Soft vs Hard Masculinity

The Creature From The Black Lagoon is one of the most iconic horror films of the Golden era. References to it can be seen even in children's cartoons to this day. There's an entire book series dedicated to parodying the title aimed for children. All about different, often aquatic, monsters that make their way into a kid's school.
And that's where the references stop. There's a monster, it came from a lagoon, it's funny, laugh.

But I think that with the progression of time the actual subtext of this film has been ignored.
That this film was made to praise "soft masculinity".
The set up for this discussion is simple, there are two men Mark and David.  Both like the same girl, Kay, and this film is the trial they go through in order to "win" her.
 Mark is an action hero blonde man who sees the creature as something to kill before it kills them, and is jealous of David and Kay's relationship. David doesn't want to kill the creature, at least until it kidnaps Kay, and thinks with his brain. If the movie were to follow your standard action hero movie David would die and Kay would end the film kissing Mark (despite only having lost the man she loves mere moments before).
But that doesn't happen, in the last underwater scene of the film, Mark is killed by the monster. His body floats to the surface and Kay is dragged off for David to rescue.


(Side note: Marks blond hair and white shorts also provide an interesting color contrast with David's black hair and shorts. Both spent most of the film wearing the same color shorts but after Edwin is attacked and injured Mark had changed, this gives the audience a sense of the two-toned nature of the argument the film is presenting. Either you are a hard or a soft masculine type, there is no in-between. Though it could also have been done just so that when the underwater fight went down the audience could still know who was who.)
David uses a knife to attack the creature, which at first made me think this was his, and by extension the films, way of embracing hard masculinity. But he is unsuccessful in actually killing it, it is only with Lucas and Carl shooting the creature does he actually "die" (he doesn't until a few sequels later).
I believe it was one of our first readings (one of Williams or Clovers) that made the claim that guns aren't a phallic weapon because they don't allow the user to get close, they don't allow for the same revelry in gore that horror films are so fond of. By using a gun rather than an overly phallic harpoon or the standard knife as the weapon that kills the creature the film has rejected the traditional notion of manhood.

The Unkown vs The Known

One of the more unique aspects of Kubrick's The Shining is how everything is laid out from the start. The audience is told that the job Jack is trying to get cause a man to go insane, the audience knows that Jack is an alcoholic who hurt his son, and the audience knows everything they need to know about the shining all within the first hour of the film.
Yet with all of this out in the open, with the plot obvious, and with every reason to not care much about Jack or his family The Shining still manages to be insanely creepy.
I think conversely this fear is from what the audience doesn't know.

The Unkown has always been the source of most fears. What made the noise, who screamed, why did that vase move? Without an answer all of these can become scenarios that haunt our imaginations.

In the film the audience is only told what they need to know to understand the basic plot but not the details. In a way, the early expositing of information helps add to the creepy feeling the camera work and soundtrack slave away to create. But why was there a man dressed as a dog about to give someone else a BJ? Why was there a corpse in room 237? Why were the twins appearing only to Danny and no one else? Why is any of this happening?

The original Steven King novel has some kind of explanation for all of these things.

But had there been an explanation given in the film I don't think it would have been as scary as it is.
Horror novels rely on the unknown just as much as their film counterparts. But most authors aren't just trying to scare the reader, they also want to tell a complete story. That's what most readers are after when they read a long novel. Cheap jump scares and screaming won't work in this medium so authors have to coax the fear out of their readers.
With films jump scares and screams are abound, for most people a gory image and a screaming woman is enough to give the audience a sense of fear.

 One of the creepiest scenes for me was when Danny was playing with his trucks and a ball rolls in from out of nowhere. We don't see who rolled it or even where it came from. All we the audience know is that a ball just appeared. Most authors in a novel would tie it back to some of the spirits, perhaps the Grady sisters were trying to entice Danny towards them, in order to give the ball a reason for being there. In this movie, though there is no other purpose for the ball than to be scary.

That's what makes this film such a classic, the balance between what is known and unknown is toppled. The audience knows even less than they think by the end of the movie. The entire story is not laid out neatly for them. There's still a large debate around why Jack ended up in the picture at the end of the movie. Or why Jack froze so suddenly. Or what the Shining power Danny has actually is.
This lack of answers are primed to trigger the audiences to flight or fight responses.
The audience is forced to ask themselves the same questions they would while in the same situation, why is this happening, and how do I stop it?
Both questions the movie refuses to elaborate on.

Why does this movie make us feel so sick?

I am someone who has a pretty strong stomach, I enjoy watching films and Tv shows with bloody action, one of my favorite forms of horror is body horror. But this week's film Human Roast Pork Buns: The Untold Story managed to do something no other movie has been able to do. It made me feel sick. I spent a solid hour after watching it trying to calm my stomach so I could eat something. There is only one other piece of media I can think of that has done this and that's a TV show called Tokyo Ghoul an animated show with very little onscreen gore, and it was only for a brief time that I felt discomfort at the subject of the show.
The only real connection I can even find between both media is that one of the main concepts behind them involves eating people, which maybe that's what triggers my nausea cannibalism. Except Texas Chainsaw Massacre didn't even manage to make me feel anything and a man wears human skin as a mask.
While I was contemplating this I remembered something, one of the most popular tv-shows of the mid-2010s (aside from freaking Game of Thrones) is a show that revels in body horror. Supernatural got its start as a semi-horror tv show and it was full of body horror. A tv show that showed on primetime networks whose most vocal complaints were about the satanic elements in the show.
So why did The Untold Story manage to get such a visceral reaction out of me?
I think a part of it does have to do with the fact that much of the violence was towards women. While I don't identify as a woman myself I do still have a feminine body and a part of watching violence is mentally supplanting yourself with the victims. The infamous chopstick scene caused a very visceral reaction to both me and my mother (whom I made the mistake of watching this film with). When you find yourself able to identify with what is happening on screen at such a level it is no surprise films can cause such a reaction. Prince said that violence is connected to the visceral and I really only happen when you are able to identify, on some level, with the victims. All of the victims in The Untold Story were more human to me than Sally was in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They had a more human reaction to what was around them and the sexual violence that Pearl faced somehow managed to draw more of a reaction from me than a demon dog ripping a man to shreds in Supernatural even though at that point at I had known Dean Winchester for longer than I knew Pearl the cashier.
Along with that, the realism is much more noticeable. I probably won't be eaten in Tokyo by a man who can control his blood to form weapons, but I could be chopped up by a restaurant owner.
While The Untold Story is an over the top gorefest it is one with people and plausibility. It is about one of the most hushed conversations in our society. And it almost seems to celebrate what it can make us feel.