Though there were many films and antagonists in Universal's classic line-up, the most memorable and culturally identifiable are Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, and The "Gill-man." Released in 1954, over a decade after The Wolf Man made his debut, Creature from the Black Lagoon sees the studio partially break from its past to create a familiar narrative that is distinctly aware of its society's changing values, identity, and fears.
While the previous two decades of Universal horror films were largely fixated upon European identity and choose symbolic villains from European folk-lore to personify the way that centuries old perspectives and injustices could still affect then-modern perspectives through clashes of values, Creature from the Black Lagoon stages its identity and creature in a distinctly modern, post WWII, and atomic-era light. The film begins with an abridged history of the Earth's formation and biological developments, setting up the creature to be a kind of 'missing-link' survivor of a speciation event that has gone undetected in remote regions of the Amazon. The genetic and biological aspects that the creature's origins invoke subverts the discussion of religion and magic found in previous films, but also draws parallels to the ways in-which the old discussions can still be found present in new ones, as each force seeks to explain the way the world and people came to be as they are today. Literally moving the setting away from Europe, the film's setting draws upon the newness of still unexplored regions of the world, comparing the search for remote life on earth to the possibility of life on other planets as the Space Race positions humanity toward the heavens. Despite the new location, the film still looks towards the past, as its creature is a hold-out from the past, perhaps a metaphor for the old perspective on humanity Universal films once shared finding himself in a world where probing scientists seek to destroy him. Though he is an agent of the past like Dracula or the Mummy, the Gill-man is more specifically an agent of the past from a more modern, 1954 scientific present perspective that feels like an agent of the future given the film's positioning him. It is from this fear of man's possible origins and what they could mean for the future that his horror truly emerges.
This final creature of the classic Universal monsters strikes a balance between being outwardly terrifying and inwardly pitiable. Just as Dracula hides in shadows and travels by night, the Gill-man hides beneath the water and travels in an aquatic realm, and just as Frankenstein's Monster is a veritable juggernaut, the Gill-man is a savage combatant able to overpower the human expeditioners who enter his domain. His connection to water unites his position as a predecessor to humanity while creating another modern-day connection to the unexplored vastness of the then-present world, and the frequent image of his webbed hand emerging from the water feels like a corruption of the image of the first amphibian ancestors breaking the water's surface to walk on land. He is like a force of nature that fights back against man's prying eyes that seek to classify him and ogle him for knowledge one moment then douse him in chemicals and try to harpoon him the next. The sequence of the creature observing the sole woman of the expedition, Kay, is especially striking not only for his proximity to the swimmer, unaware of his presence, but for its deliberate psychosexual undertones, as he gazes upon her just as the camera and the viewer gazed upon her in perhaps intentional, perhaps unintentional meta-commentary on objectification that unites the creature with the viewer in a moment of uncomfortable similarity. The creature's capturing of Kay at the film's climax plays into fears of miscegenation with (novel) Frankenstein's Monster-like implications about what kind of humanity-debasing race their union could spawn. The Gill-man as an ancient human predecessor is a corruption of what are thought as base instincts such as the desire to reproduce and defend territory, those instincts which ironically make humanity less humane despite their apparent ubiquity throughout history. The audience can find a darker side of themselves reflected in this monster, and so too perhaps sympathy in these comparisons given more generous, modern interpretation.