Who Is the Most Tragic Universal Monster?

*This post is inspired by the Test Pattern podcast "Episode 72: Universal Monsters Series - Creature From the Black Lagoon and The Shape of Water"

Every good story has a dash of tragedy. Tragedy can be a powerful layer to any story, from the Odyssey to William Shakespeare, and even modern myths such as Spider-man. Tragedy is also littered in Universal's classics; The Universal Monsters. These films turn peaceful lives into nightmares, create monsters out of our fears and desires, and mirror a darker side to life that we do not want to admit. But, out of all these classic, legendary, iconic monsters which one would you say was the most tragic? For me it's obviously The Gill-man.

To start off, each of the iconic movie monsters of Universal's pantheon were created from tragedy. The Wolfman is an innocent who's life is changed by one scratch, the Phantom of the Opera was once a powerful singer until his face was splashed by acid, Frankenstein's monster was revived from rotted flesh and then discarded; none of them were born a monster. And while Dracula may be enjoying his dominion over the dark he, like the Wolfman, was originally human at some point and had to live with the changes. The Gill-man, however, is the obvious outlier of the bunch. He was not created, nor a changed man, but was always a monster in his peaceful isolated world. Instead of being born from tragedy the Gill-man is the only monster that had to learn of it after knowing peace.

In Creature From the Black Lagoon the Gill-man is seen as a creature of nature, literally described as the mythic "missing link." Not a freak, nor a monster, but a sign of optimistic hope for society to learn from and understand where they came from. The mindset of the scientists at the beginning was nothing drastic as violence. To study and observe, and show the world, but nothing overtly malicious...until they invaded his territory. Because, while the Gill-man is the missing link toward man it is still very much an animal. It did the most natural thing when his untouched territory was finally invaded by "predators" that could compete with him; he attacked. In the end, from the creature's point of view, the first movie was about a peaceful animal being invaded by an invasive species that violently retaliated to a simple territorial dispute.

While a masterpiece in itself, the first of this trilogy could be interpreted in many ways, and had taken well known monster troupes at the time of Universal's more beloved films. It is not until Revenge of the Creature where you start to see the life of this poor animal turn bleak. Humans return to the lagoon and succeed in remaking the first movie in the first act. Now, with the creature in a coma for a good chunk of the film he is relocated to an aquarium in Florida and chained to the artificial sea floor. Literally a prisoner on display. A beacon for the world to know more, and all humanity needed to achieve that knowledge was uproot the creature's life and stick him in a container.

Multiple scenes show the creature in a panic; he doesn't know where he is, he's fighting everyone he sees whether they're good to him or not, because his perception of humans started with violence, and finally you truly get to see how depressed and unhappy he is for the rest of the film. By the end of this second installment the creature had been shot at, speared, chained, poisoned, blew up, and put into a coma, and that's not even the worst that happens.

This iconic monster, the Gill-man, leaves this trilogy with the most tragic swansong of the bunch in The Creature Walks Among Us. With his escape at the end of Revenge, and the fact that now the world knows about him, the humans are back tracking him down and will do anything to capture him. In their pursuit the creature is doused with gasoline and set aflame, third degree burns knocking him unconscious. From this act, his body is having trouble recovering. That is until they open up the Gill-man's lungs, long dormant and unused, and unleashing his human side of the "missing-link."

Now, the creature becomes more humanoid. His scales, and gills, were literally burned off reverting his genes to the human side as his dominate trait. He can no longer swim, nor breathe underwater. He is kept in a cage far away from civilization, just on the shore where he can always see freedom but never attain it. The creature's life had become listless and he barely responds to his surroundings. You can see the inner turmoil this has wrought upon his mind in the middle act, and then once he's freed you get to watch his cathartic rampage throughout the compound. Finally, if that wasn't enough, after all is said and done, the creature returns to the water, the place he's always been his entire life, to say goodbye and supposedly drown himself.

The creature, or the Gill-man, is the most tragic of the Universal monsters, because his story ends. The Gill-man is one of nature, not an accident, curse, nor creation. He is who he is and is happy with life in his own little world. Unlike the other monsters humanity doesn't want him dead, but instead imprisoned and tortured until the end of his days so that they could learn from him. But through the course of three films his life had been nothing but tragedy, a new experience, where he was shot at, speared, poisoned, chained, forcibly induced into a coma, shocked, burned, experimented on, and finally stripped of his livelihood. In Creature, they invaded his home. In Revenge, they made him a prisoner. In Walk Among Us, they stripped him of his identity. And even throughout all those horrors he still did not attack a mother and her child in Revenge, and he did save the goats from a mountain lion in Walks Among Us. The only people he killed are those that are either invading, or hurting him. All of which are natural animal instincts. In the end the creature walks back into the world he once knew, a world where he felt safe, and where he would inevitably drown.

What do you think after reading this? Who is your most tragic Universal monster? Please leave your comments down below.