With six sheep and two goats now joining the cast, Sherwood shot the effective, no-dialogue scene of the Creature’s arrival at his “new home”: A rental truck driven by Grant (with Johnson riding shotgun) is followed by a Chrysler Imperial limousine onto the property through its guarded gateway. In a high long shot, both vehicles pull up in front of the house (with matted-in lake background), where Grant opens the truck’s rear doors. The Creature slowly materializes out of the muslin-lined blackness, walking slowly down a ramp and impassively taking in his new surroundings. Notice that the Creature is oiled up, perhaps with glycerin, in this scene and others, probably to prevent his rubber mask from looking like what it is, rubber. The oil makes his skin look “more like lizard skin … a natural, shiny look about it,” the grand old man of monster movie fandom, Bob Burns, said on the Creature Walks DVD audio commentary. “That’s the trouble with all foam rubber, it does have a very dull look to it, if it doesn’t have anything on it.”

It’s a clever touch that when we hear the Creature’s breathing, especially in this truck scene, this fish out of water sounds the way we hear ourselves when underwater sucking air through, say, a snorkel; in our element, he sounds like we would in his. Limo passengers Barton, Morgan, Marcia and Borg watch as the submissive Creature perp-walks into his new pad, a bars-and-chicken-wire stockade. What could have been a “nothing” scene becomes a highlight of the picture through the use of music, camera angles and sound effects and the sad and unexpected spectacle of America’s favorite amphibious man, the Creature, reduced to zombie-like passivity.³⁹ Work wrapped in the afternoon after the filming of the scene of Barton and Morgan, in the stockade viewing room, having their umpteenth verbal jousting match, this one about biology vs. psychology, giving kindness, getting kindness, the law of the jungle vs. murder, etc. At least we’re spared more choruses of “the jungle or the stars.” First-time feature director Sherwood’s movie was now a half-day ahead of schedule but $3000 over-budget.

Part of the morning of Monday, September 12, was spent shooting the day-for-night scene where the scientists react to the Creature’s killing of the lion; a nice boom shot shows Barton and Morgan running along the house’s second-floor veranda, the camera pulling back and descending to ground level as they hotfoot it down the exterior stairway. Hurrying toward the stockade to take her place in the scene, Leigh Snowden slipped and spoiled a take, costing the production 22 feet of film.⁴⁰

Twice burned, thrice shy? The Creature Walks script may have dispensed with the ritual of Blacky LaGoon getting grabby over the girl, but this Creature of habit was his old “bad boy” self in a few publicity photographs. (Pictured: Don Megowan, Leigh Snowden.)

Barton (Jeff Morrow, left) and the other Gill Man hunters (Rex Reason, Maurice Manson, James Rawley and Gregg Palmer) pay a visit to the fishing village home of Morteno (Paul Fierro, abed), victim of the Creature. At the end of the scene, as Morteno is limping across the room, notice (in the background) that Barton compassionately slips some money into the hands of Morteno’s wife.

After lunch, they photographed more footage for use in the Creature’s ranch arrival scene; a shot of the Creature standing over the dead lion (with the dead sheep in the background); a shot of Marcia sitting on the veranda railing, playing a guitar; and a shot of the caged Creature raising his head, looking for the source of the music. Twice in the movie, the monster confronts Marcia but he never lays a webbed finger on her. Has he sworn off women? (If so, who could blame him, after his “epic fail” attempts to set up light lagoon-keeping with Kay and Helen?) So unbeguiled is he that it’s almost like he’s been neutered by his scientist-captors, on top of everything else. The Beauty and the Beast component that helped “make” the first two movies is conspicuous by its absence in Creature Walks, and perhaps not surprisingly, with Ross as solo scripter; he didn’t see a great deal of value in that plot element in the first Creature movie! Before he came aboard Black Lagoon as writer, “Beauty and the Beast” was a big part of the story; and then again after he left; but with Ross calling the story shots alone on Creature Walks, the Creature clings to his stag status. Sorry, Marcia, but as the kids say today, “He’s just not that into you.”

“Leigh Snowden was that phenomenon known as the Studio Starlet,” Maurice Manson told me. “[Hollywood studios] used to have these starlets who they used to promote. Not too vigorously [laughs], but the starlets were always there to be decorative! Her job in Creature Walks Among Us was to wear as little clothes as possible and to be there for the Creature to menace. That was her sole purpose in the picture!”

September 12 wrapped with the shooting of the scene in which Barton angrily barges into Grant’s room and gives him his immediate eviction notice. The 13th would have been a dull day to visit the moviemakers on Stage 19, with little of interest being shot for most of the hours following the 7:48 a.m. crew call: Morgan and Marcia talking on the veranda; the final-reel living room scene with the scientists, Marcia and the state trooper (played by ham-and-egger Larry Hudson, a 1961 suicide); and another Barton-Marcia squabble, this one in her room (“You’ve become a … cheap little … tramp!” “Only to you, Bill … only to you…”). On the Marcia’s Room set, Snowden’s sexy shadow-on-the-drape moment (as she dons her bathing suit) was the last thing filmed that afternoon; in the movie, we see that shot just before Barton enters. At least one version of the script made the goings-on a bit more provocative, prompting a scolding from the censors’ office: “Scene 385 showing Marcia changing into a bathing suit with her husband ‘watching’ seems overly suggestive and completely unacceptable on account of the nudity inherent in the scene.”

The Morteno house scene was September 14’s first order of business. After lunch, cast and crew converged on the Process Stage and got shots of the scientists and Grant in the dinghy, for use in the scene where they go from the yacht to the landing near Morteno’s fishing village.⁴¹ Next they filmed the scientists and Grant in the dinghy at the start of their Everglades Creature hunt. Notice that even in the middle of the night in a dinghy in an Everglades inlet, Barton can’t be without his captain’s hat, the visual reminder that he’s the big Kahuna (and another indication that his mental rudder is slightly askew). The early part of that sequence was shot that afternoon (turning on the Fishscope, testing the rotenone gun, etc.); “the good stuff” wouldn’t come until later.⁴²

Pollard Lake, a manmade body of water on the studio back lot, was seen in numerous movies, including some “Universal Horrors”: Monster–hunting villagers are seen in Pollard Lake rowboats in the 1931 Frankenstein, and the mud-caked Princess Ananka (Virginia Christine) bathes in its waters in The Mummy’s Curse (1944), to name just two. Add Creature Walks Among Us to the list of movies utilizing it: On August 26, a Creature suit was tested there for producer Alland, and now on the morning of September 15 Leigh Snowden took a dip in Upper Pollard Lake. In the late morning she was joined in the water by Gregg Palmer as the obnoxiously persistent Grant.

After lunch, work began on the Creature’s ranch house rampage. Upper Veranda and Barton’s Room sets, built and furnished on Stage 19, were now un-built and un-furnished by Don Megowan: He tore down an overhead porch light fixture amidst a shower of sparks, smashed breakaway French doors, and then flipped a dresser over a nearby table. Next that table and a divan went flying. Two cameras covered the doors-dresser-table-divan action, the “A” camera getting this furniture-rearrangement in long shots and the “B” camera in medium closeups.⁴³ The furniture was of course on wires, giving Megowan an assist in the up-up-and-away department. On-screen the entire house-wrecking scene has no music, adding intensity to the Creature’s grim trackdown of Barton. The absence of music also gives viewers the chance to really hear the Creature’s Darth Vader–like breathing—not to mention his “bellowing like a wounded walrus,” as the New York Times reviewer put it.

The Creature was still in a foul mood the next morning, making a door-damaging end run into Marcia’s Stage 19 room and upending her mirrored dressing table. Next he tore through the dressing room drapes and terrorized Morgan and the screaming Marcia.

“It’s clobberin’ time!”: Two more breakaway French doors later, Morrow’s Barton felt the Creature’s wrath as he is pitched to the veranda floor, then seized and hoisted overhead. No stuntman took Morrow’s place (or Megowan’s, for that matter) for the lifting-overhead scene. Morrow told me:

A kinder, gentler Gill Man? In Black Lagoon he killed five, in Revenge three, but in Creature Walks just one: his ruthless tormentor Dr. Barton. In this shot, the Creature (Don Megowan) is about to read Barton (Jeff Morrow) his Veranda rights.

They had me on a wire that led up to a pulley on the ceiling. When Don Megowan reached down and grabbed me, they pulled me up with the wire as he lifted me. Needless to say, he did not throw me over; he raised me up to the ceiling and then they stopped—thank goodness!—and put a dummy up there in my place.⁴⁴

Morrow made it sound like they shot his part of the scene on the Dabney House veranda but it was done on the soundstage replica. A few nights later, back at the Dabney House, Megowan would fling the Barton dummy earthward. Cut together in the finished movie, the two shots unfortunately feature a hard-to-miss blooper: The Creature lifts Barton and prepares to throw him over the rail, which is topped with a shelf and four big flower pots; but in the next shot, when he throws Barton, the shelf and flower pots have vanished.⁴⁵

Morrow was back on Stage 19’s Ranch interior sets the next morning (Saturday, September 17), tiptoeing around from upper hallway room to room in the hide’n’seek scenes that lead up to his fatal run-in with the Creature. Rex Reason played the scene where Morgan, hearing gunshots, gets out of bed. The two actors and the crew then moved to Stage 12, where they were joined by Gregg Palmer and David McMahon on the yacht pilot house set for the stalking-the-Gill Man scene. Again a wind machine was used to carry away Palmer’s cigarette smoke and give the false impression of actual filming-on-a-boat.⁴⁶

Dr. Barton (Jeff Morrow) must have played hooky the day his medical school taught the Hippocratic oath; “Do no harm” was the last thing on his mind. In the Creature Walks finale, the Creature (Don Megowan) gives Barton his comeuppance…and then his comedownance!

The day ended with a silent shot of Morrow and Snowden in a convertible in front of the process screen, part of the opening scene where she’s lead-footing across the bridge to the yacht landing. Before the shot could be taken, it was necessary for crew members to make it possible for Snowden to turn the wheel of the stationary car in order to fit the action on the plate.

A day of rest and then on the evening of Monday, September 19, back to the Dabney House for the final day of principal photography (all night-for-night). There’s another well-done down-the-stairs boom shot as Grant goads Barton (“What’s botherin’ ya, Doc? Your wife?”) to the breaking point—the breaking of Grant’s head, as Barton pistol-whips him. According to the shot description in the Daily Production Report, Barton treated Grant like a King (Rodney King), hitting him several times and then a few more times for good luck even after he was lying still on the ground. But in the film’s final cut, Barton delivers just one blow to an on-camera Grant, a second blow to an off-camera Grant and then a third that we only hear.

For the shots of Barton lugging Grant’s body into the Creature’s cage, veteran stuntman Paul Stader replaced Morrow and stand-in Joe Walls took over for Palmer. (These shots, and all the rest of the night’s shots, were silent.) Don Megowan’s Creature tore through a breakaway stockade gate while Barton (played by either Morrow or Stader, probably Stader) repeatedly fired his gun as he backed up and fell over a hedge. Again the action was covered by two cameras, as was the subsequent shot of the stair-climbing Creature breaking the railing. Camera “A”’s shooting-up shot was used in the movie, Camera “B”’s shooting-down shot was used in the trailer. Jeff Morrow was dismissed at 2:50 a.m. once this was in the can.

Barton (Jeff Morrow) goes off the dial in fury and kills Grant (Gregg Palmer) with three blows, one of them on-camera—the filmmakers doing the scene that way in defiance of Production Code enforcer Geoffrey M. Shurlock, who had written them: “The action showing Barton pistol-whipping Grant is considered excessively brutal. One crack with the pistol should be sufficient and should be indicated out of frame, by suggestion.”

A few minutes later, the Creature slung Barton (actually a dummy) down off the second floor porch. As mentioned above, the Gill Man getting his meat hooks on Barton is a feel-good moment in the movie because Barton’s been such a stinker to his wife and to the Creature (not to mention the murder of Grant). It might have been a fright film “first” in 1956 when audiences found themselves rooting for a monster on a destructive tear.

A long shot of the Creature descending the staircase and walking down the drive past Barton’s body was cut short for the movie so that the corpse would go unseen. Again a second camera came into play as the Creature charged after the rifle-firing, backwards-running ranch hand, shoving him through a windowed wall of the sentry house. The guard had to have been played by Stader, the only stuntman still there at that hour (now almost 4 a.m.). There were two cameras again for the Creature’s toppling of the brick pillar with the electric switchbox, one inside and the other outside the gate; the shot taken by the latter camera was used in the movie. Sparks fly as the pillar falls, with the firecracker-ish sound effects a carryover from a lab scene in an old Frankenstein movie. A high long shot (taken from the porch) of the Creature disappearing into the brush was the last shot of the night; the company was dismissed from the Dabney House location at 4:50 a.m. on the morning of September 20. Principal photography had finished with a bang.

The Creature (Don Megowan), concluding his home improvement kick, adds a second egress to the Barton Ranch. The very solid- and heavy-looking pillar falls amidst many sparks and much smoke, a worthy topper for a great monster-runs-riot scene.

