Creature Features and Rubber Suit Monsters

Invasion of the Saucer Men

Godzilla.  The Creature from the Black Lagoon. We're talkin' rubber suit monster or "man-in-a-suit" horror and sci-fi vintage special effects. They are cheesy, squidgy, and interfere fatally with the willful suspension of disbelief.  So if these wiggly, campy, F/X misfires are such a disaster, then why do they remain perennial cinema and movie memorabilia favorites?  Well, to quote the man, "It's complicated, baby."

The obvious answer to why we saw them over and over again for decades was that they worked well within typical schlock-house and straight-to-drive-in B-movie budget constraints.  This is indeed how we got Godzilla.  The original monster maestro of Japan, Eiji Tsuburaya, wanted to do our now internationally beloved 'zilla-monster in stop motion a la Ray Harryhausen's King Kong.  But when Eiji told his studio that it would take years to film the special effects for the scenes needed, they told him to find another way.  Voila, the rubber suit.  Necessity was the mother of the first, and best, rubber suit monster ever.

Sci-fi and horror movie fans worth their salt also know that our favorite gummy gargoyle rubber suit Godzilla fulfills a primal human need for monsters, which by definition are mythic embodiments of our fears about the dysfunction (natural or man-made) in our everyday lives.  In Godzilla's case, that would be post World War II pop culture processing Japanese communal fears about the return of the H-bomb.  That's enough nickel psychology.

Swamp Thing battles the Arcane Monster

Why else do we keep our devotion to rubber suit monsters in the age of CG!?  According to A-list creature directors like Steven Spielberg, it all comes down to the film goers' experience.  Although Spielberg eventually worked extensively with CGI monsters, he thinks the best performances from his actors come from playing off of animatronic or puppeteer-filled rubber sharks and dinosaurs.  In other words, in order to thrill you in the theater, Spielberg claims he needed to scare the living crap out of his non-creature actors with live action rubber monsters.

This live action versus digital debate describes an important outlook in Rochester, NY where our e-commerce company, Movie Fan Collectibles, is located.  Our city is also home to Kodak and the George Eastman House Museum's Selznick School of Film Preservation.  Curators of the film library and archive wholeheartedly uplift the experience of pre-digital film technologies and special effects for their intense and visceral simulated reality.  They assert that film and live-action reaches us in a way that digital technology, at the moment, can not.  Eastman House Museum's archive and Dryden Theater are dedicated to preserving and showing original film in all its formats.  Eastman is particularly proud of their collection's live action rubber-suit creature features, including a number of 3-D prints.  For the true cinephile, we recommend a visit.

The Gill Man in Revenge of the Creature

Critics like Aussie Sci-Fi maven Robin Pen go further by saying that if these charmingly fake filmic rubber apparitions don't reach you, then it is really more of a problem with the viewer than it is with the hokey production.  Rubber suit monsters are a pleasure best partaken with a group watching in large projection format.  In a darkened theater like Rochester's Dryden, Hollywood's seminal rubber suit monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, will be weird enough to scare the young-in's and sufficiently outlandish to make the adults belly-laugh.  This multi-generational thrill is not lost on contemporary film makers as evidenced by the currently on going decades-long development of a contemporary Creature From the Black Lagoon remake.

Fun factoids:  Bill Paxton was the last actor signed to play the lead in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, 2012. 

Eye Creature with Babes

Original Black Lagoon producer, William Alland, played the reporter character in Citizen Kane. At a dinner party during the Kane production, Alland got the idea for the Black Lagoon creature from an old Mexican folk tale that cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa told at the party that evening.


Special thanks to Robin Pen, Wiki, and the New Yorker Magazine for their rubber suit monster reporting.

Question of the week:  Paxton is out of the Black Lagoon remake, so who should play the lead in CFTBL?  I'm thinking Brendan Fraser could carry it off the way he did with The Mummy movies.  Especially since the script is supposed to be a pre-quel to the original with Victorian explorers poking around in the Amazon when they encounter the latest gill-man swamp thing.