The latest issue of HorrorHound (#78, July/August 2019) takes an in-depth look back at my favorite Universal Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. In a thirteen-page article (“Rising from the Amazon’s Forbidden Depths: Celebrating 65 Years of the Universal Monster!”), John Kitley sketches the cultural context for Creature trilogy, and presents a plethora of details about the making of the films. Accompanying Kitley’s text are hundreds of wonderful color photos–of movie posters, lobby cards, book covers, and seemingly every piece of tie-in merchandise ever created. The article is immediately followed by “Spawn of the Creature,” in which Josh Hadley offers a critical survey of the various film and TV successors (in some cases, shameless rip-offs) of the original Universal trilogy. One particularly fascinating aspect of this survey is Hadley’s consideration of how the Creature films themselves and their numerous cinematic offspring intersect with the aquatic terrors made famous by H.P. Lovecraft.

As gorgeous-looking as it is informative, this Creature-featuring issue will be cherished by any fan of the Gill Man.