There was, however, more to be done, including two key scenes. This post-production work began with a 6:30 p.m. crew call that very same day (September 20). Park Lake, seen as the Black Lagoon in Creature from the Black Lagoon and used in the beach finale of Revenge of the Creature, was now visited by the Creature Walks company for the shooting of the scene of the men in the dinghy searching the Everglades inlet for the Gill Man. A quintet of $70-a-day stuntmen played the Creature hunters: Paul Stader again doubling Morrow, Joe Walls again doubling Palmer, Alex Sharp doubling Reason, Joe Yrigoyen doubling Manson and Ken Terrell doubling Rawley. The only other player there was Don Megowan, donning the scaly latex costume of the pre-fire Gill Man. Eight gallons of coffee were prepared for the long and probably cold night of work.

With the five stunt doubles in the boat, Sherwood shot a series of silent long shots. From 8:40 until almost half past ten, the boat was photographed with Grant at the spotlight, Barton steering with Johnson beside him, Borg at the Fishscope and Morgan in the stern with the rotenone gun. A little before midnight, a second camera was added for the shot of the Creature, standing amidships with two spears in him, being on the receiving end of a lit torch thrown by Grant. (The flames that engulf the monster would later be added optically.⁴⁷) After the Creature drops into the water to douse the “flames,” Morgan grabs an extinguisher and starts spraying the small fire on the dinghy floor. That fire was real and intentional.

Yes, the Creature Walks Florida Everglades waterway does look a lot like the Black Lagoon from the first Gill Man movie: The same Universal back lot lake was used in both. In the dinghy are stuntmen Alex Sharp, Joe Yrigoyen, Paul Stader, Ken Terrell and Joe Walls.

After a one-hour midnight lunch, a wire was rigged to the boat so that the bow could be raised, supposedly by the Creature. On that night’s list of Special Equipment is a Lorain crane, so the wire must have run from the bow to the crane’s overhead arm. At about 2 a.m., in a low shot, the now-burned Creature came out of the water and “pushed” the bow of the boat up out of camera range. A bit later, with two cameras rolling, he did it again, Camera “A” getting a full shot and Camera “B” a medium. The wire broke on the first attempt, but on the second the dinghy’s passengers were ejected, some of them none too convincingly, into the drink. A bit after 4 a.m., two cameras got the shot of the Creature attempting to lift a log, but then collapsing and slumping over it. In footage shot but not used, the boat was brought over and the Creature loaded into it. Megowan and the stuntmen were dismissed at 4:20 but it was necessary for some crew members to linger until past 5 a.m., shooting background plates that would be needed when cast members Morrow, Reason et al. enacted other parts of this scene on the Process Stage.

“I’m ready for my closeup”: A behind-the-scenes shot of Don Megowan as the new and improved(?) Creature, “More terrifying than ever in human form!” (radio spot line).

Wednesday was a well-earned day off for Megowan, Sherwood and his crew but on Thursday, September 22, they reconvened for a day of silent shots. The first stop was the back lot’s Brown Hill, where they waited a while for better light, didn’t get it and decided to shoot anyway. Aside from getting the Creature shots we see in the movie’s finale,⁴⁸ they photographed a never-to-be-used long pan shot of the monster climbing a road to the top of the hill and a long shot of the Creature coming up the slope and into the foreground. (You do feel for the Creature when you see him atop the hill, obviously in a world of hurt. Maybe it’s the fact that you see the actor’s eyes and he uses them to convey that he’s got nothing left in the tank.) A bit before noon, crew and actor moved back to the stockade at the Dabney House, getting shots of the imprisoned Creature looking through the fence in the direction of the lake, reacting to the sound of the mountain lion, etc.

The lion then made his entrance, doing most or all of its scenes on the end of a wire that was painted to make it less visible. There was lots of wasted film as the lion kept heading off in wrong directions, but eventually they got all the needed footage. Creature Megowan also “battled” a dummy lion and quickly “crushed” and slammed it to the ground. One of the amusing, “only in Hollywood” items on that day’s Special Equipment list: “1 Fork Lift for Lion.”

On Saturday, September 24, when shooting took place on the Process Stage, one last name was added to the list of Gill Men portrayers: stuntman-actor Chuck Roberson, John Wayne’s stunt double from 1949 (The Fighting Kentuckian) until “The Duke” came to the end of his movie trail in 1976 with The Shootist. At 6'3" Roberson was the runt of the litter of Land Creatures (Ben Chapman and Tom Hennesy were both 6'5", Don Megowan 6'7") but of course a difference of a couple inches would be impossible to notice; and making it “more impossible” to notice is the fact that in all of Roberson’s Creature Walks footage he’s either in water or sharing the screen with actors who are sitting down.

The morning and early afternoon were spent getting shots of Morrow, Reason, Palmer, Manson and Rawley (in a dinghy in the Process Stage pool) for the scene where they’re following the Gill Man. Then it was Roberson’s turn: He’s seen as the Gill Man in the shot where he bursts up out of the water and into the glare of Grant’s bow-mounted spotlight, and in the shot where he smashes the spotlight and sends Grant toppling backward.⁴⁹ That evening, as footage of the wave-battered ocean beach played on the process screen, Megowan (in his “burned Creature” get-up) was photographed standing in front of it in profile, shoulders rising and falling with each breath. This footage was shot at 6:19 and he was dismissed at 6:20(!). It was the last shot of the day on Megowan’s last day on the movie.

On the final few days of production, the Gill Man was “Bad Chuck” Roberson (1919–88). He was nicknamed “Bad Chuck” by director John Ford, who used stuntmen Roberson and Chuck Hayward on many movies. To differentiate them, Ford called Hayward “Good Chuck” and Roberson—a drinker, fighter and womanizer—“Bad Chuck” (courtesy Photofest).

“Don Megowan was a very dear friend of mine,” Gregg Palmer told me. He continued,

Don and I played brothers on an episode of Gunsmoke [“Phoebe Strunk”], there was a shootout at Dodge City and Don was hit. “Ma” [Virginia Gregg] told me, “Go git your brother,” and I had to go out into the street, grab Don Megowan, pick him up, put him over my shoulder and carry him off. Well, when I draped him over my shoulder, his head was dragging and his feet were dragging, and it was a full day’s work to make that ten steps off-camera with Don Megowan! My vertebrae are still achin’!

September 26 and 27 were spent on the Process Stage finishing the dinghy scene. Just before lunch on September 26, they shot footage that ultimately was not used: Grant in the dinghy bow in foreground and, in the stern in the background, the Gill Man (Roberson) knocking over a torch and, angered by the light of the Fishscope shining in his face, reaching for the machine. Getting this shot led to a bit of real-life excitement, as the fire from the fallen torch forced Rex Reason to bail out of the boat. The Production Report says that he “got leg and foot caught between Borg [Maurice Manson] and boat,” whatever that means. In our 1989 interview, Reason better described the incident: “There was a little lantern on board which fell over and started a fire. I jumped out, but there was a little piece of metal on the side of the boat that ripped open my left ankle.” He added that he still carries a scar from that mishap.⁵⁰

In one shot, Gill Man Roberson jumped backwards off the dinghy stern into the water. In the movie, that footage is seen in reverse so that he appears to spring up out of the water and make a gold medal–worthy stuck landing aboard the dinghy. In order to be “shot” with the first of the two spears, the Gill Man was rigged with a wire; the spear would run down the wire to the point of attachment to the Gill Man suit. Getting it to work the first time took “forever” (from 4:38 p.m. ’til a quarter past 6) as one thing after another went amiss: In one take, the Gill Man stood waiting too long for the spear; in the next two, the wire broke; then he lost his balance and spoiled the shot; then the spear didn’t stick; then the wire broke again. In the last shot of the day, the Gill Man “took” the second spear as he prepared to lift the gas can.

The dinghy action scene originally had even more action: In footage that was not used, the Gill Man (Chuck Roberson) took a few steps toward the bow, knocked over a kerosene lamp, pushed Borg aside and threw the Fishscope overboard. Because that footage was scrapped, in the finished film the Gill Man abruptly goes from the stern to amidships, and the Fishscope inexplicably vanishes.

On Tuesday cast and crew reunited on the Process Stage and things picked up right where they left off, with a full shot of Gill Man Roberson again taking a “gasoline” shower as he hurls the can, Grant lofting the torch and the Gill Man doing his “I’m on fire!” bit (even though he wasn’t) and then going overboard. More bits’n’pieces of this scene’s action-ful finale were shot throughout the day. By seven that evening, only Morrow, Reason and Roberson were still there cast-wise, getting the shot where Barton and Grant wade over to the kayoed Gill Man (slumped over the log) and examine him. “Bring the boat,” Morrow called out to no one (Palmer, Manson and Rawley had been dismissed almost an hour earlier), and then he and Reason rolled the Creature over onto his back and began dragging him out of the shot.⁵¹

At 7:10 p.m., this fifth day of post-production came to an end. There were still 36 inserts and stock shots needed, but otherwise, the movie was finished. First-time feature director Sherwood had come in on schedule and on budget—although it’s worth a quick mention that since the 78-minute Creature Walks has close to 20 minutes of second unit footage, stock shots, etc., it was as though he had directed a one-hour movie. (This was also true of Jack Arnold on Black Lagoon.) Universal was obviously satisfied with the job he had done because four weeks to the day later he began his second movie as director, Raw Edge (1956), a Technicolor Western with Rory Calhoun, Yvonne DeCarlo and an offbeat and lurid plot: In the 1842 Oregon territory, there’s 1000 men to every woman, and the law specifies that any unattached woman belongs to the first man to claim her. (For instance, Mara Corday is an Indian girl whose husband has been found guilty of a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to hang; and with the just-dropped body still swingin’, Mara is set upon by a horde of horny cowboys!) Creature Walks star Rex Reason had a supporting part as a gentleman gambler who turns out to be no gentleman.

Several months later, Sherwood was in Lone Pine directing his third movie, The Monolith Monsters (1957). After this, however, he went back to assistant-directing, his new credits including the excellent Audie Murphy Western No Name on the Bullet (1959), directed by Arnold. In March 1959 Sherwood was in New York directing second-unit scenes for the Rock Hudson–Doris Day comedy Pillow Talk when he took ill with pneumonia and died in Harlem’s Hospital for Joint Diseases. A Hollywood Reporter item about his passing said that he directed “about ten features” when he actually directed three. His April 1 obit in Variety was even more of an April Fool’s, the show biz bible calling him “a director for Universal for 25 years [and] principal director of numerous feature films.” He died at age 52, 53 or circa 56, depending on where you read about him.

On September 28, the day after The Creature Walks Among Us wrapped, Jeff Livingston, Universal’s Eastern (445 Park Avenue, NYC) advertising manager, wrote to tell publicist Clark Ramsay that he didn’t think much of the title: “It sounds as if the monster was just ambling around, making trouble.” He suggested lots of others, including one he particularly liked, The Creature Stalks a City, “which is provoking and, at the same time, lends itself to the King Kong type of ads with cars and buildings being pushed around.” Other suggestions in that same letter: The Creature’s Jungle, The Creature Against the Sky, The Roaring Creature, The Creature Turns, The Creature’s Secret, Creature at the Crossroads, Fifty Fathoms Under the Creature, The Creature and the Mermaid, The Creature Rises in the Everglades, The Creature, Dead or Alive!, The Creature Has Two Faces, The Creature’s Master Mind and Creature from the Roaring Everglades. On October 4, Universal’s Eastern publicity manager Philip Gerard piped up on behalf of The Creature Stalks the City, calling it an excellent title and amusing himself with the alliterative comment, “[I]t has the feeling of a King Kong Kind of Kinescope.” But The Creature Walks Among Us the title would remain.

Scripter Arthur Ross assured me that Universal had no qualms about letting him alter the Creature’s appearance, but it seems as though the publicity department lads had qualms a-plenty: On the posters, we don’t see Ross’ new Creature but the old one. “Science Baits the Trap with a Woman’s Beauty!” read one ad line, making a promise the movie wouldn’t keep. “TERROR Runs Rampant on the City Streets!” and artwork of a group of panic-stricken people also violate the public trust as the Creature never gets within bellowing distance of any city … or town … or hamlet. The publicity mavens were also being economical with the truth with their artwork of the Gill Man straddling the Golden Gate Bridge. On one lobby card, there’s a small piece of cartoon art (the Creature pushing over a section of electrified fence) where he looks like the love child of the Gill Man and Bela Lugosi’s The Phantom Creeps robot.

On the Creature Walks poster art, the Creature’s multi-million-year evolutionary leap is indicated only by a pair of high-water pants with rope belt.

Inside the pressbook, a castlist gives the names and character names of the six top-billed players plus, surprisingly,

Creature …………………… DON MEGOWAN and    RICOU BROWNING

This is the only one of the three movies whose pressbook reveals the names of the Creature players. What’s funny about this, “Land Creature”–wise, is that Tom Hennesy probably would have liked getting official credit, and Ben Chapman would have loved it—and yet the only actor to get it is Don Megowan, who probably hated it! His daughter Vikki told me, “He downplayed all his sci-fi movies because he did not want to be stereotyped as just a sci-fi actor. Quite honestly, back in those days he really didn’t want it widely publicized that he played the Creature, for fear it would hurt his opportunities for other roles.”

Exhibitors reading the pressbook were also made aware that two different 16mm “Shock TV Trailers,” one 60 seconds, the other 20 seconds, were available for free from Eastern advertising manager Livingston. Apparently the trailers were scary stuff back in the day; on March 16, 1956, Livingston wrote to publicist Ramsay:

Just to let you know that you and Bob Faber have not lost your horrible touch.

Station WEWS in Cleveland will only show The Creature Walks Among Us TV trailer after 9 p.m. Station KYW in Cleveland will not show the minute spots but only the 20-second ones. Station WSPD in Toledo is debating whether or not they will accept the spots at all.

I’ll keep you advised of further developments.

Kind regards.

Leigh Snowden was described in the press as “a well-scrubbed, ladylike blonde with a figure that could give Marilyn Monroe an anxiety complex.” Here she poses with a man who enjoys his job, Creature Walks co-star Rex Reason.

At no cost to Universal, one unusual publicity item was concocted by their San Francisco field representative Mike Vogel: a four-page herald in which the Creature Walks events are written up in tabloid style, as though they were true-life stories that had inspired this new movie. Theaters playing Creature Walks were solicited by the printer to order copies. The “newspaper” was called the State-Clarion and the headline accompanying the cover photo of the post-fire Creature read “Monster or Man? Human or Beast?” In the grand yellow-journalism tradition, a page-one story was titled “Love-Slave Wife Calls Mate Killer.” One “scoop” within the paper was a story by Marcia Barton, “‘Tried to Fight Him Off,’ Sobs Gal; Asks Fair Play,” which read in part:

I eagerly accept the State-Clarion invitation to reply to the charges I am much to blame for the deaths of Jed Grant and my husband William Barton.

The truth is, that Barton tried to make a love-slave out of me. He would go into the most awful rages if I as much as looked at another man. He killed Grant.

I was never in love with Jed Grant. I turned to him only for the companionship I could not get from my husband. I was happy to find anyone to make me forget, if only for a brief moment, the shuddery shadow-world I lived in under the vicious influence of a crazy scientist and his sinister “love-laboratory.”

… All I can say now, is that before anyone passes judgment, they should go and see The Creature Walks Among Us. I am willing to rest my reputation and honesty on what the picture reveals.

It was as though the Gods of Weather frowned upon the idea of a third Gill Man feature: Clouds and rain had hampered Creature Walks’ Florida second unit (as they did all three movies’ Florida units); a killer heat wave put a hurting on its first unit team at Universal; and when the night of the Creature Walks preview loomed, disaster struck again: On January 25, 1956, rainstorms began sweeping over California, sending rivers out of their banks. In the Southland, rain and gusty winds caused flooding that forced many from their homes, prompted shopkeepers to sandbag entryways, and caused mudslides that blocked Coldwater Canyon and Laurel Canyon. On the 26th, the area was again relentlessly pounded, with hundreds of women and children being rescued from their flooded homes by men in trucks and boats. Roads turned to rivers, forcing the abandonment of automobiles. “Water reached nearly to the rooftops of houses in the Palms area, near Manning and Motor Aves.,” reported the Los Angeles Times.

On the night of the 26th, during the third heaviest 24-hour rainfall in Southern California history, L.A.’s State Theatre hosted the Creature Walks preview, running it after a regular showing of the Glenn Ford–Donna Reed drama Ransom! (1956). Preview Comment Cards were handed out to the few who’d braved the elements to attend. The question “WHICH SCENES, IF ANY, DID YOU DISLIKE?” elicited the answers “About jealousy,” “House scenes,” “The factual scenes and the mushy scenes,” “The final scenes” and (there’s a wiseguy in every crowd) “Most.”

The role of Barton’s tormented “trophy wife” was a stretch for Leigh Snowden, who in real life “could dance, could sing, and had an outgoing personality,” according to her friend Ina Poindexter. “Leigh was really very talented, multi-talented, and she was funny. We loved being around her.”

WERE ALL THE STORY POINTS CLEAR TO YOU?

No, the reasons for the changes [in the Creature] were not made clear enough.

No, poor script. In fact, some lines ridiculous.

What story?

Story?

DID THE PICTURE HOLD YOUR INTEREST THROUGHOUT? IF NOT, WHERE DID IT FAIL TO HOLD YOU?

Where it deviated from adventure to psychology.

The end.

From the beginning to the end.

Have to admit it—best comedy of the year.

At Universal at the next morning’s Studio Operating Committee, a Mr. Batliner said that too few cards were turned in, “probably because of the adverse weather conditions” (ya think?), to draw any conclusions about how the movie would be greeted by audiences. According to Batliner, the Universal employees at the preview remarked that it was well-received and sustained the interest of the folks who were there. Down the line a bit, Preview Comment Cards mailed to the studio by other attendees included these remarks:

Best comedy in years. All it lacked was Abbott and Costello and Liberace.

Good for children.

Color would have helped—at least I wouldn’t have felt as though I were out $1.00.

It is a poor way to present the subject of genetics.

A good try.

Harrison’s Reports thought that Creature Walks’ thrills and chills were on a par with its predecessors: “It is all far-fetched, of course, but [the story makes] for a series of horrific situations that are sure to excite those who go for this type of entertainment.” Funnily enough, Harrison’s called Creature Walks “Adult fare” while Jack Moffitt’s Hollywood Reporter review was titled “U-I’s Newest in Creature Series Good Kiddie B.O.” Motion Picture Exhibitor called it a “suitable addition to others in the series.… The story holds attention and the acting, direction and production are okay.” J.P. of the New York Herald Tribune described the Gill Man as “the target of a mad (MAD, you hear!) scientist who wishes to speed up evolution” and wasn’t much impressed by the goings-on: “Only in the dreary nether world of the sea does the picture come to life.”

New York Times wiseguy A.H. Weiler gave Creature from the Black Lagoon a fairly negative review in 1954 and now he was back to belittle this follow-up, again more interested in trying to be funny than in writing sensibly:

Although the cause of the common cold is still baffling mere medicos, leaders of Universal’s school for advanced science fiction seem to be having no trouble at all. True, they have ignored simple sniffles. But two years ago they dredged up “a creature from the black lagoon” … that proved to be more improbable and funnier than a running nose.… [H]e showed up again yesterday at the Globe as The Creature Walks Among Us. Perhaps it would be best if they tackled the ordinary cold, after all.

Weiler ended the review with “Chances are he’ll be back.” S.A. Desick of the Los Angeles Examiner said that the Creature was “still a serviceable monster as monsters go, but he scares the wits out of the script. The story that is jerry-built around him is a tiresome one of jealousy and mayhem.” In a years-later review, a Castle of Frankenstein scribe wrote, “If you doubt [Jack] Arnold’s contribution to this series, just watch—or try to—the 3rd, non–Arnold Creature epic, The Creature Walks Among Us.”

And then there are these quotable notables:

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I didn’t particularly like [Creature Walks], I thought it was the weakest of the three.—Jack Arnold

If I had known that Creature Walks would be shown on television and been around [after its theatrical run], I wouldn’t have done it … I did the film feeling it was just a job, but I really hadn’t anticipated the possibility of it getting on television—there weren’t too many movies of that type on television at the time, and I thought of it as a picture I’d be able to simply put behind me. I personally thought it was kind of corny.… It was a comedown after This Island Earth and Kiss of Fire, a downer.—Rex Reason

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

The Creature Walks Among Us, I thought, sucked.—Ricou Browning

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The dumbest [Gill Man movie] was The Creature Walks Among Us, which was terrible. Burning his gills off, and putting him in a suit…!—Ben Chapman

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Universal insisted on [two Creature] sequels, both of which I am ashamed of. I wish to disassociate myself with the other two films as much as possible [laughs]! But the studio wanted to mine that thing as much as possible so I blew those two pictures through my nose and didn’t want to hear any more about ’em!—William Alland

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I have a copy of the Creature Legacy Collection [DVDs] and I watched Creature Walks … and I don’t think that came off as well as the first two. I think that they went too far when they tried to humanize him. Nobody wanted to see that happen to him; I thought that this was a degrading thing to do to the magnificent Creature. The first two were kinda somewhat “believable,” the way they disturbed him in his habitat, but by the time they got to the third one, they missed the boat! I was kinda happy I hadn’t done that one.—Ginger Stanley

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

One dissenting voice among the moviemakers: scripter Arthur Ross, who told me, “It turned out to be, surprisingly, not too bad a movie.”

According to “H’wood on New Scientifiction Kick,” a December 9, 1955, Daily Variety article on the resurgence of sci-fi movies after a brief lull, “[Universal] may put a fourth Creature into work.” The prospect of an additional Creature stanza was also mentioned in the Creature Walks pressbook, the article telling readers that if Creature Walks has the same success as its two predecessors, “it’s quite likely that U-I will produce a fourth [Gill Man] feature.”

Early Playdates
By Robert J. Kiss

The American Film Institute lists the general release of The Creature Walks Among Us as April 1956, specifically mentioning an April 26 New York opening. Creature Walks did open in New York City on April 26, but the movie had reached theaters across much of the U.S. prior to this. Even the AFI’s approximate general release date of “April 1956” ought really to be shifted back to “March 1956.”

The official premiere took place at the Joy Theater in New Orleans on the evening of March 6, 1956. The previous two pictures in the series had reportedly “gone over big” at the theater, and a deal to open Creature Walks there had been reached well in advance, with the Joy advertising the forthcoming premiere from February 24 onwards. The movie then played continuously throughout the day as a standalone feature at the theater on March 7 and March 8. This constituted a one-off showing in the state of Louisiana, where the film was otherwise not seen until April. A similar situation existed for the state of Mississippi, where Creature Walks played at a lone theater, the Ritz in Laurel, from March 15 to 17, prior to opening statewide in April.

The movie began playing more widely on March 21, when it opened on a double-bill with The Price of Fear⁵² at ten Los Angeles theaters; by the end of the month, it had opened throughout California. As with the previous two Creature features, it was also seen early in the state of Michigan, for example opening at the State in Benton Harbor, the Lyric in Ludington and the Michigan Theatre in Traverse City on March 25. The movie was furthermore released to theaters throughout Ohio between March 28 and April 1, before then opening across vast swaths of the nation, from Alaska to Texas and from Oregon to Massachusetts, during the first two weeks of April. On April 13 it was also put to limited use as a Friday the 13th midnight show.

In Boxoffice Magazine (January 26, 1957), exhibitor I. Roche of Vernon, Florida’s, Vernon Theatre advised other movie theater impresarios, “If not played too close together, the Creature will pull a fair crowd, mostly colored patrons. Would do well on Friday–Saturday if terms were lowered a mite so it could be double-featured.”

In this instance, the New York opening date must be understood specifically as referring to the film’s opening in New York City; it had reached theaters elsewhere in New York State earlier in the month, for example opening in Binghamton during the first week of April and in Albany during the second week of the month.

As a Standalone Feature,
March to September 1956

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A cool collectible, this Creature Walks pop-up pops up and up to the point where, compared to the guy he’s holding, the Gill Man looks about 15 feet tall!

Within the sample of around 900 movie theaters across the U.S. during this period, 24 percent of all Creature Walks screenings took the form of a standalone presentation supported only by “selected shorts.” This form of presentation was common in two types of location: (i) theaters in small towns where single bills were generally the norm anyway; and (ii) at the majority of theaters within Texas. Revenge of the Creature had likewise received special treatment as a standalone feature in Texas, and if Texas were excluded from the sample of around 900 movie theaters, then the overall tally of standalone screenings of Creature Walks nationwide would fall to 18 percent. Although the “selected shorts” accompanying the feature were seldom named in advertising, the titles of two Universal-International Musical Featurettes, Mambo Madness and Cool and Groovy, do appear with some frequency in newspaper ads.

Regular Co-Feature,
March to September 1956

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Within the sample of around 900 U.S. movie theaters during this period, 45 percent of all Creature Walks screenings were double-billed with The Price of Fear, meaning that this was both the movie’s “regular co-feature” and the single most common way to see the movie during its first run. This double bill was attested nationwide throughout the entire period from March to September 1956.

Other Co-Features,
March to September 1956

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The other co-features are arranged alphabetically below; the month mentioned in each case is the earliest in which I’ve found the pairing attested among the sample of around 900 U.S. movie theaters. Collectively making up 29 percent of the total for first-run screenings of Creature Walks, this was far from an uncommon way to see the movie, in particular at lower-rung small town and neighborhood theaters. Nevertheless, the choice of co-billed feature could vary widely, and even the title that was most commonly paired with Creature Walks on the list below, the Western Backlash, accounted individually for just four percent of screenings nationwide.

Bold signifies a more substantial number of playdates for the double bill in question

April 1956 Backlash (Richard Widmark)

June 1956 Bad Day at Black Rock (Spencer Tracy)

September 1956 The Birds and the Bees (George Gobel)

June 1956 Blackjack Ketchum, Desperado (Howard Duff)

August 1956 The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters

July 1956 Comanche (Dana Andrews)

September 1956 Congo Crossing (Virginia Mayo)

September 1956 Dawn at Socorro (Rory Calhoun)

May 1956 A Day of Fury (Dale Robertson)

June 1956 Day the World Ended (Richard Denning)

September 1956 Fire Maidens from Outer Space (Anthony Dexter)

July 1956 It’s a Dog’s Life (Jeff Richards)

May 1956 Jaguar (Sabu)

June 1956 The Kettles in the Ozarks (Marjorie Main)

August 1956 The Last Command (Sterling Hayden)

June 1956 The Last Hunt (Robert Taylor)

June 1956 Miracle in the Rain (Jane Wyman)

May 1956 The Naked Street (Farley Granger)

June 1956 Northwest Passage (Spencer Tracy)

September 1956 Pardners (Martin and Lewis—and Jeff Morrow)

August 1956 Pete Kelly’s Blues (Jack Webb)

August 1956 Postmark for Danger (Terry Moore)

July 1956 The Rawhide Years (Tony Curtis—and Leigh Snowden in a small part as a riverboat passenger)

June 1956 Rock Around the Clock (Bill Haley)

April 1956 Running Wild (Mamie Van Doren)

September 1956 Scared Stiff (Martin and Lewis)

August 1956 The Searchers (John Wayne)

August 1956 Shack Out on 101 (Terry Moore)

May 1956 Star in the Dust (John Agar)

Domestically, Creature from the Black Lagoon reaped $1,300,000, Revenge $200,000 less than that. Creature Walks (its Italian poster pictured) didn’t even rise to the seven-digit level. Universal, probably figuring that a third sequel would make even less than Creature Walks, gave the Creature his walking papers.

