12 Days of Monsters: Day 7
12 Days of Monsters is a series exploring the visual design of different monsters - looking at what makes them successful (or not), what trends they represent, and what they mean to me personally.
The Monster
“Deep Ones”
from the 2020 film UNDERWATER
Personal Context
Before we get to this monster, a little story:
When I was a kid, I loved this cartoon called DEXTER'S LABORATORY. In 1998, I saw an episode that took a sudden turn towards the end that scared the everliving shit out of me.
In this episode, Dexter gets stuck in an alien prison. His cellmate is a big fat alien with a stubby little trunk instead of a mouth, which just repeats the sound "GORK" over and over. Dexter's cellmate follows him around for the day, and eats Dexter's prison rations by sticking his trunk in the bowl and sucking it up. At the end of the day, Dexter finally manages to translate "gork", and learns that it means "food". Dexter chuckles, since there's no way the alien could eat him with that stubby little trunk.
And then his cellmate reveals an enormous mouth in its abdominal cavity, yawning open like an oven, as it moves to swallow Dexter whole and eat him alive.
Screenshots of my childhood nightmares, from the DEXTER'S LABORATORY episode "Misplaced in Space", originally aired in April of 1998. These images are the clearest I could find, before hitting the part of my search results that included sites dedicated to people with a sexual fetish for images of getting eaten alive. (Yes, I know what it’s called.)
(Don't worry, he's rescued at the last minute.)
That whole sequence at the end of the episode rattled me, though. Something about being conscious and facing an enormous mouth that was about to swallow you whole really shook me.
A scene from the end of the ANIMORPHS episode "My Name is Jake, Part 1" (based off the 7th book in the Animorphs series, titled THE INVASION) - originally aired in September of 1998.
It wasn't just that one episode, either. Later that year, the ANIMORPHS TV show premiered. In the first episode, the villainous alien Visser-3 kills one of his enemies by transforming into a giant monster and swallowing him whole. This was less graphic than the DEXTER'S LABORATORY episode, in that it was shown purely through silhouettes (and pretty badly, too, as the silhouettes' sizes fluctuated a bunch, like a bad Adobe Flash animation). Still, though, Visser-3's victim was conscious and flailing as it happened, and this was plenty gruesome for me. I didn't watch the rest of the series.
Now, even at that age, I was very much into monsters. By the time I was a teenager, I was heavily into zombies - which were going through a bit of a cinematic renaissance at the time, through films like 28 DAYS LATER and RESIDENT EVIL in 2002, DAWN OF THE DEAD and SHAUN OF THE DEAD in 2004, LAND OF THE DEAD in 2005, etc. And in this period one of the defining features of zombies was that they ate people - in fact, they didn't attack people except to try to eat them. Most of the time that someone got killed by zombies, it was that they got torn apart and eaten alive.
And that...didn't bother me, actually. If anything, it was part of the appeal of zombies. Which is kind of weird, right? Strictly speaking, getting eaten by being ripped apart like that is both more violent and more grisly. But that somehow made it more manageable, to me. Maybe it was just because those effects tended to not be very compelling (especially once you can recognize when a zombie is just biting down on a squib that's clearly just resting on someone's cheek or neck, like in 80% of the "gory zombie bites" that I can recall off the top of my head). But I think at least some part of it had to do with the defining features of arrangements like the one in those episodes of DEXTER'S LABORATORY or ANIMORPHS: a huge mouth, and a consciously resisting meal. (Just typing that out made me shiver.)
So, let's talk about a monster that I thought was really cool because it has a huge mouth and tries to swallow a consciously resisting victim whole.
The Movie
from orcs to deep ones
UNDERWATER is a 2020 movie in which staff at a drilling facility on the ocean floor are forced to evacuate when an undersea earthquake causes immense damage to the facility. As they try to do so, they are beset by strange monsters unknown to man. They are never formally named in the script (behind-the-scenes materials calls them “clingers”) but I'm going to call them "Deep Ones".
