Creature from the Black Lagoon

The Creature from the Black Lagoon is one of the many monstrous forms assumed by the entity known as It in Stephen King's novel It. It appears to the boy Eddie Corcoran in Bassey Park on the night of June 19, 1958, as a reptilian, fish-like monster that drags him from the Canal and kills him. The Creature is a manifestation of It's ability to read a victim's mind and take the shape of whatever they fear most, in this case a monster from a horror movie. Its appearance marks one of the early murders in the cycle of violence that plagues Derry during the summer of 1958.

Appearance and Form

The Creature from the Black Lagoon, as It manifests it to Eddie Corcoran, is described as having a long, pleated snout, with green fluid dripping from black gashes like vertical mouths in its cheeks. Its eyes are white and jellylike, and its webbed fingers are tipped with claws like razors. Its respiration is bubbly and deep, the sound of a diver with a bad regulator. As it sees Eddie looking, its green-black lips wrinkle back from huge fangs in a dead and vacant smile. The creature has a fin, something like a rooster's comb and something like a hornpout's poisonous backfin, standing atop its hunched and plated head. The white light from an arc-sodium lamp turns a smoky green as it passes through that membranous headfin. The creature's scales drip slime the color of seaweed, and its gills open and close along its bulging neck and cheeks. This form is a direct projection of the monster from the 1954 film Creature from the Black Lagoon, which Eddie had likely seen or heard about.

The Attack on Eddie Corcoran

On the night of June 19, 1958, Eddie Corcoran, a ten-year-old boy who had run away from home to escape his abusive stepfather, was sitting by the Canal in Bassey Park. A hand closed around his foot, and he looked down to see what he first believed to be his dead brother, Dorsey, who had been beaten to death by their stepfather. The apparition, wearing Dorsey's muddy tatters, croaked, "Eddieeeee... I came to see you Eddieeeeee...." Eddie tried to scream but could only manage a reedy moan. He grabbed the concrete edging and yanked himself backward, but the thing's hand was small and implacable. As Eddie crawled away, white hands appeared on the concrete lip of the Canal, and Dorsey's face emerged, with dim red sparks gleaming in his sunken eyes. Eddie ran, but the thing pursued him, changing form. The overwhelming smell of rotting fish filled the air. It was no longer Dorsey but the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Eddie tripped over a park bench, and the creature closed in. Its batrachian hands closed around his neck, its chitinous hooks scrawling bleeding marks into his skin. Eddie choked, thinking, "You're . . . not . . . real," but the creature was real enough to kill him. As its claws hooked into the soft meat of his neck and his carotid artery let go, Eddie's hands groped at the creature's back, feeling for a zipper, a final, desperate attempt to find the seams of a costume. They fell away only when the creature tore his head from his shoulders with a low satisfied grunt. As Eddie's picture of what It was began to fade, It began promptly to change into something else.

Narrative Role and Significance

The Creature from the Black Lagoon serves as one of the early, visceral manifestations of It's power in the summer of 1958. Its attack on Eddie Corcoran is a key event in the escalating cycle of violence that draws the Losers' Club together. The murder is discovered the next morning by Mike Hanlon, who finds the boy's blood and the grooves where his body was dragged to the Canal. This discovery, along with the pocket knife bearing the initials "E.C." that Mike finds and later throws into the Canal, solidifies Mike's connection to the horror and his role as the group's historian. The creature's form, drawn from popular horror cinema, exemplifies how It exploits the specific fears of its victims, particularly children, to hunt and kill. The attack also highlights the theme of parental abuse and neglect, as Eddie Corcoran was a victim of his stepfather's violence before becoming a victim of It. The creature's final, grotesque transformation after killing Eddie underscores the entity's fundamental nature as a shape-shifter, a being without a true form of its own, that feeds on fear and death.