July 1956 The Swan (Grace Kelly)

May 1956 Three Bad Sisters (Marla English)

September 1956 The Treasure of Pancho Villa (Rory Calhoun)

May 1956 Tribute to a Bad Man (James Cagney)

May 1956 The Trouble with Harry (Edmund Gwenn)

August 1956 Tumbleweed (Audie Murphy)

June 1956 The Warriors (Errol Flynn)

June 1956 World Without End (Hugh Marlowe)

Triple Bills, March to September 1956

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The titles are arranged alphabetically below; the month mentioned in each case is the earliest in which I’ve found the triple-bill attested among the sample of around 900 movie theaters across the U.S. These three different triple bills collectively make up just two percent of the total for first-run screenings of The Creature Walks Among Us, and this was evidently a fairly uncommon way of first getting to experience the movie.

August 1956 Backlash (Richard Widmark) and The Kettles in the Ozarks (Marjorie Main)

August 1956 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Jane Russell) and The Rawhide Years (Tony Curtis)

September 1956 Johnny O’Clock (Dick Powell) and Tall Man Riding (Randolph Scott)

Marginalia
By Tom Weaver

• The Creature Walks Among Us was William Alland’s last sci-fi for Universal before he started cutting corners and placing a heavy reliance on stock footage—an understandable reaction to the fact that Columbia’s stock footage-filled creature feature It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) had made a better domestic showing than most or all of his sci-fis, the Creature pictures included. According to an April 19, 1956, Summary of Production Report, Creature Walks had total direct costs of $397,100; a 27.25 percent charge for studio overhead raised its cost $108,210, to a grand total of $505,310. Black Lagoon’s final cost was $613,243 and Revenge $532,477. As Ricou Browning told me, “They spent less money on each Creature picture, so they got worse.”

• The Morgan–Marcia–Grant diving scene includes shots of the Gill Man taken from Black Lagoon. You can tell the old Black Lagoon footage from the new Creature Walks shots (a) by the fact that in the new shots, he has the Revenge of the Creature Tanning Bed Goggle eyes and (b) by how much brighter and clearer the new footage is. Underwater Gill Man shots that looked just terrific in Black Lagoon here look almost unacceptably dark juxtaposed with the crystal-clear, more picturesque Creature Walks footage. As Ricou Browning recounted earlier in this chapter, Wakulla’s waters were very muddy for Black Lagoon and perfectly transparent for Creature Walks.

The Creature Smokes Among Us—and poses for a picture with two unidentified men and producer William Alland, right.

• Part of the U-I sci-fi formula was for every movie to have two male leads forever butting heads out of mistrust or dislike or both: Putnam and the sheriff in It Came from Outer Space, Reed and Williams in Black Lagoon, Exeter and Meacham in This Island Earth and then, after a one-movie break (Revenge of the Creature), Hastings and Deemer in Tarantula. Again in Creature Walks the leads can agree on nothing, Barton arch and roguish and with a crazy gleam in his eyes, and Morgan with the noble brow. But we the viewers don’t know or care what the heck Barton and Morgan are talking about (“We can change the blood texture—build up the red corpuscle count—then the gene structure has to be affected!” “I didn’t know you wanted that kind of an experiment!” and other exchanges of that sort). They go on and on like a couple of magpies, neither ever budges, and Morgan with his too-tight halo and priestly, superior manner becomes almost as off-putting as Barton. Their clashes aren’t part of the entertainment but more like the price we pay to see the Creature a third time. These two colossal bores were the last of Universal’s Squabbling Sci-Fi Leads.

• Blooper! Atop Dr. Borg’s Fishscope screen is a DEPTH IN FEET indicator and, in the scene where Morgan, Marcia and Grant dive, we can watch it go from about 50 feet to about 200 as they descend. But moments later, as Borg examines the image blip representing the Gill Man, the Fishscope is filmed in an even tighter closeup and we can see that the DEPTH IN FEET arrow is back to zero again.

• Creature Walks star Morrow was visited on the set by wife Anna and their young daughter Lissa. Erskine Johnson wrote in his syndicated column that other Creature Walks cast members also brought their kids that day, and at one point—please let this not be true—Morrow suggested to the other mamas and papas, “Maybe we should call ourselves the Parent-Creatures Association.”

• The big difference between the first two Gill Man movies and the third is that there’s really no “Beauty and the Beast” component to Creature Walks, but here’s another dissimilarity: Creature Walks has zero comedy relief. Black Lagoon and Revenge featured Nestor Paiva as the amusing Lucas, and Revenge additionally had Dave Willock as Lou getting in a few comedy licks, Clint Eastwood playing the fool, and some cute stuff with Neal the chimp and Flippy the “Educated” Porpoise. Creature Walks is cheerless from stem to stern.

• James Rawley, who plays Dr. Johnson, comes up in Hollywood Monster: A Walk Down Elm Street with the Man of Your Dreams, the 2009 autobiography of actor Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund. Englund writes that he took as many drama classes as possible during junior high and high school, and adds, “I did well enough that a couple of my teachers told me I qualified to be a teacher’s assistant for credits, including a wonderful high school teacher, the character actor James Rawley, who played the mad scientist in the 1956 creepy cult classic The Creature Walks Among Us. (Considering my future in horror, it was ironic that I became the mad scientist’s assistant. Hey, where’s my hunchback?)” Rawley played Creature Walks’ starring role as the mad scientist? In your dreams, Freddy!

Rawley was the husband of Hawaiian-born Mamo Clark, best remembered as Fletcher Christian’s (Clark Gable) Tahitian bride in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Her handful of additional credits include the Republic serial Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island (1936), The Hurricane (1937) and One Million B.C. (1940). In the latter’s volcanic eruption scene, it’s Clark’s cave girl character who gets steamrollered by flowing lava in an unforgettable shot. Their 45-year marriage ended with her death from cancer in 1986.

• One script draft’s Gill Man–on–fire and Gill Man–burned scene descriptions caught the eye of censor Geoffrey M. Shurlock, who advised Universal, “The action showing the Creature’s entire head enveloped in searing flames, staggering, bumping, etc., seems excessively gruesome, and great care should be exercised in photographing same.” He also asked that the moviemakers “[k]indly avoid excessive gruesomeness when photographing the Creature’s ‘face burned almost black from fire.’”

• In an early script draft, Arthur Ross described a post-fire Creature wardrobe of tight, long-sleeved, high-neck sweatshirt and something like dungarees. In a different draft the writer called for a sweatshirt with tight waist, neck and arms plus the sort of diving pants worn by underwater demolition men.

• Ricou Browning got no on-screen credit for the three Gill Man movies, but he did get publicity through them, including a widely published syndicated article by James Bacon. The August 1955 piece is highly complimentary, calling Ricou “undoubtedly one of the world’s best underwater swimmers” and crediting the series’ success to the character he played:

The casts all have been different in the three pictures, a fact which convinces the studio that the creature himself is the box office attraction. The first two in the series were made for around $700,000 and each grossed four millions around the world. This town is peopled with Oscar winners who would like to have that kind of box office return.

• The Boxoffice magazine column “The Exhibitor Has His Say” often makes for fun reading. On the subject of Creature Walks, D.W. Trisko of the Runge Theatre in Runge, Texas, said that the Gill Man movie did draw patrons “despite the fact U-I pulled it on us about a month previous and ruined the main draw, as the Mexican trade had mostly left by the time we got it.” Paul Ricketts of the Star Drive-In in Ness City, Kansas, griped, “Hope this is the last of the Creature series. They have just about run out of material.”

• Creature Walks director Sherwood assistant-directed at Universal for about eight years before advancing up the ladder, and his Creature Walks d.p. Maury Gertsman (1907–99) traveled a quite-similar path: For perhaps eight years he was a Universal camera operator in the run-up to becoming a full-fledged cinematographer. At the hind end of the 1940s horror cycle, he shot The Jungle Captive (1945), House of Horrors, The Brute Man (both 1946) et al., and then when U-I came along and the joint got an infusion of class, he found himself lensing much more substantial pictures, including their huge 1955 hit To Hell and Back. (With domestic rentals of $6,000,000, it was Universal’s only moneymaker of that magnitude that year.) After Universal, Gertsman shot other horror pictures—How to Make a Monster (1958), Invisible Invaders and The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959)—and a mountain of Lucille Ball TV episodes.

By the time Creature Walks got to Australian audiences, censors had deleted the shot of the monster throwing Barton off the porch and also had reduced the number of closeups of the burned Creature’s head and face. In this photograph, makeup men apply a mix of black paint and charcoal to the Gill Man (Chuck Roberson) to give him that burned look.

• The Creature’s only two victims in Creature Walks are the mountain lion and Barton, both lifted overhead and then fatally slung to the ground. Apparently screenwriter Ross thought this was about the only way the monster could kill: In one of his Black Lagoon drafts, two of the Gill Man’s three victims are picked up and slammed onto the boat deck with crushing force.

• The Creature Walks trailer editor wanted to include a monster-and-the-girl moment, but without one in the movie, he had to “manufacture” it: In the trailer, a yacht salon two-shot of Marcia on the couch and the Creature standing over her is followed by a closeup of the Creature, who then quickly bends down and disappears off camera, creating the impression he’s excitedly reaching for her. But the latter is actually a shot of the Creature inside the ranch house, reaching down to flip a table.

• Domestically, Creature Walks didn’t crack the $1,000,000 mark as the first two Gill Man movies had done: On Variety’s beginning-of-1957 list of the “Top Money Films” of 1956, Guys and Dolls and The King and I led the pack with $9,000,000 and $8,500,000 respectively and, a looong ways down, even past The Lieutenant Wore Skirts with Tom Ewell and The Birds and the Bees with George Gobel, we finally get to the year’s top sci-fi, MGM’s Forbidden Planet, with a domestic take of $1,600,000. It was distantly followed by Sam Katzman’s Earth vs. the Flying Saucers with $1,250,000, Allied Artists’ Invasion of the Body Snatchers with $1,200,000 and Universal’s Tarantula, actually a late 1955 release, with $1,100,000.

Universal had 16 movies on the 109-movie list, the biggest being the World War II saga Away All Boats, the soaper All That Heaven Allows and the biographical The Benny Goodman Story. Other Universals higher on Variety’s list than Tarantula: Backlash, Never Say Goodbye, Pillars of the Sky, Walk the Proud Land, The Second Greatest Sex, The Spoilers and The Toy Tiger. Even entries in the studio’s long-in-the-tooth Ma and Pa Kettle and Talking Mule series, The Kettles in the Ozarks and Francis in the Haunted House, did better “wicket business” than Universal’s sci-fi flicks of ’56. If Creature Walks had performed as well as (say) The Kettles in the Ozarks, perhaps there would have been a fourth Creature installment. But it didn’t, and Universal dropped the curtain on the Gill Man.

• In “Bilko’s Vampire,” an October 1958 episode of the CBS sitcom The Phil Silvers Show, we learn that one of Sgt. Bilko’s (Silvers) buddies, Sgt. Rupert Ritzik (Joe E. Ross), is a horror movie addict who religiously watches the oldies on TV’s nightly Shriek Theater (a takeoff on Shock Theater). The crazy situation escalates to the point where Bilko travels to Hollywood with Rupert, hoping to pass him off as a real vampire and make him filmdom’s next Dracula! Name-dropped in the episode are Bela Lugosi and The Mummy’s Hand, but funnier for Gill Man fans is a scene set in Rupert’s home, where he refers to his nagging wife (sulking in an adjoining bedroom) as the Creature from the Other Room. And when Bilko and Rupert invade the Hollywood producers’ office, look on the wall for framed photos of Don Megowan in Creature Walks!

• The Castle Films editor who whittled Creature Walks down to one-tenth of its original running time dispensed with Marcia almost entirely. The only time she’s seen is in background (for about two seconds) in a veranda shot of Morgan watching the Gill Man stomping away from the toppled Barton Ranch fence.

• An episode of TV’s The Outer Limits features a scientist who, like Dr. Barton, seeks to put evolution on the fast track: Set in a Welsh coal mining town, “The Sixth Finger” (1963) stars Edward Mulhare as a professor whose lab equipment can transform a modern man into a “man of the future,” a man Mulhare expects will rise above the animal passions that lead to violence. Miner David McCallum agrees to sit in Mulhare’s “isolation booth”–like chamber and be sent soaring into our biological future; like Barton, Mulhare’s scientist messes with the genes to accelerate the mechanism of evolution. As the episode proceeds, McCallum hurtles through more evolutionary changes and looks more frighteningly weird each time we see him, and there’s anticipatory excitement as we wonder how he’ll look next. After the Creature’s operation in Creature Walks, he identically continues to evolve on his own, according to Barton (“His features, his skin—they’re more like a human’s every day!”), but to me he looks the same when his bandages are removed on the yacht as he does walking toward the ocean at the fadeout.

