Sardonic Tales: “Dark and Deep”

A few years ago, I did a thing where I picked a movie that would make a good double-feature with one of the stories in my then-newest collection, Painted Monsters. This year, for the Countdown to Halloween, I thought it might be fun to do the same thing, but with my now-newest collection, Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales.

The film to pair with “Dark and Deep” is, in fact, so obvious that I put a disclaimer in my author’s notes saying that I had actually written the story before Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water ever came out. Still, there’s no denying that it would make a great companion piece to this elegiac little story about a mummified merman.

It’s true that I wrote the story long before Shape of Water, though, so I wasn’t thinking about that movie when I wrote it. I was thinking about the 2001 remake of Edward L. Cahn’s campy 1956 carnival sideshow The She-Creature, and about the sort of ur-boardwalk it-came-from-the-sea film, Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide.

For all that it definitely influenced this story, though, I couldn’t swear that I’ve actually seen all of the 2001 version of She Creature. I should rectify that soon, though. It obviously stuck with me.