10 Films Whose Novelisations Took On A Life Of Their Own

10. The Creature From The Black Lagoon

Unfortunately, now that The Shape of Water was a success, we'll never see Guillermo Del Toro's actual remake of The Creature From The Black Lagoon.

But there was a time when the Pan's Labyrinth director, among others, were considering a straight reboot of the last of Universal's monsters.

The Creature From the Black Lagoon received a straight novelisation in 1954 by John Russell Fearn, primarily there for children too scared to see it on the big screen. In 1977, however, Walter Harris (under the name Carl Dreadstone) wrote an updated version that wildly rebooted the creature.

It was one in a series of books intent on recreating the classic Universal Monsters, which were seeing a bit of a revival thanks to Hammer Studios and several recent Dracula adaptations.

Dreadstone's monster was considerably larger than the film's human-sized Gill Man; about ten times the size. The creature was as large as the boat that's hunting it, weighing in at 30 tons.

In addition, we learn a lot more about the Gill Man's biology, including the fact that he's warm and cold-blooded and a hermaphrodite, which can be seen to partially sabotage the film's King Kong-esque ending.

The novelisation is also much more violent, with the creature eating, stepping on and impaling humans with a tree branch (a death that was deleted from the film sequel Revenge of the Creature).

We'll likely never see an adaptation of Harris' roided out Creature, but it's certainly strange enough to warrant curiosity.