Justin Dow

Eerie Earfuls 1.10: Candyman & The Shape of Water

the movie posters for candyman and the shape of water. candyman features an extreme closeup of a white person's eye. their eye color is red, and instead of a pupil, there is the silhouette of a man with a hook hand. a bee balances on the eye lid. the shape of water features a fish man and a woman in a red dress lovingly embracing as they float a blue-green ocean.

We have returned! Welcome to the first NEW episode of our show. We’ve implemented a few changes as part of our return:

First, we have new microphones and editing software. This should mean things sound even better than they did before, but since it’s been so long since we’ve done this and we’re learning new tech, there may be some hiccups along the way. I hope you’ll bear with us as we find our footing again.

Second, going forward, we’re going to release one episode a month on the last Monday of each month. This is literally a two-man operation, and a lot of work goes into these episodes. Watching both movies, researching, recording, and editing two episodes a month was too much for two people with day jobs. But that just means we have more time to make each episode something of which we can be proud.

Now, without further ado:

In this episode, we discuss Gothic romance, monsters as a metaphor for marginalized communities, and the long history of romancing the monster. Baby, lock the door and turn the lights down low as we discuss the 1992 Gothic horror Candyman and the 2017 fantasy drama The Shape of Water.

Plus, we discuss color meanings, music reflecting theme, and the Christian symbolism for bees.

Sources and Extra Reading

Transcript

Below is the transcript for Eerie Earfuls 10: Candyman & The Shape of Water. The text has been cleaned up some for readability and clarity.

(Intro – “Baba Yaga” by Kevin MacLeod plays)

Brandon:  Hey, everyone, and welcome to Eerie Earfuls, as foretold by the ancient ones. Each episode, we choose a horror movie double feature to compare and contrast for your entertainment. Fair warning: there will be spoilers.

 I’m Brandon

 Justin:  And I’m Justin.

 Let’s get to today’s double feature. The person picking the double feature rotates from episode to episode. This week was my pick and I chose Candyman and The Shape of Water. Let’s pop in the synopsis tape.

 (Tape inserted. “Anxiety” by Kevin MacLeod plays)

 Brandon:  Candyman is a 1992 American supernatural horror film written and directed by Bernard Rose based on the short story, “The Forbidden” by Clive Barker.

Helen Lyle is a graduate student in Chicago researching urban legends. She hears a story about the Candyman, who haunts the Cabrini-Green projects, and who by saying his name five times in a mirror, appears and kills the summoner with his hook-hand. Helen looks into the case and finds a score of similar murders, deciding to write a thesis on the legend as a coping mechanism for hardships. She and her friend Bernadette visit the projects and meet Anne-Marie and her infant son named Anthony.

Helen learns that the Candyman was said to be the son of a slave who gained wealth mass-producing shoes. The son was raised in white society and became a portrait painter until falling in love with a white woman. A lynch mob attacked him, cutting off his painting hand, smearing him with the honey, and covering him in bees. His corpse was burned and his ashes were scattered across what would become Cabrini-Green.

While continuing her investigations, Helen is attacked by someone wielding a hook calling himself the Candyman. However, later she encounters the real Candyman, who tells her that her doubts mean he must kill innocents to keep his legend alive. Helen blacks out and wakes up in Anne-Marie’s apartment covered in blood, whose dog has been killed and whose child is missing. Candyman continues to frame Helen for multiple murders, including Bernadette and the psychiatrist assigned to her case once she’s committed. Helen escapes the hospital and returns to Cabrini-Green to save Anthony, who the Candyman has hidden at the base of a pile of rubble intended for a bonfire. Helen climbs inside to save the baby, but the residents, unaware of this, set fire to the pile. Helen is able to escape and save the baby, but succumbs to her own burns and dies.

The film ends with Helen’s grief-stricken and guilt-ridden husband looking at his bathroom mirror and saying Helen’s name five times. Helen’s spirit appears and kills him with a hook, herself now a vengeful, folkloric spirit like the Candyman.

(Tape ejected and flipped. “Night of Chaos” by Kevin MacLeod starts playing)

 Justin:  The Shape of Water is a 2017 American romantic supernatural film directed by Guillermo del Toro and written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor.

Elisa Esposito, who was found abandoned as a child with wounds on her neck by the side of a river, is mute and communicates through sign language. She works as a cleaner at a secret government laboratory in Baltimore, Maryland in 1962, at the height of the Cold War. Her only friends are her closeted next-door neighbor, Giles, and her African American co-worker Zelda. The facility receives a mysterious creature captured from a South American river by Colonel Richard Strickland, who is in charge of the project, to study it. Curious about the creature, Elisa discovers it is a humanoid amphibian. She begins visiting him in secret, and the two form a close bond.

The US military, hoping to exploit the creature for an American advantage in the Space Race, decide to kill and dissect it. Simultaneously, Dr. Hoffstetler, a Russian spy is told by his government to kill the creature to keep it out of US hands. Elisa and Hoffstetler decide to free the creature with the help of Giles and Zelda.

