If the Gill-man could have communicated that his territory was being invaded, would it have helped? In 2017’s The Shape of Water, a movie inspired by Creature from the Black Lagoon, director Guillermo del Toro explores the romantic relationship between a creature and a woman. The character of Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is mute and communicates through sign language. She is able to connect with the creature in the movie by teaching him sign language, and they fall in love. Although the creature may be part human in The Shape of Water, there are many real-life examples of animals being able to communicate with humans. Perhaps the most famous case is Koko, a female western lowland gorilla that learned a modified version of American Sign Language. She was able to use more than one thousand signs and understand over two thousand spoken words.8
Gorillas aren’t the only animals that have been known to communicate with humans. Dolphins, elephants, dogs, and birds have all been known to learn words or symbols when observed in studies. A border collie named Chaser learned over one thousand words and Kanzi, a bonobo, learned more than three thousand symbols.9 What can we, or they, do with this knowledge? Because our brains are different than animal brains, we may never have the same things to converse about. We think about things differently. According to primatologist Joan Silk, “primates are endowed with cognitive abilities that are especially well suited to tracking social information. For example, primates are able to recognize individuals; identify kin; compute the value of resources and services; keep track of past interactions with group members; make transitive inferences; discriminate between cooperators and defectors; and assess the qualities of prospective rivals, mates and allies.”10 She suggests sticking to these topics if communicating with a primate.
Humans have explored less than 5 percent of the planet’s oceans. What could be lurking beneath the surface? We may never know. But learning about the lore and legends that surround the deep and ways to better communicate with animals may help us if or when we run into our own creature from the black lagoon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
JAWS
Year of Release: 1975
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Peter Benchley
Starring: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss
Budget: $9 million
Box Office: $470.7 million
Beachgoers are tormented by a man-eating great white shark in Jaws. Although the town of Amity in the film was fictional, movie fans distinctly remember avoiding the water after seeing the blockbuster in June of 1975. California native Cheri Gray Pierce recalls the feeling of the time. “I was just finishing up my sophomore year of high school and was spending a lot of time at the beach that summer. I remember a lot of people being freaked out about going in the water, hearing a lot of them breaking out in that ‘shark music’ while we were basking in the sun.”
Based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel, Jaws’s journey to the screen was not an easy one. The film quickly went over budget because of its ambitious creature designs. The animatronic sharks developed for the shoot malfunctioned so often that director Steven Spielberg chose to rely on suggestion, as well as composer John Williams’s iconic score, to stir dread in viewers’ hearts. This choice ultimately paid off, an example of the shadowy, less-is-more horror filmmaking that critics love. While the larger-than-life shark in Jaws is memorable, the film itself is a behemoth. Considered the first summer blockbuster, Jaws opened in over four hundred and fifty theaters after an expensive promotional campaign. Because of its massive success, this model of opening to a wide, summer audience became an American tradition. Actor and comedian Jody Kujawa recalls seeing the movie as a kid:
I remember seeing Jaws as a child on television. My parents had the Peter Benchley book which I had read three times and spent hours looking at the cover. It was an absolute thrill to see this film for the first time, watching it come to life. But my greatest thrill happened this last summer when a local theater was showing it for a mere $5. I cleared a night and went to see it. If you ever get the chance to see it on a big screen, do it. It’s a whole new experience. It’s the way it was meant to be seen. After all, it created the summer blockbuster genre.
A real-life shark attack was the inspiration for Jaws. In New Jersey, four people were killed and one injured by shark attacks over twelve days in July of 1916. Although author Peter Benchley denies the connection, the incidents in New Jersey are mentioned in his novel. Parallel to the novel and movie plot, people were encouraged to keep going to the beaches even after the first attack. The State Fish Commissioner of Pennsylvania, in regard to the first victim, was quoted as saying:
The jaws of a shark.
Despite the death of Charles Vansant and the report that two sharks having been caught in that vicinity recently, I do not believe there is any reason why people should hesitate to go in swimming at the beaches for fear of man-eaters. The information in regard to the sharks is indefinite and I hardly believe that Vansant was bitten by a man-eater. Vansant was in the surf playing with a dog and it may be that a small shark had drifted in at high water, and was marooned by the tide. Being unable to move quickly and without food, he had come in to bite the dog and snapped at the man in passing.
Four more attacks later occurred along the New Jersey shore, causing panic that led to massive shark hunts and an emergence of the shark as a symbol of danger.
Prior to 1916, it wasn’t believed that a shark would, or could, attack a human fatally. The New York Times reported that “the foremost authority on sharks in this country has doubted that any shark ever attacked a human being, and has published his doubts, but the recent cases have changed his view.” Newspaper cartoonists across the country began using sharks as imagery for politicians, German U-boats, and even polio.
We are familiar with sharks and their attacks through the news, media, and our beloved “Shark Week.” What are some creatures from the deep that may not be so recognizable to us? The giant squid is a deep ocean-dwelling squid that can grow up to forty-three feet long. Tales of these squid may have led to the legend of the Kraken, a sea monster who lives in the sea near Norway. Kraken have been featured in numerous films and stories including Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) and a Georges Méliès film entitled Under the Seas (1907). The footage used was of an octopus in a bathtub attacking a toy ship. Talk about practical effects! Even Alfred Tennyson wrote about the legendary Kraken in this sonnet:1
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep