The surface of water is a treacherous mirror. It reflects our world, the sky, the certainties of our age, but hides an abyss. Beneath that vibrant film, time does not flow linearly; it stratifies, preserving geological eras and ancestral nightmares. Few films have understood and exploited this liminal duality as well as Jack Arnold's Creature from the Black Lagoon, the last great mythopoetic gasp of classic Universal, a work that transcends its B-movie label to become a tragic poem about loneliness and the irruption of the primordial in the atomic age.

The year is 1954. America is living its suburban dream, but its foundations are shaking. Cold War paranoia casts the shadow of “otherness” over everything, while nuclear tests in the desert reawaken telluric fears, the feeling that science, in its Promethean impetus, is opening Pandora's boxes that would have been better left sealed. The science fiction cinema of those years is the seismograph of this collective anxiety. Gone are the Gothic castles and villages of Mitteleuropa; horror no longer creeps out of a coffin, but emerges from a flying saucer, a radioactive cocoon or, as in this case, a living fossil. The boat “Rita” sailing up the Amazon River is not unlike the steamboat that ventures into Conrad's heart of darkness: it is an intrusion of modernity into a sacred domain, a journey backward not only geographically but also temporally, toward a forgotten origin, the Devonian period.

On board is the archetype of the 1950s scientific crew: the idealistic researcher David, the ambitious and predatory Mark, and the scientist Kay Lawrence, played by Julie Adams, whose beauty is not just incidental but acts as a dramatic catalyst. They are the vanguard of a world that wants to measure, catalog, and possess. The discovery of a fossilized skeleton with webbed fingers leads them to the Black Lagoon, a “paradise from which man has never returned,” an aquatic womb isolated from the flow of evolution. They do not know that Adam still lives in that paradise. Or perhaps, something that precedes him.

And then, it appears. The Gill-man is not simply a “monster.” He is one of the most sublime and tragic creations in the history of cinema. The creature's design, the result of the long-misunderstood genius of Milicent Patrick, is a masterpiece of mythological biomechanics. He has the power of a prehistoric amphibian, the unnatural grace of a river god, and, above all, a gaze that is not purely beastly. In those eyes there is an abysmal loneliness, the melancholy of the last specimen of a species. Unlike Lugosi's aristocratic and decadent Dracula, or Karloff's Frankenstein's Monster, a mosaic of denied humanity, the Gill-man is a pure product of nature. He is not ‘evil’; he is territorial, curious, instinctive. He is the ecosystem itself defending itself, a force of nature reacting to invasion with the same inevitability as an antibody.

The direction of Jack Arnold, an extraordinarily talented craftsman who knew how to infuse atmosphere and psychological depth on a shoestring budget, is masterful in building tension. For the first half of the film, the creature is a suggested presence: a shadow under the boat, a clawed hand emerging from the water, a visual echo of Val Lewton's strategies. Arnold plays with the surface of the water as a veil separating the known from the unknowable, transforming each dive into a descent into the collective unconscious of the planet.

But the beating heart of the film, the sequence that elevates it to visual poetry, is the underwater ballet between Kay and the creature. While Kay swims on the surface, unaware, in a white swimsuit that makes her a luminous anomaly in that dark, green world, the Gill-man watches her from below, swimming in sync with her, mirroring her movements. It is not a scene of hunting, but of ecstatic and desperate contemplation. It is a surreal pas de deux, an erotic and terrifying dream that evokes the paintings of Max Ernst and the cinema of Jean Cocteau. In that muffled silence, broken only by bubbles, an impossible encounter takes place between two worlds, between Apollonian beauty and Dionysian sublimity. The creature, attracted by a life form so alien yet so fascinating, reaches out an arm towards Kay's foot, hesitating to touch her. It is the most poignant moment in the film: a gesture of pure desire, uncorrupted by intellectual superstructures, which is at the same time an act of potential violence. It is here that Creature from the Black Lagoon plants the seed that will sprout, decades later, in Guillermo del Toro's masterpiece, The Shape of Water, which is the most explicit and passionate reinterpretation of this film. Del Toro has done nothing more than take this subtext of empathy and interspecies love and turn it into the main text.

The conflict that ensues is inevitably tragic. The men, driven by Mark's desire to capture the creature (“Think what it would mean for science!”), do not see it as a sentient being, but as a trophy, an anomaly to be exhibited, a freak show for civilization. It is the same colonialist impulse that brought Schoedsack and Cooper's King Kong in chains to New York. But while Kong was a force of terrestrial nature, the Gill-man is an aquatic entity, more elusive, more alien. The lagoon is his kingdom, and there men are clumsy, vulnerable, dependent on their fragile technology. The film thus becomes a precursor, perhaps unwitting, of the eco-horror genre: nature is not a passive backdrop for human adventures, but an active and vengeful protagonist.

Even the use of 3D, often dismissed as a cheap gimmick, takes on a specific value in this context. The spears whizzing towards the viewer, the clawed hands that seem to pierce the screen, are not just amusement park effects; they serve to break down the safe barrier between the audience and the primordial world, to physically drag us into the lagoon, to make us feel the water on our skin.

In the end, the Gill-man, riddled with bullets, retreats into the depths from whence he came, wounded and perhaps dying. The “heroes” are safe, ready to return to civilization. But there is no triumph in their victory. They have desecrated a sanctuary, wounded a lesser god, and understood nothing. They looked into the abyss and the abyss looked into them, but they, blinded by their own presumption, saw only a monster. The real black lagoon, the film suggests, is not the one in the Amazon, but the one we carry within us: the inability to accept what is radically different, the urge to destroy or imprison what we cannot understand. Creature from the Black Lagoon thus remains a melancholic monument to the last monster, a requiem for a lost world that survives, perhaps, only in the unfathomable depths of our most ancient dreams.