Yaphet Kotto dies distracting the alien to save a white woman in Alien. In Leviathan, black actor Ernie Hudson’s character tackles the sea monster, allowing the white couple to escape. Their survival is ensured by the self-sacrifice of another character, often a non-white male. In the tradition of creature-horror, a white man, white woman or both almost always survive. Thus, the order and manner in which they die become the most suspenseful, important part of the film. Past incarnations of the creature film assure the us, the audience, that almost everyone in the gang will die. Since the time honored story structures of creature feature movies can no longer surprise us in and of themselves, the suspense of such films comes in guessing how they will adhere or depart from the formula.
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The exact location, plot devices and type of monster are arbitrary, we pay to see interesting variations on a group of people running from a big, mean mouth full of teeth. Clover goes on to say that “there is in some sense no original, no real or right text, but only variants a world in which, therefore, the meaning of the individual example lies outside itself (169).” This too is true of creature movies. While I have named only a few recent examples, the killer creature genre reaches back decades, to B-movies from the early 60's like The Killer Shrews, or even to Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).
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Just as the tradition of slasher films involves “the free exchange of themes and motifs, the archetypal characters and situations, the accumulation of sequels, remakes, imitations (169),” so does the tradition of creature-features. Clover also illuminates the identical characteristics of creature horror films. In her description of the slasher sub-genre of horror, Carol J. In all these movies, a group or gang of five to a dozen people of differing races, sexes and classes become trapped with a killer creature (a Soviet-spawned virus which mutates people into sea monsters, an alien virus that turns people into killer robots, a big snake, a giant sea monster, a giant shark, and a bunch of acid-blooded aliens respectively.) Some relatively recent movies which incorporate the gang-pick off system include Leviathan, Virus, Anaconda, Deep Rising, the Jaws movies to some extent, and of course all four of the Alien movies. I will dub this plot structure as the “gang-pick off” system. In reviewing Deep Blue Sea, I will concentrate on the relationships between these characters and the rest of the cast, and on what these relationships may say regarding gender, race and class.Ĭreature-feature movies are a sub-genre of horror in which a monster (often an oversized or especially ferocious version of a familiar animal) systematically picks off and eats most of the cast. Specifically, I was surprised at how the film’s two black male characters, its two white women and major white male character operated within the story. Deep Blue Sea sticks with most of the genre’s plot and character standards (which I will briefly define later in my review,) but strays from them in a few notable spots. Having sought out and devoured creature-feature flicks for years, I’m familiar with every cliche the genre has to offer. But something about Deep Blue Sea in particular struck me, and ultimately upset me. I’ve always enjoyed these types of movies for their camp and comic value, their special effects and the visceral thrills they provide. The story contains expected amounts of traps, escapes and grisly shark attacks, generally following a familiar formula established in countless other killer creature movies.
When a tropical storm damages their isolated, floating ocean lab and surrounding shark enclosures, the scientists and crew are stalked by the escaped sharks.
In the movie, a group of scientists genetically alter a group of Mako sharks in order to harvest brain proteins which will cure Alzheimer’s disease.
Deep Blue Sea: Gender, Race and Class in the Jaws of the Beast Deep Blue Sea: Gender, Race and Class in the Jaws of the BeastĪs an avid fan of “creature-feature” horror movies, I was ecstatic when I first heard about last summer’s Deep Blue Sea.
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