20/09/2026
20.09.26.
The Gill-man, commonly called The Creature from The Black Lagoon, or simply The Creature, is the movie monster of the 1954 black-and-white film Creature from the Black Lagoon and its two sequels Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).
The Gill-man was reimagining in 2017's The Shape of Water. The Gill-man appeared in the fewest movies of all the Universal Monsters.
Origin
Producer William Alland was attending a dinner party during the filming of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (in which Alland played the reporter Thompson) in 1941 when Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa told him about the myth of a race of half-fish, half-human creatures in the Amazon River. Figueroa spoke of a friend of his who disappeared in the Amazon while filming a documentary on a rumored population of fish-people. Alland then wrote story notes titled "The Sea Monster" 10 years later.[2] There were various designs for the Gill-man. William Alland envisioned the Gill-man as a "sad, beautiful monster" and the sculpture of it was much like that of an aquatic development of a human. Alland said: "It would still frighten you, but because how human it was, not the other way around". Originally, the Gill-man's design was meant to incorporate a sleek, feminine eel-like figure, which did not have as many bumps and gills as the final version. The designer of the approved Gill-man was former Disney illustrator Milicent Patrick, though her role was deliberately downplayed by makeup artist Bud Westmore, who for half a century would receive sole credit for the Gill-man's conception. The Gill-man suit was made from airtight molded sponge rubber and cost $15,000. The underwater sequences were filmed at Wakulla Springs in northern Florida (today a state park), as were many of the rear projection images. Part of the film was shot in Jacksonville, Florida on thesouth side of the river near the foot of the old Acosta Bridge. In the underwater scenes, air was fed into the Gill-man suit with a rubber hose.
Source: Wikipedia