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Guillermo del Toro’s science fiction fantasy film “The Shape of Water” (2017) employs a wide array of references, homages, and allusions to a multitude of works from the artistic mediums of literature, cinema, television, and music. Using... more
Guillermo del Toro’s science fiction fantasy film “The Shape of Water” (2017) employs a wide array of references, homages, and allusions to a multitude of works from the artistic mediums of literature, cinema, television, and music. Using the framework of intertextual analysis as outlined by Julia Kristeva and further refined by Gérard Genette, the author examines the conventions of 20th Century American monster literature and movie genres. Through an exposition on the figure of the monster in early to 20th Century American pulp literature and horror movies, the author examines it as a symbol loaded with the racialized and sexualized fears concerning the religious cultures of non-Western peoples and miscegenation. In these contexts, the monster embodies a threat to socially acceptable sexual relations whose presence and activities upset the circumscribed boundaries normative romance and reproduction. Responding to the genre-specific focus on the sexual threat the monster signifies, “The Shape of Water” disrupts this categorization of the non-human monster as menace by portraying the creature as a love interest while representing a traditionally masculine figure as the antagonistic. The film invokes specific biblical narratives regarding gods other than that of the Israelites to achieve underscore this message, creating a theology centered on these reviled deities. This study focuses on the film’s reliance on H.P. Lovecraft’s short horror fiction stories “Dagon” (1919) and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1936), Jack Arnold’s monster movies “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (1954) and “Revenge of the Creature” (1955), the biblical texts of Gen. 1:27 and Judg. 16, and Henry Koster’s film adaptation of the biblical Book of  Ruth, “The Story of Ruth” (1960). Through a close reading of del Toro’s narrative enters into a dialogue with these hypotexts, the author demonstrates that “The Shape of Water” functions as a hypertext that reverses the ideological significations established by previous conventions. “The Shape of Water” draws explicit thematic and narrative inspiration from this selection of sources to subvert their polemic intentions and generate a new system of values based on an ethic of acceptance for those figures traditionally marginalized within the narratives of the aforementioned texts. The author recognizes a connection between these anxieties and the biblical prohibitions on worshipping foreign gods and marriages and/or sexual relations with persons outside the ethnoreligious Israelite community. Analyzing the ways in which “The Shape of Water” references the selection of biblical and biblical-inspired texts, the author argues that the film generates a subversive value system that allows for the monster to become an object of affection and reverence.
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