10 Monster Movies That Totally Screw With Your Brain

From the sublime to the ridiculous: Barbara Peeters’ horrid monster movie, recut by a calculating Roger Corman against her wishes to include scenes of nudity and sexual assault, is a peculiar, nasty little movie that the director has tried her best to disown over the years.

The result of corporate hormonal experiments on salmon stocks to increase their physical size and therefore the revenue taken from farming the mutated fish, the creatures from the deep that terrorise the Californian fishing village of Noyo aren’t just murderous beasts. No, that wouldn’t be enough for Corman: they had to be sex-hungry monsters, too.

As a result, what we get are scenes of fish-monster rape interspersing the usual carnage and rendering the movie offensive to the point of misogyny. Why these mutant descendants of ocean-dwelling fish would fixate mating with human women is never explained, probably because it makes no sense whatsoever: but it does add an element of sexual sadism to the horrific mise-en-scène, moving Humanoids From The Deep firmly into the category of exploitation movie.

Exploitation movies like this come from a wracked aspect of the creative psyche, expressing transgressive urges and withheld desires. That doesn’t alleviate the creeping misogyny of the film, of course: in point of fact, that misogyny locates those repressed urges firmly within the male mindset.

These ravening denizens of the deep are specifically targeting women, after all: all the men have to fear is bloody murder and, naturally, the loss of their women-folk to invading beasts, an old insecurity dragged deep from within the heteronormative masculine subconscious.