WRITER EXCLUSIVE
Skybound brings back the iconic Gill-man in Universal Monsters: Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives
WHILE DRACULA was an adaptation of the original 1931 film, Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives – the second salvo in Skybound Entertainment’s Universal Monsters comic book line – is a sequel to the 1954 horror classic.
“I love the Universal Monsters as a whole,” says Dan Watters, who is co-writing the four-parter with Ram V. “They’re all these beautiful snapshots of a point in time, and the things people were scared of back then. The idea here is to take those roots and apply them to what we’re scared of now.”
Watters believes that the Gill-man, which appeared on-screen in Creature From The Black Lagoon and its two sequels, 1955’s Revenge Of The Creature and 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us, has plenty of potential. “The Creature doesn’t feel like a monster that needs to be constrained to a single story or a group of human characters,” he says. “It’s a dark mirror onto which a plethora of human fears and desires can be projected, so we wanted to expand that and take it to some fresh, darker places.”
Rather than being a present-day update, Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives takes place in the ’80s, several decades after the conclusion of the first film. “We wanted to create a period piece in between the time of the film and now,” says Watters. “Partly we’re exploring how we got from there to here, particularly as far as the rainforest is concerned.”
The story centres on journalist Kate Marsden, who journeys to South America after an attempt to locate notorious serial killer Darwin Collier goes awry. “He ends up catching up with her instead, and after surviving an attempted drowning in the Hudson river, Kate comes out of the water changed,” teases Watters. “Now she wants justice or revenge, and she’s not quite sure which herself. When Collier flees th