• The Creature was seen in Technicolor in Universal’s 1981 telemovie The Munsters’ Revenge. The kooky plot involved crooks (including Sid Caesar as the excitable Dr. Diablo) whose wax museum Chamber of Horrors figures (Herman Munster, Grandpa, the Gill Man, a werewolf, etc.) are actually robots that are sent out to commit crimes. The police think the real Herman and Grandpa are involved, and hilarity ensues (not). Amidst all the other automatons, the Gill Man Robot does a wind-up toy-like walk from place to place in a few scenes.

• This book isn’t going to attempt to cover all the movies that ripped off the Gill Man story-wise or that feature Gill Man–like monsters—but one of the exceptions we’ll make is writer-producer-director Greg Nicotero’s The United Monster Talent Agency (2010), an eight-minute B&W spoof that depicts, newsreel-style, activity at a Hollywood firm that provides actual monsters to moviemakers. Just some of the featured creatures are Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Thing, the Invisible Man, the Hideous Sun Demon, the Jaws shark and, natch, the Gill Man.

Uncredited in the cast of The United Monster Talent Agency is one of this book’s staunchest contributors David J. Schow, who plays the cameraman filming the climactic grotto scene from Creature from the Black Lagoon. Inside the Gill Man costume is special effects makeup artist Carey Jones. The scene was shot inside the KNB EFX Group workshop on March 5, 2010 (photograph by Howard Berger).

United Monster was something that special effects makeup artist Nicotero wanted to make for a long time. He told me,

We prepped it in five weeks and shot the entire short over a three-day period, two days at KNB [his special effects studio] and one day on location. For me it was one of the most freeing experiences I had ever had … not only the chance to recreate every one of my favorite creatures, but then to [also include] movies I loved in the ’70s like Jaws and Dawn of the Dead. This was probably the last project at KNB where the entire shop had a hand in the show, building, designing or playing various parts. Carey Jones, our shop supervisor, had done an amazing job in suit work on Predators [2010] and I really wanted him to play the Creature. David Schow, who plays the cameraman in that scene, said to me, “This is the closest to actually being able to go back in time and stand on set watching them shoot Creature from the Black Lagoon.” That was the biggest compliment I ever got.

• Several of the Gill Man series’ principals had in their futures another Creature-related or Creature-like credit, some actually made, some not:

  • Jack Kevan produced, co-wrote and created the creature costume for 1959’s The Monster of Piedras Blancas (see Chapter 5, “Aquatic Kith and Kin”).

• Ricou Browning again donned an underwater monster suit in a 1965 episode of TV’s Flipper.⁵³

• In 1971, Harry Essex wrote and directed the junky Black Lagoon ripoff Octaman.

• Director Jack Arnold was lined up to direct a 1980s remake of Black Lagoon (see Chapter 8).

• And in the 1980s, producer William Alland cooked up the idea for a sequel, but never got past the writing stage. He told me,

After I heard that [Universal] had talked to Jack Arnold about doing a remake, I said to myself, “Jesus Christ, you can’t do that one over again. What could you do?” I came up with the idea that they should do a sequel instead of a remake. Since the Creature that I had originally envisioned was so romantic, I thought he should have a family—a mate, and one or two little ones. In my story, they’re all removed from the Black Lagoon and secretly transported to a lake on the big estate of a very wealthy family in the United States. They can communicate with the family, and a whole relationship develops. Unfortunately, some baddies do find out about ’em and try to catch ’em—they capture one or both of the children, and the mother and the father go after them and kill the baddies. Now they’re wanted.

I wrote it all out, but I never pursued it or talked to anybody about it. You’re the first person I’ve ever brought it up to. I’m not even sure that this idea would have been appreciated, but I thought they could do something very charming with it. I could visualize the mother, the father and the two little ones swimming around together [laughs].

• Clint Eastwood and Henry Mancini were able to look back on their Creature Days as stepping stones to super-stardom in their respective fields, and Ricou Browning didn’t do so bad either: In a long career that started in a Black Lagoon, he has second-unit-directed, directed-directed, written, produced and done plenty more on movie sets wet or dry. Résumé highlights include supervising the underwater photography of an ocean of Sea Hunt episodes, second-unit-directing the underwater scenes in the James Bond adventures Thunderball (1965) and Never Say Never Again (1983), creating the character of Flipper (the movie-TV dolphin) and serving as vice-president, then president of Ivan Tors Studios. After directing and co-writing (with his brother-in-law Jack Cowden) the Flipper-like feature film Salty (1973), about some kids and their friendly sea lion, he began to find out how inescapable the Gill Man had become. As Cowden told an interviewer in 1983,

When we created Salty, [Ricou and I] went to promote the film everywhere. We went 3300 miles … and along the way we’d stop at elementary schools and give the kids a free show with the sea lion. But it would startle us every time we told them Ricou had been the Creature from the Black Lagoon. These kids would go crazy. They’d all seen it on television. They loved it.

Browning has also regularly “re-connected” with other Black Lagoon people and places on later projects. To name just a few, he did the underwater sequences for writer Richard Carlson’s Island of the Lost (1967) and director Jack Arnold’s Hello Down There (1969), returned to Wakulla Springs as a second unit director on Joe Panther (1976) and directed John Agar in the way-out action-exploitation flick Mr. No Legs (1979). “Mr. No Legs was a fun show to work on,” he told me. “We shot it in 16mm and they then blew it up to 35mm. The actors were great to work with. The movie was shot for $80,000. We ran out of money before it was finished so we just made the car chase longer. They still owe me 3000 bucks.”

Decades after donning Gill Man garb and haunting Wakulla and Silver Springs, Ricou Browning now resides in retirement some 400 miles downstate in Southwest Ranches, on the eastern edge of the Everglades—where, in Creature Walks, the Gill Man had also retired. Browning is a true son of Florida, a lifelong resident of the state (courtesy Cortlandt “The Witch’s Dungeon” Hull).

As of 2013, Browning is married for the second time (the first marriage ended in divorce) and the father of four; he has 11 grandkids (including one who passed away) and three great-grandkids. He lives a leather briefcase’s throw away from Alligator Alley.

• Wakulla Springs, still hidden in thousands of acres of Spanish moss-draped Florida woodlands, is now protected by Florida law, and not because Black Lagoon and Creature Walks were partly shot there … but we can tell ourselves that might be part of the reason. The state purchased the area in October 1985 and it’s now called the Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park. Gill Maniacs interested in visiting the spot Where It All Began can even stay at the Wakulla Springs Lodge, just as the moviemakers did in 1953 (Black Lagoon) and perhaps also in 1955 (Creature Walks). The lodge is on the National Register of Historic Places and is designated as a National Natural Landmark … again, not cuzza the Creature but … maybe. At Wakulla, according to the lodge’s website, you’ll be “surrounded by nature, including canopies of oak, hickory and beech trees, the natural spring and Florida wildlife.” Like the unspoiled land around it, the lodge too is just as it was in the 1950s, and even the 1940s and ’30s; the only changes have been for comfort and safety. There have never been televisions in the guest rooms. Riverboat and glass bottom boat tours, 365 days a year weather permitting, offer visitors a chance to see alligators, wading birds, manatees and other creatures acclimated to the boats’ presence. Athletic Creature fans (if there are such things) can swim and snorkel in the spring.

Other Script-to-Screen Changes

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• When Grant and the scientists arrive by dinghy at the fishing village, the script calls for the houses we see to be whitewashed and clean—all except Morteno’s, which is run-down and dirty, presumably to show that Morteno has been unemployed and broke since his gory Creature encounter.

• In the final screenplay, the Creature is still in rough shape after the tracheotomy, so an adrenalin injection is prepared and the hypodermic needle handed to Morgan. Aware of the need for speed, Barton takes the hypo from Morgan, replacing the short needle with a very long one as he exclaims that there’s “no time for arterial injection” and shoots its contents directly into the bandaged Creature’s heart. On August 31, the third day of first unit production, this injection scene was shot, but then not used in the movie.

• Regarding the Gill Man’s lungs: The stage was set for this plot development two movies earlier, in the Black Lagoon scene where Reed uses the Rita bunkroom as a darkroom. As the Gill Man is scientifically discussed for the first time ever, Kay reminds her colleagues of the existence of the Kamongo, an air-breathing fish from the Devonian age “which still exists today, right here in the Amazon.” A Creature Walks scene in which one of the scientists mentions the Kamongo-Creature parallels (a fish with lungs, Devonian ancestry, Amazon stomping grounds) might have been kinda neat.

• In one early draft, Arthur Ross thusly describes the Creature face that the scientists see when they remove the bandages: “[It] is similar to the contours of the first Gill Man head in makeup dept. High cheek bones, almost bridgeless nose—a long, thin-lined mouth—deeper, almost breeding eyes. The skin is swarthy.”

This is the final screenplay’s description of the Creature’s new face:

It is like a death mask. No longer scaled—but swarthy in texture. Eyes deep set, unblinking over a forehead without eyebrows…. High, tartar-like cheekbones. Sunken cheeks. A thin line of mouth almost lipless. A bridgeless nose. Here is a face, stony and fierce—but immobile. But a near-human face—not a creature. Here is skin—however swarthy in color—but smooth and clearly defined.

Critiquing the Creature Walks laserdisc for Films in Review, Roy Frumkes wrote that the post-surgery Creature “bears more than a passing resemblance to Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.”

• In the final screenplay’s description of the action-filled finale, Barton has just dropped Grant’s body to the ground in the stockade when the Creature assumes a half-crouched position, roaring. Barton fires his gun at him. The Creature, again roaring, lunges at him. Barton runs out, slamming the gate and throwing the bolt, but loses his balance, falls and drops his gun. As he rushes to the upper porch, he’s still got “frame the Creature for murder” on his mind: When Morgan appears, Barton indicates the Gill Man and yells, “Shoot him! He killed Grant! Kill him!”

The death of Barton changed from draft to draft:

• In one version of The Creature of Man, the Creature hides in the swimming pool and, when an unsuspecting Barton passes, pulls him in and kills him.

• In another version, the Creature wrecks the Barton house room by room as Barton hides on the roof. But the monster, hearing Barton’s footsteps overhead, smashes his way through the beams and shingles and gets up onto the roof. Barton climbs down and leaps into the pool, thinking the Creature won’t follow. He’s wrong: The Creature walks unafraid into the water, kills Barton and lets the body float to the surface.

• Yet another draft has the Creature hearing Barton on the roof, pulling down a beam to create an aperture, and joining him on the housetop. The monster traps Barton, lifts him overhead and throws him to the ground below.

• The Creature of Man concluded with the work-shy lifeguard content to watch the Creature vanish into the sea. A July 1955 draft of the script is instead set at a wharf at sunrise, as two small children exit a house carrying toys. Confronted by the Creature, they gasp in surprise. The Creature, his arm bleeding from one of Barton’s bullets, merely looks at them, and then peers out at the water. The children, too frightened to move, are puzzled by his human-but-not-quite look. The Creature walks to the end of the pier and then pauses, “rigid, silhouetted against the breaking day.” The children finally run back into their house, and a moment later their young fisherman father comes out carrying a grappling hook. When he looks toward the pier, we (the audience) see what he sees: There’s no one in sight. Next, in a down-angle shot from the pier, we see big, heavy ripples indicating that something has just pierced the surface of the water from above. “The camera holds on the surface as the ripples spread and fade and the water becomes almost still….”

The Music of The Creature Walks Among Us
By David Schecter

The Music Wafts Among Us

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As with its two predecessors, the final film of the Gillogy also relied on a lot on music to weave its tale, with over 51 minutes of underscore in The Creature Walks Among Us. With 66 percent of the movie’s running time containing music, that’s an even higher percentage than the first Creature picture, which is surprising considering much less action takes place underwater in this sequel, where music filled a prominent role in the two earlier films. In the case of this series entry, the third time was the charm, because unlike Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature which both re-used a lot of music written for earlier films, a whopping 90 percent of the music in Creature Walks was composed specifically for the picture. Only 7 of the film’s 35 cues came from pre-existing sources, and in all but a single instance they derived from one of the earlier Gill Man movies.

More important than the amount of music in a film is the quality of it, and for The Creature Walks Among Us, the team of Henry Mancini, Irving Gertz and Heinz Roemheld, with minor assistance from Hans J. Salter, provided stellar background music as good as any science fiction score of the era. The movie offered Mancini a rare opportunity to compose a considerable amount of music for one film, and he came up with some of his best writing up to this point in his career. His 32 minutes of music includes 29 being specifically written for Creature Walks. As usual, the assemblage of composers meant that Joseph Gershenson’s name was the only music credit in the picture. Gershenson conducted the score on January 20, 1956, in a 71⁄2-hour session that added a tuba to the studio’s usual orchestral make-up, an instrumental addition that also occurred in the first two Creature films and was used to provide more power to the brass. As was usual for Universal (and which occurred in all three Gill Man movies), there were more cellos (four) than violas (two), which added some extra muscle to the small string section.