The Deep Ones initially appear as a type of monster that I find extremely boring, and the first time I saw them on-screen it was honestly a bit of a let-down. This design archetype can probably be described as "human but with face make-up and fangs/claws"…a.k.a. orcs. Sometimes, people find ways to make them distinctive and cool, like in the 2011 film PRIEST (with their eyeless faces and distinctive dentition), but most of the time they just look like extras from LORD OF THE RINGS - like the crawlers in the 2005 film THE DESCENT. And THE DESCENT was a good movie, by the way, to show you just how prominent this kind of design is.
A vampire from PRIEST, a.k.a. an eyeless orc. This is probably the least-known of these movies, and yet, has the most inventive “orc”.
A crawler from THE DESCENT, a.k.a. a hairless orc.
An actual orc from LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING
Concept art of the Deep Ones from UNDERWATER (referred to here as “clingers”), a.k.a. scuba orcs. Or so they first appear.
So yeah, when I first got a look at one of the Deep Ones in UNDERWATER, with their bald-humanoid-but-with-sharp-teeth-and-claws look, my first reaction was "aight, another one of these". I had to tune out a little bit each time they were on-screen to keep enjoying the movie. But a little later on, they revealed a wrinkle in the design that brought me back around.
A Deep One begins to open its mouth in UNDERWATER
The Deep Ones had a maxilla vaguely resembling a human's sure - but they actually had no mandible (that is, they had no lower jaw). They certainly had some teeth where you'd expect the lower jaw to be, but when they open their mouth at all then you see that these actually line the rim of an expanding, billowing gullet - like the pouch coming out of the bottom half of a pelican’s beak, but without the beak itself to give it a definite form.
This, finally, isn’t just an orc with a gimmick. This isn’t a design that ends with “scary teeth and a mean face”. This face is less about scowling angrily at people and more about swallowing them whole.
Which, of course, they actually do.
A Deep One ingests our hero, in what should’ve been a recreation of a type of scene from my childhood nightmares
And I completely loved it.
For starters, I loved how it added something distinctive and unexpected to an otherwise aggressively boring monster design.
But I also loved the specific distinctive thing they added - one that enriched the rest of the monster’s design, and by extension, the rest of the movie.
The Visual Design
You can have a little Lovecraft, as a treat
Part of my initial problem with seeing the orc-knockoff design was that we were at the bottom of the sea. A lot of the first two acts of UNDERWATER are about managing the logistical perils of being at the bottom of the ocean. Our heroes are humanoids which can't survive that pressure of those depths without complicated suits - so seeing them pursued by humanoids that don't care about the pressure at all felt dissonant. This dissonance is lessened considerably by including some anatomy that actually fits the setting. The ballooning mouth/throat is reminiscent of real anatomy from actual deep-sea creatures - like viperfish and gulper eels.
A gulper eel (possibly Saccopharynx lavenbergi). Photo by Bruce Robinson.
This feature of the Deep Ones' anatomy also informed how the creatures moved and behaved as the movie went on, which helped make them even more inhuman. Since they had such a huge mouth and were capable of swallowing struggling prey whole, that became one of their main modes of attack - which meant they began to move in ways that were a bit more unusual and creative than "a guy in vampire makeup swiping at you while snarling". However, they're not that much bigger than their human victims that swallowing them whole is a quick ordeal - their whole body and posture contorts to facilitate the maneuver, with them bending over and bracing themselves with all four limbs as they slowly work their way down the length of their prey, not that dissimilar to real-world snakes.
The "plausibility points" scored by this design element had a second payoff for me, too. I switched from thinking "ok fine, I guess the monsters at the bottom of the sea are random spooky humanoids cos this is a generic creature feature" to "wait...what sorts of humanoids would actually be at the bottom of the sea?"
The answer to that is why I call them "Deep Ones".
In H. P. Lovecraft's short story A SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH, the "Deep Ones" were humanoid fish-like creatures that were the result of interbreeding between humans and a gargantuan sea-deity named Dagon that lived - you guessed it - at the bottom of the sea. Lovecraft's Deep Ones are humanoid primarily because part of their ancestry was actual humans - but another part of their ancestry was a benthic behemoth from the light-forsaken depths of the ocean. Hence their name.