Elisa keeps the creature in her bathtub, planning to release him when rain floods a nearby canal, but Strickland eventually deduces that Hoffstetler was part of the escape and tortures him into revealing that Zelda and Elisa were part of the break out as well. Meanwhile, Elisa and Giles learn the creature is able to heal through touch — mending a cut on Giles’s forearm and restoring hair to his balding head.

Strickland arrives at Zelda’s home and threatens her until her husband reveals Elisa has been housing the creature. Elisa is tipped off by Zelda and hurries the creature to the canal, but Strickland soon catches up with her. He arrives and shoots the creature and Elisa, killing them both. The creature, however, revives himself and heals his wounds, slashing Strickland’ss throat before jumping into the canal with Elisa’s body. While underwater, the creature heals Elisa, mending not only her gunshot wound, but revealing the scars on her neck are actually gills.

The film ends with Giles stating that he believes Elisa and the creature remained in love and lived happily ever after.

Brandon:  Okay. So why did you pick these two movies?

 Justin:  So I chose these two movies for two reasons. One, they are both, in their own way, romances. Candyman is sort of a Gothic romance and The Shape of Water follows in ways a sort of Hollywood romance which is referenced throughout the movie. And also because both of them use their monsters as metaphors and allegories for minority experiences in the United States.

 To expand on that more, Candyman is the son of a slave. His story is a little more explicit in that he is the direct result of racial actions. He is lynched by a lynch mob. And so he is sort of bringing revenge on present day America. Whereas in The Shape of Water, it’s a little more allegorical because the gillman doesn’t directly correspond to any specific minority. He’s more just treated poorly alongside the main characters who are also minorities who are treated poorly. And so you’re able to reflect on the similarities in their treatment.

 Brandon:  I think in like a little bit of a roundabout way, the fishman or whatever his name is in The Shape of Water–

 Justin:  Actually, they referred to him on set as “Charlie,” which is the name of the mascot for the Tuna of the Sea.  (Both laugh)  So, maybe worth calling him Charlie?

 Brandon:  I see, so Charlie… (both laugh more)  …are you sure Charlie’s not the StarKist tunafish?

 Justin:  Yeah, maybe. It’s StarKist. It’s one of the tuna brands.

 Brandon:  I was gonna say Chicken of the Sea is a mermaid…just saying…

 Justin:  Yeah, you’re right. StarKist.

 Brandon:  Okay. I was going to say…

 Anyway, I think that Charlie could be in a more roundabout way representative of people that have like physical deformities, you know? Like those really rare one in a million kind of diseases. Like people that have excessive hair all over their body, or like the Elephant Man or something like that, who can be seen as monstrous and not human? And their intelligence and their emotional qualities can be forgotten just strictly based on appearance.

 Justin:  I mean, sure. But I think that Charlie has sort of a stand in for all types of minorities, because the thing about being a minority in a country like the United States is that your humanity is denied. Like you said, the folks with disfigurements or with disabilities, their humanity gets denied. Folks that carry canes, for example, able-bodied people will scoff at their pain and say like, Oh, you you’re just being lazy. You don’t really need that cane.

 Black folks… their humanity was denied for centuries and even taught in, you know, even in like churches, pastors would write entire sermons about how black folks were descended from Cain or from some other nonsense to justify why they didn’t have to treat them like people.

 In fact, we even talked about in the Frankenstein episode, how an entire scientific branch for a while, phrenology, was basically developed so that they could justify, “No, see black people aren’t really humans cause reasons.” So yeah. Charlie is definitely sort of a standing of all of that.

 Brandon:  I do agree. I only mentioned that it could be like the people with physical deformities because you’ve already got three other people in the cast that represent other minorities, like people with disabilities, people of color and LGBTQ plus people. So, anyway, that’s all just going to say, sorry.

 Justin:  So digging into the monsters as minorities thing a little bit, it was really interesting the way the two movies had similar ways of dealing with them. So on the one hand, Candyman is a little more explicit in the origins of the monster, but the actual plot of the movie is a little more abstract in that Cabrini Green sort of symbolizes the trauma of white supremacy on minorities. Cabrini Green is the projects that’s eventually built where the Candyman’s corpse ashes were scattered. The reason those projects exist is because in America, there there’s been this long history of housing discrimination. Things like red lining.

 Red lining is the practice of denying key services like home loans and insurance, or increasing their costs, to residents and to defined graphical area. The reason it’s called red lining is because as part of the New Deal, whenever companies were starting to decide where places could be safely insured and where they couldn’t, they would cover those areas red and coincidence of coincidences all the places where insurance would be not great were where black folks lived. Which is why it was called red lining.

 Versus like Shape of Water, which was a little more explicit. It was a little more Hollywood cartoonish racism. Like you have one man who stands in as a symbol for white supremacy and the patriarchy in Strickland. He is sort of  the amalgamation of all of those problems. He is defeated by, you know, minorities banding together. But it’s also a little more explicitly about those specific things because they show that kind of discrimination on display and it’s specifically lamp shaded.