Herman Stein, who was involved in so many of Universal’s sci-fi–horror movies of the 1950s, got a short break from scoring a monster movie, with his only contributions to Creature Walks being a tracked excerpt from Black Lagoon’s “That Hand Again” and a shortened version of Revenge’s “Main Title.” This abridged “Main Title” begins the second sequel, and it’s a shame that a totally fresh opening musical statement wasn’t offered, seeing as the film contained so much new underscore and offered a completely different take on the Creature’s story. Universal apparently wanted everyone to know from the start that even though the Gill Man would be strolling around in clothes rather than swimming in his lagoon, this was still a Creature film. The movie’s opening music was not the most brilliantly conceived in cinematic history. Not only was Stein’s “Main Title” performed at what sounds like a rushed tempo, but as the credits end, a Roemheld cue (also named “Main Title”) covers the rapid action when Marcia and Dr. Barton drive to the boat. This music offers an odd reprise of part of Stein’s “Main Title” that already played 35 seconds earlier.

Conductor’s score of “Main Title” from The Creature Walks Among Us, by Herman Stein and Heinz Roemheld (©1956 Gilead Music Co./USI A Music Publishing).

This was Roemheld’s first of four 1950s monster movies, and his horror scoring pedigree went all the way back to the 1930s with The Invisible Man (1933), The Black Cat (1934) and Dracula’s Daughter (1936). Heinz Eric Roemheld (pronounced Rame held) was born on May 1, 1901, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He started playing piano at age four, soloed on piano at the Majestic Vaudeville Theater House when he was 12, and graduated from the Wisconsin College of Music at 19. He went to Berlin to study music in 1921, and the following year he debuted as guest pianist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1925, while performing on piano and conducting the orchestra for the silent The Phantom of the Opera, he was noticed by the head of Universal Pictures, Carl Laemmle, a member of the audience. Laemmle hired Roemheld to manage Universal’s theaters in Washington, D.C., and later in Berlin.

When the rise of Nazism drove Roemheld back to the States, he joined Universal as a composer and music director; he later worked for Paramount and Warner Brothers, and then became a freelancer in the mid–1940s. He won the Academy Award for Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and in 1952 he wrote the standard “Ruby” for Ruby Gentry. He retired in 1964 to focus on classical compositions, frequently conducting them with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. His concert works include piano preludes, sonatinas and string quartets. Roemheld composed, arranged or conducted music for more than 400 films, a few of which are The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Sh! The Octopus (1937), You Can’t Get Away with Murder (1939), Gentleman Jim (1942), Shine on Harvest Moon, Janie (1944), It Had to Be You (1947), The Lady from Shanghai, The Fuller Brush Man (1948), The Mole People (1956), The Land Unknown and The Monster That Challenged the World (1957). He passed away on February 11, 1985.

Despite the large amount of music in The Creature Walks Among Us, there’s a total absence of underscore for over 5 minutes after the “Main Title,” a prominent gap in a horror film of this type, especially when you’re trying to build the proper atmosphere for the story. Salter only contributed one brief cue to the picture, the 1:25-long “The Small House,” heard when the motorboat heads to the home of the injured Morteno. Serving primarily as travelogue music, it is undeniably well-written, but why Salter wasn’t allowed to spend the day in bed rather than having to write this single cue is a mystery. Perhaps he had to be removed from some other picture at the same time so he wouldn’t receive a screen credit on that assignment? “The Small House” got some extra mileage when it was tracked into Universal’s 1958 short Down the Magdalena.

Heinz Roemheld (courtesy Heinz Roemheld family).

Only Mancini-composed music is heard between 8:50 and 31:41 of Creature Walks, and if you have enough free time to just close your eyes and focus on the 15:27 of music he contributed to this section, you’ll understand what a major contribution he made to the movie. “Into the Deep, Part 1” begins delicately on vibraphone, harp, marimba and alto flute, with bass clarinet descending in anticipation of the divers going underwater. This dazzling composition features endless harp glissandi, vivid runs on flutes and oboe, and glittering celesta that provides beautiful aural accompaniment to the underwater sequence. When the movie occasionally cuts back to the boat’s Fishscope set-up, vibraphone and clarinet paint a more anticipatory tone befitting the search for the Gill Man.

“Into the Deep, Part 1” also plays during a shark sequence near the beginning of William Castle’s 1966 thriller Let’s Kill Uncle. This movie also uses some of Stein’s Creature theme during another shark scene near the end of the picture, although it’s impossible to guess what cue it came from due to the excerpt’s brevity. Let’s Kill Uncle contains one of Universal’s more bizarre scores, being entirely patched together from 84 tracked cues courtesy of Gertz, Lava, Mancini, Roemheld, Salter, Skinner, Stein, Stanley Wilson and even a bit of Hugo Friedhofer’s music from This Earth Is Mine (1959).⁵⁴

Mancini’s “Into the Deep, Part 2” is very different in flavor from the first part of the cue, the composition beginning with the Creature theme as the Gill Man reaches out for the divers. Ominous piano and alternating pizzicato (plucked) and arco (bowed) strings provide the jagged rhythm while muted trumpets raise the danger level. Just before the divers decide to descend further, strings and clarinet play while French horns and trombones slowly but insistently augment the Creature’s pursuit. Mancini’s marvelous writing in this sequence would be adapted and re-used by the composer near the climax of The Monolith Monsters, heard when the dam is being prepared with dynamite.

“Stalking the Creature, Part 3” combines the tones of Mancini’s two previous parts of the cue, starting when the Creature’s image vanishes from the sonar screen. Quick woodwind phrases telegraph the possibility that something might be wrong, but Mancini deliberately misleads us about what’s happening when upward and downward flute runs play amidst sweeping strings to augment Marcia’s underwater ballet. After a repeat of some of the pursuit music used in the previous cue, Marcia swims in a dreamlike state thanks to Mancini’s expressive string and harp writing. Exceedingly beautiful French horn and cello alerts us to the danger that Marcia is experiencing raptures of the deep. While she continues swimming in a trance, the orchestra builds in intensity as Morgan approaches her.

“Stalking the Creature, Part 4” should be familiar to those who own the 1959 Dick Jacobs album “Themes from Horror Movies” (reissued as “Themes from Classic Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films”), although that lethargic version seems to be missing 90 percent of the strings, as well as many other important instruments that brought this superb cue to life in the picture. Despite these omissions, it comes across as one of the better renditions on that album, probably because it was a slow piece to begin with and it didn’t require the full orchestra that the recording budget couldn’t afford. In Creature Walks, the cue begins when Morgan drops his harpoon, Mancini providing downward notes to accentuate this action. As the doctor swims toward the surface carrying Marcia’s motionless body, woodwind runs, with punctuations from harp and vibraphone, manage to create an ambiguous mood that perfectly fits the scene, not telegraphing whether or not she’s still alive. When Marcia regains consciousness, clarinets and bassoon continue slowly, preventing the mood from becoming too joyous.

Creature Walks’ lengthy underwater ballet offers a welcome variation on the swimming sequences in the two prior Gill Man movies. It not only presents a different take on a beautiful woman in aquatic danger, but it also offers something original from a musical standpoint instead of yet again dredging up Herman Stein’s “Kay and the Monster” cues, most of which would have been totally inappropriate for this unique sequence. Although Mancini’s Creature Walks cues include a few minor adaptations of some of Stein’s Creature material, they are almost entirely in the character of Mancini’s personal style. His Creature themes manage to offer more variability than what the composers were permitted to use in the first Gill Man picture, with Mancini’s approach being more in keeping with the leeway William Lava had when he tackled the theme in Revenge of the Creature.

Mancini’s “Poor Rich Wife,” heard during a conversation between Morgan and Marcia, offers a glimpse at the lighter, jazz-based style many people associate with the composer, primarily because Mancini’s many record album releases concentrated on this particular area of his prodigious output. His quiet, understated “Who’s Stalking Who, Part 1” is heard when the Vagabondia III is in nighttime pursuit of the Creature. Mancini wisely stays away from the dialogue-heavy sections, instead using his music for dramatic punctuation during the non-talking sequences, with piano, harp and clarinet featured throughout. After the yacht reaches the end of the line and the scientists trail the Gill Man via dinghy, “Who’s Stalking Who, Part 2” contains a quieter version of Mancini’s pursuit theme, more suitable for this smaller marine vehicle. Mancini’s Creature Walks music is replete with compositional devices and instrumental voicings he would use in future Universal films, as well as during his more renowned years when his name was among the most recognized in a movie’s credits.

Henry Mancini backstage at the Hollywood Bowl, 1991 (courtesy Monstrous Movie Music).

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 16, 1924, and raised in West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, Mancini studied at New York’s Juilliard School of Music. After World War II, he was hired as a pianist-arranger for Tex Beneke’s Glenn Miller Orchestra, and he studied in Hollywood with Ernst Krenek and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Mancini wrote music for clubs and radio shows, including work for Bob Crosby, Buddy Rich and David Rose. In 1952 he was hired by Universal-International, and for the next seven years he wrote at least partial scores for over 100 of the studio’s films, among them The Golden Blade, Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), Border River, Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), So This Is Paris (1955), Man Afraid, The Tattered Dress (1957), Touch of Evil, Damn Citizen, Flood Tide (1958) and The Great Impostor (1961). Mancini then went on to compose a long line of classic film scores, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Experiment in Terror, Hatari! (1962) and The Pink Panther (1963), and he wrote for the popular television series Newhart, Peter Gunn and Remington Steele. Just a few of his famous songs are “Days of Wine and Roses,” “Dear Heart” and “Moon River.” Mancini won many Grammy Awards and Academy Awards, and released numerous popular records. He wrote a book on orchestration entitled Sounds and Scores and an autobiography, Did They Mention the Music?, in which he shares some of his memories of Universal. He was a much-loved member of the Hollywood community, and was often eager to help and give his time to others. He passed away on June 14, 1994, while still actively composing excellent film music and recording some of it for posterity.

Irving Gertz wrote just under 12 minutes of music for The Creature Walks Among Us, his first cue being “To Catch a Creature, Part 1.” The piece segues directly from Mancini’s previous piece, beginning when the lighted dinghy approaches. Strings, woodwinds and brass are colored by vibraphone and harp, with the music building and receding depending upon the dictates of the sequence. One almost forgets the trip starts out so uneventfully, as the wealth of ominous and atmospheric touches adds drama where almost none is occurring. Gertz uses a traveling motif throughout this cue to accentuate the journey, and he re-used parts of this composition in the following year’s The Monolith Monsters. The passage is heard just under five minutes into that rocky horror picture, right before a dissolve to a long shot of the town of San Angelo. The same music is used again in Monolith Monsters when Dave (Grant Williams) drives to the Simpsons’ destroyed house, and once more when Dave and Prof. Flanders (Trevor Bardette) drive up Old San Angelo Road during the day to investigate the meteorite site. This last cue, named “Meteor Secrets,” contains a brassy variation of the three-note Creature theme that’s heard when their car stops, this being a holdover from the music Gertz originally wrote for Creature Walks.

As one might surmise, Gertz’s “To Catch a Creature, Part 2” in Creature Walks follows “To Catch a Creature, Part 1.” It begins during a quick dissolve on the boat, building slowly until the Creature bursts from the water. One notable section occurs when the men realize that the Gill Man is coming right at them, with this particular material also being re-used by Gertz in The Monolith Monsters. It’s heard during the mineral movie’s “Prologue” when narrator Paul Frees describes the meteorite bombardment of the Earth by stating, “In every moment of every day they come….” The cue’s origin explains why the Creature theme occurs three times as the meteorite explodes, although why the musical references to the Gill Man weren’t deleted when the cue was rewritten for Monolith Monsters should probably be chalked up either to laziness or a rapidly approaching deadline.

Unfortunately, Gertz’s outstanding “To Catch a Creature, Part 2” was butchered in Creature Walks, with the final 1:10 not being used in the movie. After the Creature ejects the men from the boat, near-silence greets this incredible event, resulting in the almost immediate and total dissipation of the suspense that was building during the entire sequence. This is especially notable when the men stand in the water and stare at the Gill Man, where the uncomfortable silence makes it almost seem like they’re sharing a steam bath.

Irving Gertz at home (courtesy Monstrous Movie Music).

Freelancer Gertz had already done much work for Columbia and independent production companies before he was called upon by Joseph Gershenson whenever Gertz’s unique talents were required at Universal. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, on May 19, 1915, he studied with Wassili Leps at the Providence College of Music, and upon arriving in California before World War II, he began work in Columbia’s music department. After serving in the war in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, he began composing for films for Columbia, during which time he studied with both Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Ernst Toch. Gertz served as composer and music director for many independent features during the 1940s and 1950s, with some of his work at Universal being for Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, Cult of the Cobra, Smoke Signal, To Hell and Back (1955), Four Girls in Town, The Deadly Mantis, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Istanbul (1957), Wild Heritage (1958), Hell Bent for Leather (1960), Bullet for a Badman, He Rides Tall (1964) and Fluffy (1965). In 1960 he was hired by 20th Century–Fox, where he worked as a composer and music director for over 12 years. A few of his other pictures include Last of the Redmen (1947), Jungle Goddess (1948), The Bandits of Corsica (1953), Overland Pacific (1954), The First Traveling Saleslady (1956), Hell on Devil’s Island (1957), The Alligator People (1959) and The Wizard of Baghdad (1960), and some of his TV work was done for Daniel Boone, The Invaders, Land of the Giants, Peyton Place and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. After his film career ended, he concentrated on writing concert works. He was a sweet, gentle, funny and erudite man, and his contributions to the art of film scoring were exceptional. He passed away in Los Angeles on November 14, 2008, at the age of 93.

