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 Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

You may not have seen Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), but you’ve probably seen the titular creature, Gill-man. And you’ve most likely seen the most striking scene from the film, where Kay (Julia Adams) swims, unaware that Gill-man (Ricou Browning, who played the character in the underwater scenes) is first watching her, then mirroring her just feet below. He eventually touches her foot, alerting Kay to his presence, but he hides before she can find what grazed her.

The film, which opens with a discussion about evolution and focuses on the age-old fight between greed and environmental conservation, inspired many creature features, among other things, after it. (Famously, Guillermo Del Toro created The Shape of Water as a version of the story where Gill-man and the woman could fall in love.) To read more about Creature from the Black Lagoon and aquatic horror in general, check out Tori Potenza’s piece on how to start watching the genre.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, the television series written and created by Liz Garbus, serves multiple stories. It’s one part documentary, one part murder investigation, and one part eulogy for Michelle McNamara. In the same vein, the show uses imagery from Creature from the Black Lagoon in multiple ways. The film is first brought up as something Michelle and her husband, Patton Oswalt, bonded over. They both loved it.

But let me back up a little: Michelle McNamara was a writer who started her true crime journey, at least publicly, by writing True Crime Diary, a blog about her obsession with true crime and was an attempt for her to share her investigating/web sleuthing with readers and people who could potentially help. (Unfortunately, the site is no longer available, though you can find it through the Way-Back Machine.)

She was very interested in the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker, who she renamed as the Golden State Killer. This obsession had her up at all hours, compulsively checking the internet for new clues, new ideas on who could have committed the heinous crimes attributed to the Golden State Killer. McNamara wrote: “I’m envious, for example, of people obsessed with the Civil War, which brims with details but is contained. In my case, the monsters recede but never vanish.”

After writing an article about the Golden State Killer for LA Magazine, McNamara pitched and eventually started working on a book, called I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, named after something the Golden State Killer said to one of his victims. The show chronicles her experience investigating these crimes.

Throughout the series, the aforementioned iconic scene, where Kay swims with Gill-man in the water beneath her, serves as an important visual metaphor, often to depict the Golden State Killer. He was a threat, looming out of sight of the women and couples he attacked. He tracked and found victims by trailing waterways in the neighborhoods and narrowing down who he could attack on any given night. As Michelle wrote:

His method appeared to be to pick a neighborhood, target a half-dozen possible victims, and maybe even prioritize them… That means that women exist who, because of change of schedule, or luck, were never victims, but like the Creature’s shapely object of obsession treading in the lagoon, they felt something terrifying brush against them.

But I think—going beyond the show’s use of the footage—it’s also a good metaphor for what lurks beneath the surface in all of us. Michelle was battling so much while writing the book. Her mental health, her struggles with being a mother, her addiction that only came to light after her death, things that happened in her past, her grief; all hiding where no one else could see it. The show goes so far in humanizing her, sharing her writing, stories from her childhood, her difficult relationship with her mother, how Michelle just missed the opportunity to speak with her father before he passed. There was so much more to her than the outward picture presents.

I can picture it just like the creature: Grief lurking beneath you at any time. Over losing your parents. Over never having a good relationship with your mother. Over having been taken advantage of by a boss decades ago. The hurts that never go away, only hide inside, waiting to grab you when you least expect it. When it brushes past your mind, just the smallest thought can unnerve you, put you in a bad mood. But you have to go through your day, with all those feelings lurking beneath the surface.

McNamara died in April 2016, and Patton Oswalt was dedicated to getting her book finished and published after her death. It became a hit when it was published in 2018, drawing a lot of attention to the case. The perpetrator was charged in 2018 and sentenced in 2020. The show, which also aired in 2020, is a powerful testament to McNamara’s life, both public and private, and to her belief that these crimes could be solved.

The series, so intentional with how it re-creates (and intentionally does not reenact) the Golden State Killer’s crimes, is the same way with how it depicts Michelle’s life. There are shots of a laptop on a desk, of what looks to be her daughter Alice’s playroom. But in the last episode, these are all packed up, reminding us that this is a television show. These were deliberate creations, now able to be put away and left only for the people who were in Michelle’s life to handle.

By bringing Michelle’s work to light, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark gives us the opportunity to see more of who she was, what drove her to investigate these crimes, and how her writing brought attention to victims who deserved to have someone fighting on their side from the start. It also gave us an incredible depiction of the monstrous, how they can occupy your mind long after they’ve grazed past you. As Michelle wrote, “Violent men unknown to me have occupied my mind all my adult life.”