Once the design of UNDERWATER's creatures was revealed to be more thoughtful than "budget orcs again", it wasn't long before I started wondering if these were supposed to be Lovecraft's Deep Ones.
Which made it all the more satisfying when the third act of the movie reveals that the answer is, unambiguously, yes.
UNDERWATER started out as a pretty decent "how do humans escape an inhospitable environment" movie like 2013's GRAVITY, then started to slide down into a fairly generic creature feature - then rocketed back up as the creatures were effectively revealed to not be what you initially thought, culminating in a third act that is essentially fanservice for fans of the Cthulhu mythos like me. And a subtle but important element that bridged us from "forgettable" to "memorable" was this one element of the creature design - the inhuman gulping mouth.
Reflections
on big mouths
I knew I had to write this post when I realized the connection between the big-mouthed nasties in UNDERWATER and the sort of shit that really scared me back in 1998.
By now, I'm not really scared by that stuff in the same way - I'm pretty sure, at least. Not only did I love UNDERWATER, but I've also had a pet snake (a ball python) for several years now. My chonky scaly girl (named "Yig" after another Lovecraft story) eats rats, and swallows them whole - and not only am I not squicked out by this, I actually find it fascinating to watch.
But even back when I was a kid, I realize there was a bit more nuance to how the whole "eaten alive" thing got to me. For instance, if the big mouth was too big, it wasn't as unsettling - I wasn't bothered by the space slug in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, or by Charybdis' yawning chasm of a mouth from the 1997 miniseries THE ODYSSEY (which I wrote about earlier in this series).
I would say that it might have to do with the mouth being closer in size to the person being swallowed, or the mouth being much larger than expected - but the more I think about it, the latter might be something I actively found cool, even as a kid, rather than something that unsettled me. In 2000, just about a year and a half after the episodes of DEXTER'S LABORATORY and ANIMORPHS that got under my skin so much, I saw the movie GODZILLA 2000. In that movie's climax, the monster Orga unhinges its jaw, revealing that it goes all the way down past its head and into its chest, and attempts to swallow Godzilla whole. And that didn't scare me at all.
Orga faces off against Godzilla in GODZILLA 2000, the movie that Toho made as a response to Hollywood’s GODZILLA
Orga unhinges its jaw, revealing unfolding cheeks with grasping claws, as it tries to swallow Godzilla whole
Maybe that’s because the effects and choreography were kind of bad. Or maybe because Godzilla’s face couldn’t emote enough to show fear at what was happening. Or Godzilla and Orga might’ve been too close to each other in size.
Who knows really?
Although the scenes from DEXTER'S LABORATORY and GODZILLA 2000 both suggest that there's large chunks of the population that don't find this sort of imagery too disturbing (the former was, after all, a kids' show), there are definitely plenty of people who do find it unsettling. The 2014 film THE TAKING OF DEBORAH LOGAN is a found-footage-style possession movie in which an old woman becomes possessed by something evil - and one of the more noteworthy parts of the movie (and the only reason I know about it) is a scene where the possessed woman's jaw unhinges like a python's, and she is seen slowly trying to eat a little girl head-first. In fact, if you do an image search for "the taking of deborah logan", there's a good chance that most of the results will be stills from that scene specifically. Mouths that are unexpectedly too big are definitely fertile ground for imagery that unsettles - or at least, fascinates - many audiences. For me, it may be both.
On which note, I want to end this piece by sharing the story one of my favorite Tumblr interactions, featuring one of my favorite internet artists. This is the story of Yobby.
One day, living inspiration and distinctive artist iguanamouth announced they had a dream where they met Yoshi’s father, and his name was “Yobby,” and he looked like this:
This art prompted another user to suggest that Yobby ingested things simply by unhinging his jaw “like a basking shark” and scooping things up.
This bit of anatomical speculation led iguanamouth to make two more illustrations, asking the inquirer to clarify if they meant Yobby’s mouth opened like this…
…or like this:
Yobby’s mystery persists to this day.