 Whereas in Candyman, it’s more subtly mentioned. Like when Helen gets attacked in the bathrooms and after the police come to save her from that guy who said he was the Candyman, she says, “It’s ridiculous. Dozens of murders because have been happening, and the cops don’t bother to look into it. But as soon as one white woman is attacked, the police show up and sweep the entire building.”

 Brandon:  It was funny how little they did to upscale those apartments because she was basically showing that girl around the apartment. And she was like, “Look at this. These are all cinder block walls. And all they did was cover them in plaster. Boom, automatically it makes it Ritzier. But like there were still traces of that past there — like with the medicine cabinet where she pulls it out and you can see it just goes to the other medicine cabinet. And I thought that was, I thought it was like a really interesting kind of, sort of like mini allegory for gentrification. I just thought it was… it was kind of cool how on the surface her apartment was, you know, very “this is fancy” or whatever, but really if you look past like the very thin veneer of what little upscaling they did, you can see the past. And it kind of just reminded me of the history of America in general.

 Justin:  Yeah, for sure.

 Brandon:  Cause it was like  (laughs)  we’re always like, “America’s great!” And then you look past that thin veneer of “everything is great,” and then you’re like, “Oh, there’s actually a lot of, lot of problems.” You can easily see where we’ve been.

 Justin:  Yeah, definitely. Even nowadays you can see like situations where people are like, “Oh, I don’t know what you’re complaining about, Black Lives Matter. All that stuff was in the past. That was in the 1800s or 60s or whatever.” And then, if you actually take the time to look at, say, recent history, you can see that black folks are categorically poorer than white folks, or black folks have a harder time — they have to make more to live in worst neighborhoods, or the fact that they are killed more often by police where white folks are taken in. It’s one of those things where you can say, “Oh, we’re good. We got rid of Jim Crow. So everything’s fixed.” And it’s this thin veneer of whitewash over the ugly truth.

 Brandon:  Mmmhmmm.

 Justin:  Like I said, part of it was that both of these movies explore minorities and their difficulties in the United States, historically and contemporarily, but also they’re romances. They’re odd though.  (both chuckle)

 Brandon:  Yeah.

 Justin:  Candyman is explicitly a Gothic romance. So there’s this long history of people being romantically interested in monsters. There’s usually kind of two different ways to approach the story. There’s the “you want to change the monster” — I can fix them. I can make him better. The other side of the coin is the desire to embrace that which society abhors. There is this draw to them by people. People seem really interested in acceptance of those dark things. Not necessarily always rejecting, but even saying like, “yeah, this person has these dark things about them, but isn’t that kind of what makes them cool? Don’t we kind of love that about them?”

 Brandon:  Yeah. I did not get… (laughs)  When I watched The Shape of Water, obviously the way it is set up and everything, she kind of has a fascination with the monster. And…well, I should say…whatever…Charlie, I guess. The Gill Man. And she has a fascination with him. Obviously. Anybody would. And it’s a gentle fascination to kind of see what it knows and if it can learn and things like that, and she discovers that it does enjoy, you know, music and it can learn to, you know, speak, and she enjoys its company. So it kind of develops, you know, into a romance from both sides. I think that’s pretty clear.

 Candyman is very one sided when I watched it. Like I did not get any kind of desire from Helen, but she just seemed to me like she was kind of stuck in her academic stuff and she was trying to be taken seriously and all Candyman wanted was, he was like, “I just want you, I just want you baby.” He hypnotizes her and like all kinds of stuff. And I was like, this is very one sided. It feels almost like, uh, what is that, you know, where somebody eventually becomes infatuated with their kidnapper?

 Justin:  Stockholm syndrome.

 Brandon:  It kind of felt like that. Yeah. Stockholm syndrome. And it’s… I dunno… I mean, I did enjoy it because it kind of reminded me of like the Phantom of the Opera, where, you know, the Phantom is aggressively pursuing what’s her name, Christine. And she is fascinated with him, but does not reciprocate those feelings. So it is very Phantom of the Opera-esque, except way more intense.  (Laughs)

 Justin:  That actually ties into the concept of the Gothic romance. Because in the Gothic romance, there are specific tropes that are hit. One of them is the distressed heroine, which Helen definitely is. She’s in a loveless marriage, her husband is cheating on her, and sort of openly doing it and almost like daring her to say something about it.

 And there’s also the Byronic hero, which is based on Lord Byron. It’s meant to… it’s sort of the precursor of the antihero. And you can see that. It’s meant to be like a hero, but with these sort of darker qualities to him, and you can sort of see that in the way that Candyman is presented.