In the movie, Morgan (Rex Reason) listens as Marcia (Leigh Snowden) idly strums a guitar. In the early treatment The Creature of Man, these two put  on a performance (he playing a hushed, muted Spanish guitar, she singing) for the benefit of the Creature, who turns toward them, watching and listening: “No movement but that—a quiet, almost stealthy movement. All the more oblique because the sadness of it is as much the loneliness of the woman singing it as the ‘being’ it is directed to.”

When “Marcia Noodles” on the piano aboard the Vagabondia III, she isn’t really “noodling,” she’s making believe she’s playing a solo piano composition that had been written by Mancini. And when she fiddles with her guitar later in the film, this is another Mancini piece entitled “Luring the Creature.” It’s hoped that these revelations don’t dishearten Leigh Snowden fans into thinking that the lovely actress wasn’t talented, because in real life she sang and played piano. She was also an excellent judge of musical talent, as she married Dick Contino the same year The Creature Walks Among Us was released. Contino was one of the most famous accordion players of his generation, as well as a singer, a session player on many film scores and an occasional actor, as in Daddy-O (1958) and The Beat Generation (1959).

The piano solo Marcia is supposedly playing was recorded in less than a half-hour after the regular January 20, 1956, recording session for the orchestra ended, with about $12 in extra pocket change going to Universal’s contract pianist Lyman Gandee. Gandee was known as a practical joker when he worked in Kay Kyser’s band, and he can be seen on piano in the 1940 musical-horror-comedy You’ll Find Out. Marcia’s guitar solo was recorded in a three-hour session on January 18, 1956, two days before the orchestra’s recording session. The guitarist was Hilmer J. “Tiny” Timbrell, who received $48.21 for his work, which was part of the film’s nearly $23,000 music budget. A Canadian-born musician who appeared as a band member in a number of late 1940s and early 1950s movies, Timbrell was a much-requested Hollywood musician, and in addition to doing a lot of film work, he played on recording sessions for Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Ricky Nelson and Marty Robbins. Some of his most-listened-to performances were his rhythm guitar accompaniment for Elvis Presley during the Loving You soundtrack sessions, and he also worked on other Elvis sessions, including the films G. I. Blues (1960), Blue Hawaii (1961), Kid Galahad (1962), Viva Las Vegas (1964) and Easy Come, Easy Go (1967).

Heinz Roemheld’s second Creature Walks cue is “Mutation Accomplished.” The composer wrote a total of 4:31 of music for the picture, spread over four pieces, with this cue beginning when the bandaged Creature breaks free of his operating table straps. Creepy Novachord, tremolo strings and low instruments carry the portentous composition until it ends with some energetic music that nicely augments shots of the boat moving through the water.

Mancini’s moody and deliberate “The Thing Awakens” is an excellent piece heard when the Creature’s bandages are removed, highlighted by low strings, subtle piano and woodwinds. The moment that the Gill Man’s head is viewed, a spooky rendition of the Creature theme plays on Novachord, and glissandoing harp accentuates his altered appearance. Tinkling piano effects, harp, vibraphone and Novachord add to the eerie situation as the Creature surveys his onlookers in this memorable musical sequence.

An unexpected omission of music occurs during the scientists’ drinking party following the operation. This was a prime opportunity for Universal to include a source music cue (published by Universal’s Northern Music Corporation) in the background, but for some reason the scene was allowed to play without music. While such a use of music wouldn’t have helped or hurt the sequence, it’s still surprising that none was used.

In “Perfect Wife?” Mancini offers a style that is quite different from what’s already been heard in the movie. It’s more conventional, in line with the type of music he would provide for some of his later, glossier films, but it fits the mood of this scene very well. After an inebriated Dr. Barton tries to romance an unwilling Marcia, she wakes up to the strains of a lovely solo piano melody, which sex-crazed Jed Grant can obviously also hear, as he promptly seeks her out. Had somebody put lyrics to this beautiful piece of music, it might have been a hit, and as the melody was used a few times in Creature Walks, it’s possible that someone was thinking along those lines at one time.⁵⁵

According to Creature Walks’ one-minute radio spot, the movie’s scientists “dare the dangerous experiment that could create a new being … even though it would make the Creature more fearsome with a human mind … more powerful with human emotions!”

After a fight between Marcia and Jed disturbs the Gill Man and he dives into the water, some short original Mancini compositions (all titled “Something Fishy”) connect tracked Black Lagoon cues, including Stein’s “That Hand Again,” Salter’s “The Monster Strikes Back” and Mancini’s “Monster Gets Mark, Part 1” and “Monster Gets Mark, Part 2.” The watery scenes are somewhat reminiscent of the visuals that the Creature music was originally written for in the first movie, which makes the tracked music somewhat palatable. Still, this intrusion of pre-existing music should have been avoided in what is otherwise a nearly perfect score.

Conductor’s score of Henry Mancini’s “Hungry Leopard” from Tanganyika (© 1954 Northridge Music Co., courtesy Henry Mancini Estate).

As the Gill-less Gill Man is brought back to the surface, Mancini’s “Hungry Leopard” from the Van Heflin–Ruth Roman adventure Tanganyika (1954) adds to the tracked proceedings. This is the only library cue in Creature Walks not to come from one of the earlier Creature movies, which is both odd and yet also perfectly in keeping with Universal’s musical history. Tanganyika features an original score by Mancini, Salter, Stein and Lava, and it’s a solid work, one that supplied a wealth of library cues to subsequent Universal motion pictures, most commonly Mancini’s two-part “Hungry Leopard” and Stein’s “Merrion Killed” and “Children Lost.” In Tanganyika, “Children Lost” covers a scene where Andy, a young boy, swims above a herd of hippos. Stein’s writing is vaguely reminiscent of some of the swimming sequence music he wrote for Black Lagoon, even though the hippos look nothing like the Gill Man and Andy looks even less like Julie Adams.

After the now-terrestrial Creature is introduced to his stockade prison in Creature Walks, there’s a poignant moment when he looks out at the water, thanks to Mancini’s low-key “Behind Bars” offering a musical effect on harp, vibraphone and Novachord that flawlessly captures the link between the Gill Man and his former liquid environment. This is a superb example of the power of underscore to relate information that can’t be expressed otherwise, because without the music, viewers might have seen the Creature, then the water, but simply not made the connection.

The first part of Marcia’s “Adventurous Dip” in the lake was composed by Mancini, with Roemheld supplying the last 20 seconds when the mountain lion arrives. Mancini’s contribution begins as Morgan and Marcia wind up their talk about her husband, with alto flute carrying the memorable melody heard earlier in “Perfect Wife?” Solo clarinet lends a steamy undertone as Marcia dons her bathing suit behind a curtain, with English horn adding a sense of resignation as she walks out on her spouse. When she approaches the water, the love theme returns, this time on alto sax, with the light-jazz approach adding to the sexual tension between Marcia, Jed and possibly the Creature. This cue was also used in Outside the Law along with “Perfect Wife?” Because the two pieces shared the same melody, they worked as well together in the crime picture as they did in Creature Walks Among Us.

At the Barton Ranch, “Creech” (Don Megowan) is caged by his captors (Rex Reason, James Rawley, Maurice Manson, Jeff Morrow, extras playing ranch hands). Films in Review’s Roy Frumkes, covering the movie’s laserdisc release, wrote that it was “moving and sincere, with some astonishing pantomime coming from under all that latex. And the third act is beautifully staged and impressively primal. It just might be a little horror noir gem.”

Roemheld’s addendum to “Adventurous Dip,” as well as his “The End of the Lion,” are of a completely different nature than Mancini’s contribution, befitting the vicious feline intruder. The music features flutter-tongued brass and flute, along with harp and drum rolls to describe the brutal action, the flute adding a welcome instrumental touch to the tried-and-true fluttering brass that so often depicts such monstrous movie moments.

Irving Gertz handles the Creature Walks climax, with “Murder by Night” covering the scene leading up to Barton killing Jed. The cue was written in typical Gertz style, with the music moving in one direction, then another, quickly changing moods from light to dark and back again. Woodwinds predominate, as they do in many of the composer’s works, with strings and muted brass adding significant touches throughout. As somebody once told the composer, “It’s impossible to hum your music.” That might be true, but humming isn’t a prerequisite for great dramatic underscore, and Gertz was brilliant at writing such music.

During Arthur Ross’ stint as scripter for Creature from the Black Lagoon, he had the Gill Man fight and mangle a jaguar. The scene never made it to the screen, but Ross resuscitated the idea in Creature Walks with the one-sided Creature vs. mountain lion match.

When the Gill Man witnesses the murder in “The Avenging Creature,” the older Creature theme plays a larger role, with the music building steadily until the clawed prisoner breaks from his cage. After the Gill Man escapes, the soundtrack goes from frenzied onslaught to total silence when the Creature enters the house, but not because Gertz couldn’t think of anything to write, or because he lost his pencil, or because the musicians took a cigarette break in the middle of the recording session. On the contrary, Gertz wrote some powerful action music for this sequence, but over 30 measures were not used in the film’s soundtrack until the Creature catches up with Barton and throws him to his death, where it sounds suspiciously like somebody turned up the volume on their stereo. The cue ends on the quiet side except for a brief orchestral outburst as the Creature fends off an armed ranch hand before knocking down the electrified fence post and escaping. It’s a shame that some of Gertz’s best work was removed from the picture, because the silence during these emasculated scenes is indeed deafening. And why this happened to Gertz’s contributions but not to any of the other composers’ music is puzzling.

You can hear some of “The Avenging Creature” in the opening of The Midnight Story (1957). That Tony Curtis crime movie’s score is under 27 minutes long, and it features 16 original Salter cues, as well as one by Skinner near the picture’s end, which might have been included to prevent Salter from receiving a composer’s credit. The film also contains a few old compositions by Mancini and Stein, as well as a most unusual opening. The movie begins with an original “Main Title” fanfare by Salter, followed by Gertz’s “The Avenging Creature,” then there’s another short Salter piece called “Main Title” that leads to a re-use of Stein’s “Main Title” from The Glass Web. Whoever pieced together this score certainly took a bewildering approach, including using part of Stein’s “Main Title” from Backlash (1956) a few minutes later in the body of the film. Maybe somebody held a contest to see how many snippets of “Main Title” cues could be crammed into the opening of one motion picture.

Gertz’s Creature Walks “End Title” begins when the surviving scientists discuss the outcome of their experiment. The composition is a mostly subdued piece designed to quietly underscore the dialogue-laden wrap-up. The bittersweet music hints that there might be romance ahead for Marcia and Morgan, but not right now given the recent tragic events. A dissolve to the shore leads to a powerful rendition of the Creature theme as the Gill Man looks out at the crashing waves. A strong orchestral surge with prominent harp and Novachord follows, and Gertz uses dissonances and instrumental clashes to musically symbolize the dilemma the land-living Creature is now facing with the ocean before him. As the film doesn’t have a clear-cut resolution, Gertz cleverly chose musical devices to emphasize the same conclusion.

Mancini’s “End Cast” offers a full orchestral variation of the piano piece heard in “Perfect Wife?” which might have been one last attempt to see if the tune might have “song” potential. And even though it unfortunately didn’t, the cue effectively closes the musical door on this (so far) final chapter in the Creature’s cinematic history. Not to mention it was a much better choice than re-using Stein’s “End Cast” from The Redhead from Wyoming one final time.

Analysis
By Steve Kronenberg

The Creature Walks Among Us: Even the film’s first-person title is provocative. One year before Herman Cohen and AIP cooked up I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), the Creature walked among “us”: We—the audience and fans—are included in the horror. And “horror” is the operative word here. Though The Creature Walks Among Us is not in the same league as the 1954 original, it is a far better sequel than Revenge of the Creature. And if Creature from the Black Lagoon resembled a high adventure film, and Revenge was merely another monster-on-the-loose fest, Creature Walks is, of the three, the closest to a pure horror film. Its Gothic roots are reinforced by Jeff Morrow’s evil scientist and the Creature’s own Frankensteinian transformation. In addition, Creature Walks may be the first of Universal’s 1950s horrors to portray its monster as an existential anti-hero—despite fans’ assertions that 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man was the first existentially themed genre piece.

Among Creature Walks’ many assets is its solid cast, a group of players far superior in every way to Revenge’s stock performers and dull characters. The cast of Creature Walks is led by Jeff Morrow as the obsessed Dr. William Barton. Morrow initially portrays Barton as a serious albeit zealous professional, and his expressive, eager eyes superbly convey his enthusiasm for his Creature “capture and conversion” project. Throughout most of the film, Morrow is subdued, yet betrays just enough fervor beneath the surface to convince us that his Barton is no rational academic. When Capt. Stanley (David McMahon) tells Morrow the crew is ready to set sail after the Creature, Morrow’s sly and sinister smile belies his anxiety and eagerness: “All right, captain. Get underway!” (Remember that Morrow honed that zealous quality playing another obsessed scientist in This Island Earth.)

