The 13 Days Of Halloween: The Creature From The Black Lagoon

When I was a kid, one of the most scary movies I had ever seen was THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. May have been on Bob Wilkins' Creature Features or on C3PM Theater on KCRA (Sacramento). The movie is really creepy, and uses the water to hide the monster the same way JAWS used the water to hide the shark. You never know when or where it will strike. The film also has great music with some of the earliest use of "stings" - dant-dunt-da! The group of people, isolated, with a monster out there... somewhere... builds dread. Every time someone gets into the water because there's a tree or something in the way of the boat, you worry that the creature will attack. This was one of those movies I watched as a kid with hands covering my eyes - peeking between my fingers.



Not as scary as an adult, but still *fun* - it has some real suspense and real thrills and actually has an environmental message (great shot of a cigarette butt being thrown into the lagoon... camera dips underwater to show the Creature looking up at the butt and garbage floating in his pool). I didn't notice the environmental stuff when I was a kid. This is one of those films that people my age saw on TV as kids and remember - which is why Universal keeps trying to remake it (latest attempt was with Will Smith). The cheese-fest ANACONDA owes just about everything to this film.



For a while there was a slot machine in Vegas based on BLACK LAGOON, and I always played it becuase it had clips from the film with some clever quips. I have no idea if kids today would find this scary, or just silly - there's no gore at all... but when people dangle their feet in the water and you know it's down there, that scared the heck out of me when I was young!

- Bill
TODAY'S JACK-O-LANTERN:



IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: HOW You Tell The Story - It's not just the story, it's how you decide to tell it... backwards?
Dinner: Pork chop, salad, potatoes... danged cold is still hanging in there!
Pages: Half a chapter on the action book rewrite plus a thing that I needed to work on for months... that I finally finished.