 One of the things I find remarkable about that though, cause like you’re right. If you, if you take this story completely at face value and you apply like modern, respectable, socially healthy ideas of romance… it’s horrifying. He’s like murdering people and like cajoling her in to becoming his victim. But…it’s a really interesting take. The way he’s inviting her to join him. He says, “Be my victim.” It’s not like he just kills her. He’s not Freddy Kruger, like hunting her down. He is asking her, “Join me in death. We can be — we can live together in infamy, in legend.”

 Like on the one hand, yes, he’s also slowly murdering everyone around her to kind of sweeten the deal and make her…convince her to do it. But in a way, if you approach it from that sort of dream logic of immortality through stories, he is setting her up to have her own immortality. Like he is killing those people, but he’s doing it in such a way that she always gets blamed for it. So that at the end, when she does succumb to death, she herself is now immortal. He has sort of given her this gift of being able to exist beyond time through fear and through story.

 Brandon:  Yeah. I was going to say when you were talking, you know, he was like “be my victim” and all this other stuff. And I was like, I mean, yeah, in some of those things, it does seem kinda like a romance and then… yeah… he’s like, “Oh, you don’t want to? Well, I’m going to murder everyone around you and frame it to where it’s impossible for you to get out of it. So you basically have no other choice other than, you know, like join me or spend the rest of your time in an institution or something.”  (Justin laughs)  And I’m like…ugh…creepy

 Justin:  “Happy commitment! You’re going to be committed either way — committed to me or committed in a hospital.”

 Brandon:  Yeah. So it did, it felt like a very one sided romance, and it felt like an extremely sinister, heightened version of the Phantom of the Opera.

 Justin:  Yeah. I can see that. I also think like, there are ways that the movie frames him to make him romantic. One, it’s Tony Todd, and he was a very handsome motherfucker back in the day. Not that he’s not now.

 Brandon:  I mean, he still is. Yeah.

 Justin:  And he’s not even framed threateningly. Like when Freddy Kruger is introduced, he cuts his own fingers off and stretches his arms really wide and like scratches the walls. And all Tony Todd does is just walk forward. And say, (in a low, gutteral voice, mimicking Tony Todd)  “Be my victim.” And the way they frame Helen’s response to that, it’s a soft focus closeup, just like an old Hollywood romance. Like he’s introduced feet first, which on the one hand is because his father was a shoemaker, but also it’s the way that they would often introduce love interests back in old Hollywood. You’d start at the feet, you know, pan up to the face and then do a closeup of the person reacting like, (in a sultry, low voice)  “Oh my God. So handsome… So pretty…” And that’s her reaction.

 Brandon:  Yeah, I thought that those scenes were really interesting, especially when I found out why Bernard Rose did that. So apparently he came up with this idea that she would be hypnotized every time that she came into contact with him in order to remove the horror movie cliche of excessive screaming, especially in women. And so every time she has a confrontation with Candyman, she’s always like hypnotized and kind of in this like trance-like state kind of thing. And that also adds to the idea of romancing the monster or being romanced by the monster aggressively.  (both laugh)

 So one of the things that I wanted to talk about was the different approaches to the source material that both of these movies used. Candyman is based on the Clive Barker short story “The Forbidden.” And apparently in the original short story, Helen is doing a thesis on graffiti in Liverpool, and she noticed this disturbing graffiti in an abandoned building that makes reference to the urban legend Candyman, further research convinces her that he is the cause of several recent murders and mutilations. And she eventually encounters the Candyman and gains like notoriety as becoming his last victim.

 And that kind of happens in the movie. Although, because I haven’t read the short story, I don’t know if, you know, the Candyman in the short story is like an actual, you know, like entity, like a ghost or something like that. Or if it’s just an actual murderer that’s taken up that moniker. Because it kind of happens in the movie. She becomes a victim of Candyman, but it turns out to be a guy and his crew that’s just adopted that name in order to inspire fear. And he really has, you know, killed people and whatever, but he just beats her up because she’s investigating.

 It’s later revealed that the neighborhood isn’t really patrolled by police except in instances of white crime, which you mentioned earlier. That’s kind of why, I guess he would use that is to inspire fear, coupled that with the lack of police presence would basically make him unstoppable, kind of, but then later in the movie, you know, she becomes a victim of the real Candyman and she becomes an urban legend because her husband says her name five times in the mirror, and then she suddenly appears and kills him.

 So, I thought it was really interesting that while, uh, when adapting the story, Bernard Rose changes the setting from Liverpool in the UK to Chicago. The story was originally set in Liverpool and it was about segregation and the culture of poor urban areas like you can see in, you know, because Liverpool is an old manufacturing Harbor town kind of thing.

 And that translates very well to Chicago because Chicago is very similar. It’s like an old manufacturing, town, meat packing town, things like that. Bernard Rose changed the setting to Chicago based on its dynamic architecture and the large amount of prejudice that, you know, still exists there. Not that it doesn’t in Liverpool, but I’m assuming it would be, you know, more digestible for American audiences to understand what was happening in Chicago.

