Welcome back, ghouls and ghosts, to the third annual installment of SpookyJawn! It’s our horror takeover of MovieJawn, and this year we are wall to wall with monsters!

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

The ocean is scary. It’s hard to see what’s down there, and some of what we know is down there is downright terrifying. There’s so much we still don’t know about life under the sea (except that they’ve got a hot crustacean band), so we fill it with our imaginations. So many great movies ponder the horrors of the deep, so to make this list, I had to pare down the criteria for inclusion to just what I think of as “genuine” sea monsters. Mostly because each of the restrictions below could easily be their own entire list. So:

No real life animals, including sharks, giant squid, and prehistoric animals
No kaiju
No mermaids
No aliens

With that in mind, here are six of my favorite beasts from beneath the sea!

Gill-Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon (dir. Jack Arnold, 1954)

The final addition to the “core” Universal Monsters, Gill-Man has everything you’d want from a sea monster (yes, he lives in a lagoon, but let’s not discriminate between bodies of water here). An iconic design by former Disney animator Millcent Patrick, Gill-Man seems both natural and otherworldly. The best monster designs make you feel for them, and that is certainly true with this design. Gill-Man, despite his scaly appearance and webbed hands, has a sympathetic appearance. He appears humanoid enough, and his strong brow and eyes go a long way to map emotions onto him when paired with the great pantomime acting from Ben Chapman. And the underwater photography–featuring Ricou Browning in a version of the Creature costume built for swimming–is still astounding and is truly necessary to make the movie work. Creature from the Black Lagoon is an enduring classic, and one I will watch anytime.

The Amphibian Man, The Shape of Water (dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2017)

Guillermo del Toro’s reinterpretation of Creature from the Black Lagoon (with a healthy dose of elements found in Revenge of the Creature) deserves its own place on this list. Revisiting it for this writeup for the first time since I saw it in its original release, I was struck by Doug Jones’ performance as the Amphibian Man, and how much he was able to convey a sense of thought and feeling through the suit (with a noted improvement in suit/computer integration compared to Abe Sapien in the Hellboy films). For whatever reason, this movie left me cold the first time I watched, but this time through I saw the characters beyond their archetypal roles and felt the charm and love put into all of the performances.

The Kraken, Clash of the Titans (dir. Desmond Davis, 1981)

Release the…wait, that meme was from the 2010 snoozefest remake. The original film featureingthe final feature film work of legendary stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen deserves a spot on this list. Many of Harryhausen’s sea monsters were real (like the octopus in It Came From Beneath the Sea or the giant crab in The Mysterious Island) and therefore not eligible for this list. But his kraken, a four armed creature that resembles a mer-squid, is one of the most unique creatures in the animator’s menagerie. The big bad of this movie (so big I almost discounted it as a kaiju), this unique design and imposing scale make it one of the best of all time.

Honorable mention goes to the kraken in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which gets points for a really interesting design and eating Johnny Depp. I didn’t give it its own entry because it gets killed off sometime between Dead Man’s Chest and the sequel, At World’s End. A kraken deserves at least an on-screen death.

The Octalus, Deep Rising (dir. Stephen Sommers, 1998)

First of all, Deep Rising is an underseen movie. It’s basically the wet version of Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy that would arrive a year later. Treat Williams works fine as an ersatz Kurt Russell caught up in the hijacking of a luxury boat, and seeing the push-pull between the hijackers and the Octalus makes the whole thing a very fun monster flick. Plus a great Jerry Goldsmith score.

The Octalus itself is basically a tentacle monster with a vagina dentata face, which definitely makes it feel otherworldly and scary, The sea worm genus Ottoia gets name checked in the movie, which also grounds this sea monster enough to make it feel like something that could exist somewhere in an unknown part of the ocean.

Cthulhu and friends, Underwater (dir. William Eubank, 2020)

Alien is the kind of movie so good it spawned an entire subgenre of blue collar workers facing an unknown threat in an extreme environment. Deep sea riffs on the concept predate Underwater, of course, but this overlooked creature feature manages to keep a brisk pace throughout its lovely 95-minute runtime. Plus, it has Kristen Stewart in a lead role taking on the Ripley archetype but making it her own kind of queer. I call the sea monster at the end of this one Cthulhu because it is clearly inspired by Lovecraft, but it is ambiguous enough to maybe be its own thing. The inventive design work leading up to the finale, combined with the use of oppressive darkness and “snow” floating in the water make the bottom of the ocean feel like an alien planet. A perfect setting for a horror movie.

Red and Blue, The Sea Beast (dir. Chris Williams, 2022)

I was going to just say that The Sea Beast is How to Train Your Dragon on water, but I realize that trilogy is still probably underseen by many adults (it’s excellent, do yourself a favor and check it out too). While many of the elements of the film may feel familiar (there are also elements of Master and Commander and Godzilla here), they come together to make something that feels new. The Sea Beast wears its anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial outlook proudly on its sleeve, and for someone who is basically always rooting for the monsters in any of these movies, that’s a welcome change. And the animation here is downright stunning. The ropes were animated using some of the same techniques that Across the Spider-Verse invented for web physics. Plus, sea shanties!

The designs of the sea beasts themselves are smooth, which makes them appear more friendly and cartoon-like than if they had been rendered with lots of scaly textures. It makes them very cute, which also balances out the massive size of Red especially. The Sea Beast feels like a fully realized world and ecology, and I am desperately hoping for more adventures with this crew.