuances to her personality that go leagues beyond the usual "pretty blonde woman who does science" stock figure, though "leagues beyond" isn't necessarily enough to give her a terribly huge amount of shading or personality. But it's not nothing. Moreover, as the film starts to break down into what amounts to a three-way battle of wills between Mark, David, and Lucas over what makes the most sense to do next, the film introduces some fairly fine gradations between them, as well as Thompson and Carl. Really, the only thing that spoils it is that the Richards, Carlson and Dennings, are hard to keep straight even by the standards of square-jawed brunet white leading men in '50s B-movies.

What makes it best, though, is the all-encompassing sense of atmosphere, not all of it supplied by the gorgeous Florida locations standing in for the Amazon (not always successfully - "And I thought the Mississippi was something!" exults Kay when confronted by the enormous grandeur of a river that appears to be about thirty feet wide). A huge part of it, in fact, is thanks to Arnold and cinematographer William E. Snyder's remarkable use of 3-D, which ranks this right up with Dial M for Murder and Kiss Me Kate in the annals of '50s movies that are just better with the gimmick than without it. Creature from the Black Lagoon is already the best of those three in 2-D: its strengths as a narrative and the one-of-a-kind greatness of the Gill Man would rank it among the very best creature features regardless. But in 3-D, it's a revelatory spectacle, whether because of its showy gaudiness (the fossilised hand plunges out of the screen to grab us in what might very well be the single best "something juts out of the screen" effect in all of cinematic 3-D), or because of how it thrusts us into the film's world, as in the case of all the outstanding underwater sequences, directed by James C. Havens. Whatever it's doing, the 3-D in this film makes the jungle and the Black Lagoon wrap around us like few other B-movie locations on record: the film's setting is enormously tangible and realistic, which helps with everything that follows.

Before I get too far beyond it, though, how about those underwater scenes? Nobody could possibly explain the unique strengths of this movie without acknowledging how great they are. Not least, of course, being the moment that Adams, in a positively scandalous one-piece swimsuit, and the Gill Man, played in his swimming scenes by underwater stunt expert Ricou Browning (later to direct the underwater action in the James Bond picture Thunderball) swim in parallel lines, just feet apart from each other, the creature studying the oblivious woman with what we generally understand to be predatory lust, though in this moment, the only thing you can really notice is the sublime marriage of the purely balletic and the nerve-wrackingly horrific. It's one of the iconic moments in Universal horror for a good reason: beauty and bestiality working in tandem to create one of the most unusual moods in any B-horror movie on the books.

The rest of the underwater material is less famous, of course, but no less effective: Havens managed to keep the movement quick and punchy despite that being the one thing it's basically impossible to do underwater, and so the sequences serve rather to augment than to deflate the overall momentum. Lord knows how he did it, but it's superb. Add to that the busy underwater compositions of fish and kelp, serving to keep us as constantly on the defensive as the spooky dark corners in a haunted house movie (and they pop like nobody's business in 3-D), and you have a simply great movie location, captured with peerless mixture of visual elegance and genre movie tension.

Any movie with those underwater scenes would need to be reckoned with; here, while they're the best thing going, the rest of the movie isn't that far behind (it's only weak spot is the score, composed by Henry Mancini, Hans J. Salter, and Herman Stein, under the direction of Joseph Gershenson; it's much too eager to make sure that we get how horrifying and intense and awful things are, even when they're mostly just tense). The Gill Man is such an alien figure, despite his basically humanoid construction, and Chapman plays him with such jerky motions, that we never do get a chance to get our heads around him; he's not "scary", but more than weird enough to leave the whole movie with a patina of the complete ontological wrongness that is at the heart of all good horror. A lot of what the movie and Arnold does is to simply let that wrongness flow untrammeled, slicing into the lives of the highly normal cast of appealing, everyday humans. It works, almost certainly better than it out to; the impeccable craft and design of the Gill Man suit, able to convincingly convey both inhumanly strong musculature and inhuman underwater grace couldn't have a better framework to be its most impressive self. The whole thing is ultimately just a '50s B-movie, but it's hard to imagine what they could have done to make it a better one.

Reviews in this series
Creature from the Black Lagoon (Arnold, 1954)
Revenge of the Creature (Arnold, 1955)
The Creature Walks Among Us (Sherwood, 1956)