 While scanning film locations in Chicago, he chose the Cabrini Green projects as the setting because of its reputation as a housing project with poor construction and a lot of violence and high robbery rates and things like that. And it was also the perfect location because it’s located fairly closely to high class neighborhoods in real life, meaning that Helen could live by and she could feel isolated from the chaos, but also close enough to, you know, like see it from her window basically. So it’s close enough to be real, but she can still feel safe and isolated.

 Another thing was, I don’t believe there’s the murder of Ruthie Jean does not happen in the short story. The murder of Ruthie Jean in the movie is based on the murder of Ruthie May McCoy, who was a resident of Chicago’s Abbott Homes project. And her killer was an intruder, and he did enter her apartment through an opening behind the medicine cabinet just like it was depicted in the movie. So art imitating life a little too creepily there. I was like,

 Oh, this was interesting. I thought because The Shape of Water, primarily the structure of this story is loosely based on the 1954 film Creature From the Black Lagoon. And it was inspired by Del Toro’s memories of wanting to see the Gill Man and Kay Lawrence succeed in their romance. Cause he always thought they should be romantically involved. Obviously it was a romance between those two and everybody else just wasn’t seeing it. And he actually approached Universal in order to do a direct remake of Creature in which, you know, he did that, but the studio executives rejected the concept.

 Justin:  Well they had to get their Dark Universe off the ground, man.

 (Both laugh)

 Brandon:  Yeah. I guess they kind of regret those, you know, six Academy awards or whatever it won now. So anywho, it was also interesting because, you know, Candyman takes place in the modern time. The source material takes place in modern times and — at least at the time anyway — and same with the film, it takes place in like in modern Chicago when it was shot in 1991, 1992. Creature from the Black Lagoon also takes place in quote unquote modern times because it was like a film of 1954. It would have been like present times. And Guillermo Del Toro made a conscious decision to change the setting to the 1960s Cold War era. And he specifically said it was to counteract today’s heightened tensions and a quote from him was saying, “If I say once upon a time in 1962, it becomes a fairy tale for troubled times. People can lower their guard a little bit more and listen to the story and listen to the characters and talk about the issues rather than the circumstances of the issues.”

 And this was a sentiment that Octavia Spencer agreed to. Cause I always wondered, for me, ever since I saw her in The Help, I was always like, is she always just going to play  cleaning ladies and stuff like that? Cause for me, it kind of seemed like she was kind of typecast after that maybe, but Guillermo Del Toro actually wrote that part for her and he wanted her to read the script before she agreed to do it. And you know, she loved it and she was like, Oh, absolutely. I want to do this. And she agreed with that sentiment of being a fairytale for tripled times. And she has a quote as saying, “Troubled times back then, but some of the themes are very, very relevant today. The quote unquote otherness of it all.” And it’s funny that he wrote two main characters who can’t speak and then the people he chooses to use as their voice are people who represent very disenfranchised groups, such as an African American woman and a closeted gay man. And she says that’s a testament to who Guillermo Del Toro is as a person. To him no one is invisible.

 And the rest of the quote is, “In the sixties, people who look like me and who were part of the LGBTQ community had no civil rights and were disenfranchised people. So a fable for troubled times, it even applies today.”

 And yeah, I thought that was really interesting that he made a conscious choice to set it, you know, back in a different time to kind of make the story more palatable, I guess, so that people wouldn’t worry too much about the politics of today. And Candyman does the exact opposite of that. It sets the quote unquote fairy tale in modern times, and it makes you deal with all of the troubles of today because it’s directly confronting those issues.

 Justin:  You know, it’s funny about that though, because they both, both of them explicitly take the source material and then apply an at times explicitly racially based take on it.

 Candyman, you know, like, like you said, it was about class and then they specifically in setting it in, America said, well, the underclass is almost uniformly black folks because of white supremacy, so let’s just do that. And then tying the Candyman’s origins into slavery and in Shape of Water, in a way he takes that old timey setting to take you off guard a little bit. Let you let your guard down because, “Oh, it’s a period story. It’s about the past.” But then the things he talks about are things that are still very relevant.

 As the movie goes along and those themes start getting presented, it becomes harder to ignore those subjects. And that’s kind of represented in Giles and because Giles is very, very obsessed with old movies, with specifically like old classic Hollywood movies. And he constantly has like an old musical on or something where he can watch and sort of live back in the day. And he has all these stories and anecdotes about things that he’s heard about on set and about how the actors were and things like that. And then one day whenever Eliza comes home and she turns on the TV, there’s a news broadcast on, and it’s some police brutality story. It’s footage of black folks being attacked by white police and like hoses being turned on them. And he explicitly is like, “Turn that off! Turn that off! Turn that off! I don’t… I don’t… I don’t want to see that. I don’t want to ever want to see that. And then he turns onto some squishy, happy musical that he can ignore the stuff happening.

