![]() ![]() Once there, by law, the creature runs amok before being killed.īut even as the first few (of many) drafts of the script were being written and rewritten by a handful of writers, Alland decided to distance himself from the Kong connection by confining the action to the Amazon and leaving the creature’s fate in question at the end, just in case a sequel was called for. The Kong influence was clear, as Alland’s original treatment involved the creature falling for a young human woman and getting captured by scientists who drag him back to civilization. He whipped up a quick treatment in which he essentially moved King Kong’s storyline into the waters of the Amazon. Creature from the black lagoon full#It’s unclear if anyone ever took him up on that.īut a full decade after first hearing it, that Amazonian fishman story was still sitting there in the back of his head, nagging at him. The other guests got a chuckle out of that, but the cinematographer insisted it was absolutely true, even offering to provide photographic evidence. In 1941, Alland was at a dinner party at Welles’ home when one of the guests, a South American cinematographer, told the story of an amphibious humanoid creature who emerged from the Amazon once a year, grabbed a young woman from a local village, and then disappeared again. William Alland was a close friend of Orson Welles, a member of the Mercury Theater troupe, and the man who played the faceless reporter in Citizen Kane. Even if this aquatic fish face would go on to become the most iconic and influential cinematic monster of the 1950s, his isolation within the Universal pantheon is somehow fitting, given the storyline that plays out onscreen. Creature from the black lagoon series#In that way, the Gill Man was like the Mummy, forced to carry his series alone. ![]() Of course, given the three-film franchise’s contemporary time frame and American setting, it would’ve been a stretch anyway to find some reason to have him mix it up with the Wolf Man. Arriving six years after the golden age of Universal Horror was capped with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1954’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon was never able to clumsily shuffle his way into the expanded universe shared by Dracula, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, and, if briefly, The Invisible Man. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |