[Pride 2021] ‘A Creature Who Can Slay Me:’ Remembering Universal Studios’ Wildly Horny ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ Musical

Stop me if you’ve seen this one: a nice woman who works for a bunch of asshole scientist men comes face to face with a large, humanoid amphibian. She is struck by the fish-man’s otherworldly beauty, finding herself drawn to his scales, his curious personality, and his impressively buff musculature. Even though everyone around her says the relationship is unnatural, she decides to go for it, submitting fully to the creature’s love.

No, I’m not (just) describing 2017 Best Picture winner The Shape of Water.

This is also the plot of Universal Studios’ ill-fated, wildly horny Creature from the Black Lagoon: The Musical, which ran for approximately two months in 2009 before closing. Though reviews at the time reportedly called it an “abomination,” here’s my counter-argument: it’s a blast.

Gill-Man is my favorite of Universal’s horror monsters. Unlike his contemporaries, who arguably wore out their welcome in an endlessly repetitive string of sequels, Gill only appeared in three Creature from the Black Lagoon movies. Revenge of the Creature and The Creature Walks Among Us are the other installments in what is ultimately a tight trilogy with a clear arc, rehabilitating the creature from pre-historic threat to semi-capable, ever-more-human-looking member of society. Harry Benshoff devotes space in Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality in the Horror Film to discussing Gill-Man, mapping his arc onto a familiar horror project of “curing” the monstrous queer.

Wait… the Creature from the Black Lagoon, queer? According to Benshoff, yes, as the original movie is full of misdirected and interrupted sexuality. The Creature represents a clear threat to the heterosexual love triangle formed by Kay and the two rival scientists who compete for her affections, Mark and David. As Benshoff notes, advertising for the film said the creature was “raging with pent-up passions;” sure enough, this phallic Creature spends the movie erupting to the surface and disrupting the heterosexual coupling.

When he kidnaps Kay, he places her on a literal pedestal in the center of his grotto, happy to be able to admire her from afar without those pesky men interrupting him. It’s diva worship, something we queers are all too familiar with. Meanwhile, the Creature’s actual attacks are carried out against the many shirtless, muscular men who populate the film. One such encounter takes place in a tent. The creature overpowers a muscular, shirtless native… places his paw over the man’s face… and then the film cuts to a wider shot, showing the tent shaking back and forth. You know what they say… when the tent starts a’rockin….

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.” What exactly did the Creature do to that man in the tent?

This very tent sequence is how Creature from the Black Lagoon: The Musical opens—part of a Today Show clip package introducing the plot—as if the musical wants us to keep in mind the creature’s taste for muscular men. First, though, audiences hear a voiceover disclaimer from the house: “Ladies and gentlemen, the show you are about to experience depicts an unnatural romance. This relationship is performed by highly trained professionals, and so we ask that you do not attempt to engage in an unnatural romance at home, and remind you that even your average garden-variety romance involves a frightening degree of risk. Thank you.” We don’t hear it as often now, thanks to legalized gay marriage and wider social acceptance of queer people, but in 2009—post-Proposition 8, pre-repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, pre-Glee and pre-Lady Gaga’s imperial phase—that voiceover about “unnatural romance” would have resonated a certain way with queer audiences.

The video intro, presented by Meredith Viera and Matt Lauer, lays out the history of the creature and the storyline of the musical we are about to witness, which somewhat confusingly imagines that the original film from 1954 actually happened, while showing us clips from it. Now, we learn, a new expedition will attempt to retrace the steps of the original, to see if the Creature still exists. And, this was 2009, so of course Matt Lauer makes an off-color joke about how he wishes his notes had included pictures of what he’s being told is a “a fine lady ichthyologist.”

What unspools is a stripped-down redo of the original film remounted as a rock musical, complete with updated pop culture references that shout out modern touchstones from OJ Simpson to “Lady Marmalade.” Creature from the Black Lagoon: The Musical splashes the sexual subtext of the original film all across the stage, reconfiguring the metaphorically sexual significance of the Creature as a literal one.

Kay, the “lady ichthyologist,” is frustrated because her wimpy fiancé David won’t put out. She’s feeling extra amorous because of the heat of the jungle, but David ducks her advances and reminds her that they’re scientists, so of course they can’t be making out. Mark, on the other hand, pursues Kay relentlessly even though she’s clearly not interested.

To avoid the men, Kay decides to go for a solitary swim while she sings about what she wants in a lover. This is the musical’s show-stopper, its piece-de-resistance: a high-wire ballet that reinterprets the iconic swimming sequence in the original film, which sees the creature gliding through the water below Kay and mimicking her graceful movements, a (literally) sub-liminal reflection of her sexual appeal.

In the musical, Kay sings a song called “Slay Me,” soaring through the air on wires as she “swims.” The Creature appears and glides next to her, mimicking her as his film counterpart mimicked Julie Adams. The song is a rock ballad about wanting to be consumed by a lover, to give yourself over to them completely. “Engulf and devour me / Please overpower me,” she sings. She wants “a creature who can slay me, who can slay me / Crazy, drive me crazy / Fry me and fillet me / you know what, you know what to do / and I will slay you, too.”

Queer audiences are used to this sentiment, especially in horror. Our romances are already considered “unnatural,” already frowned-upon by society, so it’s an easy move for queer audiences to map our identification and occasionally our attraction on to a monstrous figure in a horror film. A monster-fucker relationship like this, in other words, queers the “natural” order (read: cis-heterosexual monogamy), and there’s a queer sort of pleasure in rooting for it to succeed.

After Kay finally sees the creature and flees back to the ship, she describes his appearance to the men as “vertebrate… razor sharp claws… vestigial fins… incredible muscle tone… six-pack abs that would make a girl……..” She trails off, and then cries, “Oh David, hold me,” falling into his arms. David, however, has just hastily emerged from below-decks with Mark, both of them suddenly shirtless and wearing only short-shorts. He, of course, resists her embrace. Hmm.

The rest of the musical consists of the Creature capturing Kay, seducing her with a song about being evil (“My evil, you can’t overstate / Like Ahnold, I will Terminate / and when I need to procreate / I’m a Kama Sutra fan!”). In the meantime, the Creature and Kay sing a duet (“Strange New Hunger”), which is full of even more innuendo, including a joke about the creature being hung……(“He’s what?!”)…...gry for her love.

By the end of the show, the creature has been shot with a spear dipped in “A-Rod’s Growth Hormone,” which Mark has evidently been using to enlarge his penis. Side note: this is a canny update of the original film’s weapons, which are incredibly phallic spearguns that spurt out clouds of a white liquid meant to knock the Creature out. The actor in the rubber Gill-Man suit is replaced by an impressive, massive creature puppet, and Kay is ultimately eaten by the monster, “engulfed and devoured” by his love, just like she wanted. It’s the biggest diversion in plot from the film, consummating their attraction in a way the original movie could not, and I love it. No way could Kay have fucked the fish like Sally Hawkins did, performing as they are for an audience of tourist families; instead, this is the next-best thing.

Look, Creature from the Black Lagoon: The Musical has issues. The captain of the ship is a Voodoo priestess, and there’s a joke that mocks her chanting (i.e. while she’s having a premonition, she chants “mocha chocolatta ya-ya!”). That sort of thing would never have made it in the script even five years later. Also, as family entertainment goes, it’s shockingly horny; I’m not surprised audiences walked out bewildered by what they’d just seen. 

However, as a reinterpretation of an iconic film character, as an attempt to make subtext text and to dazzle audiences with puppetry (by Michael Curry, who designed the animals in the Lion King musical), this is a deliciously campy experience. Despite its short life on stage, Creature from the Black Lagoon: The Musical lives on thanks to YouTube. The account “Inside Universal” that uploaded the show has performed a valuable service to queer history by ensuring that we’ll always have “Slay Me,” and I for one am forever grateful.

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