 And it’s not until he gets his own sad moments of oppression, where it finally becomes personal for him and he’s able to identify with Charlie’s struggles. Because he hits on that waiter in the pie shop, and when the guy 1) reacts all disgusted at the idea that…ew, gay. Get away. And then 2) is super racist to this black couple that comes in and tells them like, the whole restaurant’s been reserved. Get out. You’re not, you can’t come in here, even though it’s empty, that’s when Giles is finally like, “Okay, fine. I will help you break out the Fishman because if you say that he’s important, I will believe you.”

 A familiar topic that we’ve discussed before on here whenever we talked about Urban Legend and Theater of Blood — Candyman, the movie, is specifically about a theater of… (laughs in frustration)

 Brandon:  Yes it is.  (chuckles)

 Justin:  Candyman, the movie, is specifically about urban legends. Whereas the short story is about gossip and rumors. It’s not necessarily an urban legend as much as it’s gossip. I love the way that Candyman is sort of about urban legends and exposing a deeper truth through this fantastical story. By sharing the stories of Candyman, they are also sharing the stories of racial trauma, of the dangers of living in areas where a police presence is either lacking or over present, the dangers of poverty.

 And in The Shape of Water, instead of using urban legends, it’s more folk tales. It’s… there are moments of these… there are these moments in the movie where overall the movie tends to be relatively realistic, but there are these moments of like fairytale or folklore, like fantasticalness. Like the moment when Eliza floods the bathroom and she’s able to sort of swim around with the creature for awhile is this moment where like, that’s just not how water and buildings work, but it reveals the love and the connection that they have and the connection she has with water, and through doing the fantastical, it gives you a deeper truth about her relationship with this creature.

 At the end of the movie, it’s not necessarily clear whether she actually died being shot by Strickland. And that’s how she went on. Whether she actually is part fish person, whether she became part fish person because of her love of the creature?

 Because it’s so easily the same thing as the handsome Prince kissed her and woke her up. Or because of true love, the beast turned into a human and revealed who he really was. Because you kiss now, you have the handsome prince. It’s that seems sort of like, it doesn’t make sense, but it is doesn’t have to because it’s digging for a deeper truth than actual facts would reveal.

 One of the things I really like about both of these movies — and this was not necessarily a part of my original reason for pairing them, but it was just one of those happy accidents that tends to happen whenever we do these episodes — which is both of these stories are romance stories in which the woman main character is disrespected by broader society. Men, don’t take her seriously. She’s talked down to her in her profession, she’s not respected, and through her relationship with this supernatural, otherworldly male creature, eventually she is transformed into an entity similar to the male creature. And in that transformation reaches this better existence, this better life.

 Like you could argue that Helen, at the end of the movie, cast off that unfulfilling old life where she’s trying and struggling to get respect, but her husband doesn’t care about her, and he’s openly cheating on her, and her peers and mentors don’t care about her –like her professor openly mocks her. But at the end, she is feared. She is eternal. Because she now lives in legend.

 And the same thing with Eliza she’s mute. No one respects her, except for like a handful of friends, her bosses are all rude to her and mean, and at the end she’s able to become, to join Charlie in this other world where she seems to be more herself. And she, after having this connection to water throughout the whole movie, she’s able to sort of live that.

 Brandon:  I kind of wanted to talk about the symbolism that’s utilized in both films and the music, and how it kind of backs up that symbolism.

 Both of the films obviously use literary symbols. One of the most prominent examples in The Shape of Water is the implementation of the color green. And it’s literally like everywhere. It’s like the wallpaper of the apartments. It’s the tile, and in the bathrooms at the government facility, it’s just different shades of green. It’s Michael Shannon’s new car. It’s the Jello that Giles is trying to draw in the advertisement. He draws it as red and the guy’s like, “No, you gotta change it to green. Green is the color of the future.” And so that really stood out to me because everything is teal green, some shade of it. And so I was like, I want to know what the significance of that is.

 Even just like recently in the 18th and 19th centuries, green was associated with the romantic movement and literature and art and like the German writer Gerta, that was like his favorite color. He said it was the most relaxing color. And that was what everybody’s bedroom should be. And green has a lot of symbolic qualities beyond that.

 It’s often just associated with nature and vivacity and life and hope, youth and experience, jealousy and envy, love and sexuality, you know, and like in the Victorian era, green was often associated with homosexuality. Green was often associated in men with homosexuality. Which I thought was weird because it was really popular in the Victorian era.

 And afterwards, due to, you know, the different discoveries of different pigments, specifically radium, which was super popular and put into like everything… it, granted, made a lot of people sick because it is radioactive, but it’s still,

 Justin:  (Laughs) You gotta suffer for your art.

 Brandon: Yeah.

 Go further up the timeline green in the fifties — er, well, really like the twenties through the fifties — was like this color of the Other. And it was often associated with monsters. For example, Bela Lugosi, he wore like a slightly green tinted makeup when he played Dracula on Broadway in 1927 to 1928 and the production stills for Frankenstein, the early posters, they always showed the monster as green and pretty much every time after that, that there was advertising for Frankenstein, the monster was always green.

 And then even beyond that, you’ve got green is, particularly in America associated ,with social status prosperity and the dollar. And this was really super popular in the fifties and the sixties. And like everything you could possibly imagine was available in green and was really popular and like different shades of green. Really popular were like avocado and teal for cars and appliances. And even like, furniture everything was, you know, available in green. And so that was kind of why that guy was like, “It’s the color of the future!” Because the fifties were such a prosperous time and green was such a popular color that obviously that’s going to bleed over into the sixties.

 Justin:  It’s funny. You’re bringing up the information that… how green was a symbol of nature, because what I noticed wasn’t just specifically the color green, cause I noticed that color green thing too, and I was like, what’s going on there, man? But what I noticed. even more than that, is it’s green and red that interplay throughout the movie. Eliza’s uniform is green, but after she first has sex with the creature and sort of starts feeling happy, and like sort of owning herself, she explicitly buys these red shoes that she was looking at at the beginning of the movie and wearing this red hair band and standing out.

 In an article where they were talking to Guillermo del Toro, and he said that red is meant to symbolize romance and passion. And so anytime that there were moments of like swells of emotion, there’s red present. Uh, yeah. I love the color. Thank you for bringing that up. It was so cool.

 Brandon:  I thought it was really interesting, if you could believe it, that water also features prominently in The Shape of Water.

 Justin:  What?!

 Brandon:  I know, I know it’s surprising, but it’s actually, you know, pretty prominent in the movie. And it’s also a really interesting literary symbol because water can mean so many different things in literature, kind of like how, you know, actual water can exist in many states across the world, and, you know, things like that.

 Water is most often associated with cleansing and the feeling of freedom. And it’s also often associated as like a symbol of power, because it can do so much, you know. It can, you can be turned into steam, which powers engines it can be, you know, in liquid form and flow through dams and you know, or highly hydroelectric dams, you know?

 And so. It has the power to both create life and destroy life. So it’s often, you know, it’s about power. And I think that’s, you know, fairly present in the movie because … the water, you know, is like everywhere. (Both laugh)  Like, I  trying was to contextualize that last night. I was like, “Oh my God. It’s literally everywhere.”

 It’s in her morning routine. She’ll boil eggs, and then she fills up the tub, and then she masturbates in the tub while the eggs are cooking. And then she shines her shoes, and she uses like a little green brush and some water to shine her shoes. And, you know, she’s a cleaning lady which involves using lots of water to clean things. And she was found by a river as a child! It’s just so many things. And not to mention, I think this takes place in Baltimore, which is like close to the sea. And also in the time of year that it takes place. It’s like a very rainy time of year. So things are, throughout  the movie, often damp, rainy, foggy, you know. So water is like everywhere. And, uh, the thing that I thought was most interesting was the fact that the water is reflected and exemplified in the score.

 I don’t know how to pronounce his name. It was written by Alexandre Desplat? Or Dess Plat. I’m not sure how to pronounce his name. He’s French, so that could be the reason. I am not French. I’m very white American.

 Justin:  You just need to talk through your nose more.  (In an exaggerated French accent)  “Alexandre Desplat.”

Brandon:  (Laughs) I believe that in The Shape of Water, the composer is using the water as sort of a symbol of luck. He specifically cites in this article that I read the feeling associating love with the sensation of submerging yourself in warm water. And so he does that a lot, particularly in the opening phrases, which are, for me, as soon as I heard it, I was like, “Oh, this is French” because French music has a very strange… kind of an open sound where chords don’t always resolve or they incorporate lots of ninths, thirteenths, and above that, to where they just kind of keep going. And he uses an arpeggiated melody that consistently rolls forward, kind of like waves in an ocean. And all of his melodies are very buoyant, you could say. And they ooze with affection, you could also say.  

(Segmant from “The Shape of Water” by Alexadre Desplat plays)

 Brandon:  And it’s also interesting that music is also like water in that it can take on so many different shapes, and that it can emphasize certain things and, you know, it can create certain things. And also when used incorrectly, it can destroy a mood or a feeling or something, you know?

 Justin:  In Eliza’s apartment, her wall was going to just be a blank wall. And he wanted his art department to emphasize things because the art department apparently is his favorite department. It’s like effects and art are his two favorite departments. Because he loves the artistry of film. And so he had them paint this mural of waves crashing on the wall and when they added and a bunch of extra layers and deterioration and distress to it, it blends in. And so it looks mostly like a blank wall with maybe some like dust swirls on it. But if you look really closely, you can see these crashing waves. So she’s even surrounded by water. In her own apartment, but like at the start of the movie.

 Brandon:  The most prominent symbolism that I think that’s found in Candyman is the use of bees. And obviously, you know, um, it’s important to the story because during his  lynching his painting hand is cut off and they shove a hook in it, and then they cover him with honey and he’s stung to death by bees. They’re kind of take on a spiritual element, sort of, you know? Because they follow him basically everywhere and they appear with him when he appears places.

