It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with... Keith Phipps, Scott Device. We've retrieved from her watery grave in the grotto, but she seems to have lost her voice, so she can't join us for this episode. We're sure she'll be fine, and we'll know when she's back when she breaks out in song,

or terrible fish puns. On the first half of this episode, we discussed Jack Arnold's 1954 black and white horror classic, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the last bastion of the classic

Universal Movie Monster series, at least until Universal awkwardly tried to revive the franchise in

2017 with the Tom Cruise version of

The Mummy. In this episode, we'll look at a more successful revival of the Black Lagoon

mythos in Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, which he designed to play out his

childhood fantasies of a version of the Black Lagoon story where the creature and the girl wind up

together. Here's a quote from a piece about the film in The Hollywood Reporter, where Del Toro talked about his influences. The creature was the most beautiful design I'd ever seen, he recalls. And I saw him swimming under actress Julie Adams, and I loved that the creature was in love with her, and I felt an almost existential desire for them to end up together. Of course, it didn't happen, unquote. So young del Tora made it

happen, sketching the fishman and his love interest over and over again. Quote, I had them eating

ice cream on a double bicycle, having dinner, he says. Okay, so never mind the old jokes about how

little a fish needs a bicycle. This is a fascinating image, the idea of a young del Toro drawing

Julie Adams and the Gilman out getting ice cream together.

It speaks to his lifelong love of monsters, which comes up in virtually every film he's ever done,

from his early Mexican film, Kronos, up through the Hellboy pictures, and on to the recent Crimson Peak.

People in his movie are often fighting against monsters, but his movies tend to fetishize the grotesque and bizarre as well, and he loves monsters as symbols for every dark emotion in the human pantheon.

So with Creature from the Black Lagoon, Del Toro gets to play out his childhood fantasies by turning the Gilman into a victim who can only be rescued by a woman who loves him.

Captured and abused in captivity by all-American government agent Richard

Strickland, played by Michael Shannon, the fish creature is loved and protected by mute janitor

Eliza Esposito, played by Sally Hawkins. She gets a little help from her friends, black

...