Morrow’s occasional, wild-eyed obsession in transforming the Creature makes a fine contrast to Rex Reason’s stolid, compassionate academic—the educated, rational scholar who wants to study, not tamper with, the Gill Man: “We can learn from nature, help nature … but we can’t bypass nature!” This tension is obviously reminiscent of the clash between Reed and Williams in the original. Yet, Morrow modulates his zeal with a quiet determination. Throughout much of the film, he adopts a determined, almost granite facial expression which exemplifies his quiet obsession with the Creature. Note how intently Barton stares at the Fishscope as Morgan, Marcia and Grant descend in their scuba gear to explore the Creature’s environs. And as the reckless Marcia is rescued by Morgan, Barton’s face becomes a mask of subtle anger. In addition, Morrow is quite convincing in his subdued, jealousy-fueled threats to his on-screen wife. (Eventually, Morrow’s jealous rages over Leigh Snowden dilute the power of his otherwise excellent performance.)

But Morrow is most delightful when his Dr. Barton resembles the obsessed mad doctors of Gothic horror. Note his wild-eyed delight as he discusses the Creature’s transformation: “We are changing a sea creature into a land creature!” Morrow’s Barton is no less passionate—and no less egocentric—than Henry Frankenstein, Henry Jekyll or Dr. Moreau. In fact, his desire to tamper with the creature’s natural anatomy seems lifted directly from 1933’s Island of Lost Souls! Yet, Morrow’s Barton is also capable of pathos and insecurity. He drunkenly complains to Marcia: “The jungle or the stars. Can’t they see I want to catch a star?” In this scene, the vulnerable and self-doubting Barton resembles yet another Golden Age mad doctor: Boris Karloff’s Janos Rukh in The Invisible Ray (1936).

Morrow’s modulated, believable, and textured performance as a subtly mad doctor highlights Creature Walks Among Us and augments its status as a real horror film. And Morrow does an excellent job of showing us Barton’s many sides: cruelty, jealousy, insecurity, scientific obsession. He also serves as the contrasting force to Rex Reason’s conscience-stricken Dr. Tom Morgan, thereby making the Creature’s pathos an essential theme of the film.

Reason also delivers a surprisingly versatile performance as the leading man–hero, Dr. Morgan. He has the deep, masculine voice and commanding demeanor of most 1950s male leads, but he is more relaxed and natural than John Agar was in Revenge. His polite, affable interactions with the beautiful Leigh Snowden do not seem forced or flirtatious, as Agar’s did with Lori Nelson. He also displays a surprisingly tender and sensitive side with Snowden, who is routinely victimized by Morrow’s cruelty and jealous streak.

Reason also does a fine job portraying the film’s scientific conscience, as did Richard Carlson in Creature from the Black Lagoon. His character is bent on capturing the Gill Man alive and unharmed—unlike Barton, who is determined to experiment on the Creature. In one scene, Morgan tells Gregg Palmer’s cruel, smarmy Jed Grant: “Remember, the object is to capture him, not kill him. As much as you’re tempted, try not to hit a vital area.” Reason convincingly utters these lines, treating Palmer’s Grant with appropriate condescension. Later, when the transformed Creature dives into the ocean with his burned gills, Morgan becomes distraught: “He’ll die in the water! He’ll use his lungs and he’ll drown!” Morgan’s fear for the Creature’s life is downright touching—and he proves himself a versatile and believably sturdy hero by diving in and rescuing the hapless Gill Man.

Simultaneously, Reason conveys due respect for the Creature’s right to live as one of nature’s biological wonders. After the Gill Man is burned and rescued, he marvels at the fact that the Creature has lungs beneath his burned tissue—conveying the fixed, wide-eyed wonder of a Henry Frankenstein! Later in the film, his affinity, even affection for the Creature continues to develop. As the Gill Man lies on an operating table, we see Morgan quietly put his hand on this monster as he tells Barton: “He remembers fear. When he’s afraid, he’ll attack anything animal or human.” In fact, it is Reason’s Dr. Morgan who gives the audience a summation of the Creature’s psyche—something which was barely explored in the original film and never even touched on in Revenge: He explains that the Creature lives in “terrible fear” because he views all men as his enemies. At the film’s end, after the Creature has killed off Barton, Morgan with sympathy and sensitivity conveys an understanding of the Creature’s persona: “The Creature moved a step forward. He didn’t attack until he was attacked. He killed the real enemy.” Rarely, if ever, has any 1950s horror film gone to such lengths to analyze the monster portrayed on screen—or to convey the notion that our real monsters often wear human faces. Far from the stock 1950s hero portrayed by John Agar in Revenge, Reason, like Richard Carlson, delivers a multi-faceted, sensitive performance that reaches beneath the veneer of good looks and deep voice.

Likewise, the beautiful Leigh Snowden delivers an interesting, layered performance as Marcia. Initially, Snowden seems to assume a femme fatale demeanor: Her provocative curves are on full display in a tight bathing suit, accompanied by an independent, fiery attitude that contrasts sharply with both Julie Adams in the original and (especially) Lori Nelson in Revenge. When the sleazy, amorous Grant asks Marcia, “Is that all you do is talk?” Marcia quickly pushes him away and retorts: “No, I like to swim too!”

As the film progresses, we see Snowden’s Marcia as affable, dignified and tender, the victim of her obsessed and selfish husband. Snowden’s natural ability to project warmth is especially conveyed in her scenes with Reason, who returns Snowden’s sensitivity in kind. They do have chemistry and their scenes are far less trite and forced than those between Agar and Nelson in Revenge. And Snowden’s Marcia, like Reason’s Morgan, even projects sympathy for the Creature. As Marcia longingly eyes the ocean, she tell Morgan, “I can understand why the Creature never wanted to leave the water.” The romantic “rectangle” between Barton, Morgan, Marcia and Grant may be filler, but the conflict is much better written and acted than it is in Revenge.

Creature Walks Among Us is most interesting in its approach to the Creature himself. This monster who, in prior films, was alternately graceful, lovesick and pathetic, here undergoes a startling transformation that defines not only the film, but the Gill Man character itself. Ricou Browning’s sea-based Creature is only briefly seen. To be sure, Browning’s Creature displays all the grace and style of his previous Gill Man incarnations. And in one poignant scene, there’s a feeling of pathos as the burned Creature (Chuck Roberson) tries to lift a fallen tree and helplessly collapses.

Yet, it’s Don Megowan as the hulking, surgically transformed Creature who carries the day in Creature Walks Among Us. Fans and writers have routinely and unfairly dismissed Megowan’s Creature as an ugly, hulking brute—almost a perversion of Browning’s stylish and lithe sea monster. But beneath the Creature mask and costume, Megowan uses his eyes and body language to deliver a surprisingly wide range of emotions.

According to Hollywood columnist Erskine Johnson: “After a fight scene with the undersea monster in The Creature Walks Among Us, Jeff Morrow wailed, ‘Why can’t I be in a picture titled Marilyn Monroe Walks Among Us?’” Pictured: Don Megowan (as the Creature) and Morrow.

Our first view of Megowan’s transformed Creature (when his head bandages are removed) is one of the film’s most memorable moments. The facial scales, burned away by fire, are replaced by a smoother, semi-human flesh that results in an even uglier, more monstrous appearance—perhaps because he looks so strikingly different from Browning’s leaner, fish-like visage. But it is when the Creature opens his eyes and gazes malevolently at Barton and Morgan that we realize the menace inherent in this newly awakened Gill Man. Megowan’s eyes alone tell us that the Creature is decidedly unhappy as an air-breathing “land Creature.” When the Creature is moved to a stockade inhabited by sheep and goats, we note Megowan’s eyes and tilt of his head as he curiously regards his new, docile neighbors. Megowan is seen walking the cage, examining his new environment with wonder and curiosity. And note how longingly Megowan gazes at the ocean through the fencing that separates him from his natural home. Megowan’s genuine ability to convey hurt and pathos with his eyes makes his Creature even more pathetic than the previous portrayals by Browning, Ben Chapman and Tom Hennesy.

Yet, Megowan just as easily shifts from pathos to anger. Note the rage conveyed by his eyes, face and body as he spies the mountain lion clawing one of the sheep that share his cage. Indeed, Megowan displays disarming fury as he viciously kills the big cat. And Megowan effectively blends anger with confusion as he witnesses Barton’s murder of Grant—before his Creature goes on his own rampage and destroys Barton himself.

It is pointless to compare Boris Karloff’s performance as the Frankenstein Monster with Don Megowan’s Creature. Yet, Megowan’s ability to convey pathos, menace, anger and childlike curiosity is wholly reminiscent of Karloff’s Monster. (As mentioned above, Megowan actually played the Monster opposite Anton Diffring’s Baron Frankenstein in Tales of Frankenstein.) Megowan’s performance is the “heart and soul” of Creature Walks Among Us and is perhaps the one 1950s monster portrayal that truly echoes the work of a Golden Age icon. His unfairly maligned Creature is most worthy of tribute.

The solid Creature Walks cast is ably abetted by the film’s technicians, particularly underwater d.p. “Scotty” Welbourne. He treats us to some atmospheric and murky underwater photography in the initial scenes of Browning’s aquatic Gill Man. We also get a fine overhead view of Marcia performing an abridged water ballet through a cloud of bubbles. Welbourne then delivers a dark, moody long shot of Marcia, Morgan and Grant swimming through the depths with Browning’s Creature gliding parallel to them. Welbourne creates a spooky, chilling tableau as he blends the darkness of the water with the rock and algae beneath the surface of the river.

Maury Gertsman’s land-based camerawork, especially his penchant for closeups of the Creature, is equally effective. He delivers an evocative medium shot of Megowan’s Gill Man swathed in bandages from top to bottom, again reminiscent of Karloff’s Monster. And before the bandages are removed, we get a genuinely eerie shot of the Creature’s inhuman, uncomprehending eyes through the bandages. This closeup emphasizes the unsettling contrast between the pure white gauze of the bandages and the Creature’s burned, scaly skin. Then there are two equally disarming shots: one of the Creature’s burned hand and then an even more startling view of the bandaged head with only the eyes and mouth showing. It is a bizarre, unsettling scene—perhaps because we are unaccustomed to seeing our favorite 1950s monster bandaged and strapped to an operating table! During the shipboard scene in which Megowan’s Creature runs amok, Gertsman delivers a memorably subtle shot: The camera focuses on a door latch slowly twisting and turning—then an ominous shot of the Creature’s smooth, misshapen, webbed hand reaching out to pull open the door.

As Dennis Saleh points out in Science Fiction Gold, the Gill Man has been “merchandised like a celebrity screen idol: on posters, paperbacks, pencil erasers, figurines, lunch boxes, belt buckles, bars of soap, and best of all, beach towels.” This cool conglomeration is a small part of the collection of David J. Schow.

Throughout the film, Gertsman ably blends darkness and light, exemplified by the scene in which Megowan’s Creature walks out of the pitch-black back of a moving truck into daylight. And watch for the Welbourne-photographed scene in which Morgan dives into the water to save the Creature from drowning. He shows the Creature and his rescuer in a series of long shots, blending the dark water with shafts of light, just as he did in the 1954 original.

No scene better captures the existential angst of Creature Walks than the final shot of Megowan’s Creature preparing for his lonely and lethal walk into the ocean. Gertsman focuses on Megowan’s glistening, distorted face as he longingly gazes into the waters that beckon him. No matter that the ocean is obviously back-projected: Gertsman beautifully captures the poignancy and pathos of the Creature’s last gasp at freedom, and his final passage into the water. The solitude of Megowan’s Creature is permanently etched by this memorable shot. It is almost as if both previous Creature films were preludes to this scene—a final rite of passage from water to land, to water again. In Creature Walks, Gertsman’s camera is an essential tool in capturing and appreciating the Creature’s Frankensteinian persona.

Creature Walks also benefits from the kind of tight, fast pacing that graced the 1954 original—a function of John Sherwood’s direction and Arthur Ross’s script. In fact, Creature Walks opens with Morgan and Marcia racing to his laboratory-equipped yacht. Sherwood and Ross also allow for a well-timed prelude to the Creature’s first appearance, as Barton and Morgan discuss the Gill Man’s biology and the means to change him into an air-breathing animal. Sherwood’s sense of pacing is fully realized in the Creature’s first attack scene. The Gill Man silently stalks Barton’s yacht by night as we anxiously await the assault to come. When it does come, Barton, Morgan, Grant et al. are in a dinghy and the Creature suddenly arises from the water, jumps up on the boat and is set afire by Grant. Sherwood superbly sets up the attack. Sherwood proves equally adept at staging and directing the closing action scenes with the Creature loose in the Barton home. This time it’s the Creature hunting for Barton; his orgy of destruction through the house is not accompanied by music, so we hear only the Gill Man’s heavy breathing and bellowing, and Marcia’s screams.

Sherwood and Ross also contribute to the superb final scene, with Megowan’s weary Creature eyeing the ocean and walking towards certain death. It is Ross’ script that posits the idea of the Creature finally returning home, in peace, rather than dying in a hail of bullets. No Universal monster ever received such a fitting and poignant end.

The Creature Walks Among Us is marked by its believable script and performances, its Golden Age echoes of mad science, and its focus on the Creature’s psychological—as well as biological—makeup. The film is not only a superior sequel, but one of Universal’s best horror offerings of the 1950s.

The three-movie adventure that began at a riverside geological camp on the Amazon in Northern Brazil, ends on an ocean-view Marin County, California, hillside: The Creature (Don Megowan) is about to stagger to his doom in the closing moments of The Creature Walks Among Us.