Also known as The Creature Below, this 2016 film was directed by Stewart Sparke and was either extremely brave or unwise in its tackling of a giant tentacled creature that was akin to a Lovecraftian horror. My friend Leila contacted me about it and said it was a “Blood drinking Cthulhu monster” and the film “certainly (had) vamp tropes”. I can’t disagree, whilst it doesn’t necessarily fully veer into that wider vampiric arena it has tropes on display.
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| opening scene |
After the appearance of a blood-spattered woman and something crawling around (a moment from the film’s denouement), we cut to Olive Crown (Anna Dawson) who is on a video call to Dr Fletcher (Zacharee Lee, Young Dracula). She lays out her credentials – she is a marine biologist who was the only civilian on a US military project to develop an exo-suit. She knows that Fletcher is honing the tech and she wants in.
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| the dive |
We next see her in an exo-suit as she is lowered deep into an oceanic rift. She gets as far as the tests suggest are safe but orders the operator Dara (Johnny Vivash) to lower her further – towards the source of unusual seismic readings they’ve had. Something is down there, something with tentacles that wrap around her… She awakes on the surface spitting water (how they were able to get her up from so deep, despite pressure and a ruined suit and without a decompression chamber isn’t explored). She can’t remember what happened.
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| the egg |
Fletcher isn’t happy with the destruction of a multi-million-pound piece of equipment and sacks her (like all the characters, he is a 2-dimensional construct – bad boss and angry man). Olive goes to check the helmet and it has an oily residue on it. The breathing apparatus is ruptured. Inside she finds more residue and something round and organic. She hides it in a tool box and steals it as she leaves.
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| gunk in eyes |
She gets home but hasn’t told boyfriend Matt (Daniel Thrace) that she was back (or that she almost died and was fired). Nevertheless, he is delighted to see her but has to work (I think in a hospital). She sets up her lab in the basement, discovering that the organic something is an egg and it contains something that is distressed by light. The next day the egg has hatched and something with tentacles is crawling around. It spits black gunk (it seems more than simple ink) into her eyes and she has a flashback to the accident. When she comes around, she captures the creature and puts it in a tank but Matt is home and she has lost time. On the way to a restaurant, she is bothered by headlights at full beam and once there she eats ravenously but is then sick.
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| creature attacks |
So, she becomes obsessed with it – one might say she is a thrall to the creature. She confides in Dara and he suggests it looks malnourished and she needs to find what feed it eats. She tries all sorts but nothing is right, until she purposefully cuts her finger and it reacts and she gives it her blood. This is the accidental feeding blood to the vampire infant trope, followed with her actually nursing it. It won’t drink blood from a heart bought at the butchers (presumably not fresh enough) and Dara has spilled the beans to Fletcher, and he wants the creature. The need to feed it leads to murder, sacrificing people to the creature for it to kill and feed from. We see, often, that her skin looks sallow and there are black rings round her eyes – this felt like a vampire trope. When passing one meal to it her eyes swim into black, suggesting the connection between her and it and the control it holds.
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| creature |
The tropes then are the drinking blood (one wonders why a creature from the bottom of the ocean would rely on mammalian blood, but, hey), the look of sallow skin and blackened eyes that fit the pale vampire trope and finally the fact that she is in thrall to the creature (vampire). For that last point it is worth noting that she thinks herself more important to it (as a high priestess, almost) than she actually is and she is actually rather disposable. She does taste blood herself, at one point, but the film doesn’t suggest she needs it. The film itself isn’t the greatest but this will have had a lot to do with creating a feature that required loads of effects (bodies in the basement do look pretty dope though) and leaps of faith in the plot are required in order to vault over the all too apparent holes.
The imdb page is here.
On Demand @ Amazon US
On Demand @ Amazon UK
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