Black Lagoon. Black Lodge. Whatever.

 Most images of Millicent Patrick online show her cradling the head of the creature she designed (although she wouldn't be fully credited for thirty years) and the most viewed of these is cropped and tilted so it looks like the two are dating...

 Before

 

 After

... which is why I've opened this post with a publicity still of Patrick actually designing, but that's not really what I've come here to talk about.

 I'm still in France. Dad screened 1954's "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" for me a couple of nights back (we watched "The Shape of Water" the following night and "The Lighthouse" the day before, so this year's Christmas viewing has been a triple-bill of mer-person erotica). I'd never seen it before, and even though I'm already a fanatic for those early Universal Horrors, it was a smarter film than I'd been expecting, not least in its use of 3D. Here's a still from the opening scene - if you can't make out what it is, it's because you're not seeing it in enough dimensions...

 That's a claw reaching out of the screen. Not the jump scare you might expect, but the fossilised hand of the creature's primordial ancestor, completely still. Staring at this through my 3D specs I imagined audiences of the fifties likewise watching it hang in front of their faces, waiting for the gigantic thing to flinch. Which it doesn't. Because it can't. It's dead. It's the past. But it might... and it's always been there and that's what's scary, although only in 3D. Something I love about Universal's best monster movies is how impossible it is to read too much into their goofy iconography, how easily they carry out their duties to the mythic. This particular creature for example was generated in an atomic explosion far larger than the norm, depicted in this second still from the movie's prologue. Again it doesn't impress nearly as much in 2D...

... but what you're actually looking at is the moment before the Big Bang (underscored by the first verse of Genesis), a hell of thing to throw in an audience's face on a first date. Claws emerging from the darkness are a staple of horror movies from at least "The Cat and the Canary" onwards, but to have that claw emerge not from a false bookcase but from the same waters that produced the rest of us provided a very different context. Basically this film had me at "In The Beginning." I'd like to write more about those old Universals; I picked up a lot of touchingly remastered classics on the Finnetour. You can see for yourself the opening scene zoom all the way in from bang to claw on youtube here but you really need 3D to fully appreciate what was attempted, as I said. I wonder if David Lynch was a fan...