In 1964, the rubber suit was dusted off for the guest character of Uncle Gilbert on an episode of television’s The Munsters, filmed on the Universal lot, and a highly inaccurate and impressionistic “Gill Man” suit also appeared in The Monster Squad (1987). But to date, the creature has not yet anchored another feature film. A remake has been announced no less than nine times by Universal, and several full scripts developed for an impressive roster of directors, including Jack Arnold, John Carpenter, Peter Jackson, and Ivan Reitman, but the production has never escaped an apparently jinxed underwater cage of preproduction shackles. Creature from the Black Lagoon remains the only classic Universal monster franchise that has never enjoyed a major remake or series reboot.

Ben Chapman

Julie Adams, Richard Carlson, and Antonio Moreno

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THE SHAPE OF WATER

FOX SEARCHLIGHT, 2017

In 2002, Guillermo del Toro came close to realizing a project he had dreamed of since childhood: directing a remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon, in which the watery monster would be sympathetic, the story seen finally from his perspective. Most important, the Gill Man and the girl would finally get together. His vision wasn’t at all what Universal had in mind, and this stab at a remake was shelved with all the others. Nearly ten years later, del Toro revived the project as an homage rather than a remake, with stunning results. In Cold War–era Baltimore, Elisa (Sally Hawkins, in an Oscar-nominated performance) is a mute cleaning woman at a top-secret research facility who forms a wordless bond with a humanoid amphibian (Doug Jones) that is at the center of a high-stakes intelligence tug-of-war between American and Soviet forces. The bond evolves into a full-blown romance as Elisa contrives with a pair of friends to liberate the creature—threatened with euthanasia—from captivity. Sculptor Mike Hill’s bodysuit for Jones brilliantly evokes the spirit of Universal’s lagoon monster (miraculously, without violating its trademark). Like most of del Toro’s work, The Shape of Water, which won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, has enormous heart and emotional depth. If you think a musical number resembling a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers routine performed by a woman and an amphibian might make you laugh, it’s only because you haven’t yet seen the film.

Sally Hawkins and Doug Jones in The Shape of Water