 I think that’s very intentionally all kind of pointing towards biblical references to bees, and one of the most obvious ones, or one of the first ones I believe, is in the book of Judges. And it’s like literally one of the last Judges in the book of Judges, which is Samson, who you should know from the story of Samson and Delilah, is introduced and–

 Justin:  Which also gets brought up in The Shape of Water!

 Brandon:  Yes, it does. And, you know, Samson is supposed to have that superhuman strength. And at one point in the book, I don’t remember where, because I haven’t read it, at one point, he tears apart a lion with his bare hands. And after a time he returns to the carcass and he sees a swarm of bees have nested inside the lion’s carcass and they are, you know, they’ve created like a beehive inside and they’re creating honey.

 The character of Candyman shares some similarities to Samson in the fact that he is like super, all powerful. And you know, was before he was cast down, a very important person, very similar to Samson. Samson was a Judge until his ultimate undoing by Delilah. Which kind of happens to Candyman too, because he falls in love with a white woman and then you can’t do that in the old days. And so he gets lynched.

 But what I think is really interesting is that bees are often used in Christianity as symbols of like community and personal power. Like Christian monks, they often in the early days, would live in like these beehive-like huts to symbolize, you know, the aim of harmonious community living and things like that.

 Saint Ambrose, he was a Bishop of Milan, and he became one of the most influential ecclesiastical figures of the fourth century. And there’s a legend — often his little crest has bees incorporated into it because there’s a legend that as an infant, a swarm of bees settled on his face while he was laying in the cradle, and they left behind a drop of honey, which is used in the Bible a lot to convey like sweetness and the good parts of life and things like that. And it was–

 Justin:  And heaven’s the land of milk and honey.

 Brandon:  Yes, exactly. And so with Saint Ambrose, his father considered this swarm of bees settling on his face to be a sign of his future eloquence and that’s kind of where the phrase “honey tongued” comes from.

 Justin:  Oh!

 Brandon:  And for this reason, bees and beehives appear in Saint Ambrose’s shields and things like that.

 To me, I kind of think this biblical link with bees and Candyman is cemented in so many scenes throughout Candyman. The residents of Cabrini Green, they might be under unusual persecution due to their location and their circumstances and things like that they can’t help, but for many of them, it is still home. And it is a place to live. And home is often equated with a feeling of sanctuary. And of course, sanctuary is the main portion of the church where you go to do your worship.

 The really interesting thing is that there are depictions all over Cabrini Green of Candyman and references to him, writings on the walls and things like that, which parallels the depictions of saints in the stained glass windows of a lot of cathedrals all over the United States. Well… all over the world, not just the United States. Candyman even references himself in this kind of like spiritual godlike way when he’s talking to Helen, because he’s talking about “our congregation” and “our names will be written on a thousand walls” and things like that.

 So, and then it’s further basically brought to home plate by the score of Philip Glass who uses a pretty bare bones structure to create this kind of sacred sonic landscape. And you can tell that just by like the opening theme, he’s basically just using pipe organ and a choir.  

(“Cabrini Green” by Philip Glass plays)

 It is fascinating to me that two films. They both rely on symbolism that would seem to contrast itself with the subject matter. And yet it helps to enhance the ideas of the monsters and things like that and their different qualities and it creates a more enjoyable viewing and listening experience.

 Justin:  Y’know, it’s funny, you bring up that the bit where Candyman sort of talks in that sort of Christian almost pastoral ministerial way. I don’t remember the exact line of dialogue, but you’re right. There’s a moment when he talks about…his existence is tied to belief and there’s a sort of Christ-like quality in a way to aspects of him. He appears to her and he’s sort of wrathful and he says, “You doubted me. I came for you because you doubted me.” And he says that because she doubted he has to reassert himself and he’s performing these sort of dark miracles to renew faith in him. There’s a line, I think, where he mentioned something about, I don’t remember if he called the residents of Cabrini Green has flock or his congregation, or something like that, though, where he talked about —

 Brandon:  Yeah. I remember writing down the words “our congregation,” and I was like, “I need to look up that line later” because that was super strong. You know, the whole movie, I was like, “man, his voiceover stuff is super churchy. He considers himself kind of like a God,” which I guess he kind of is. Yeah.

 Justin:  And it’s funny, that’s what they said that’s what the natives believed that Charlie was in The Shape of Water. They believed that he was a God that they worshiped and he kind of, he also kind of has a Christlike portrayal because he is killed by Strickland — shot multiple times in the chest. And then he just sort of comes back on his own, wakes up, pulls a Neo, wakes up, heals himself, and then goes over and cuts Strickland’s throat because motherfucker stepped to the King.  (Both chuckle)

 Yeah. In fact, Strickland even says… that’s funny because Strickland is actually extremely religious and constantly talks about the Bible in a sort of bastardized dumb, dummy way. Uh, but he talks about like, he talks about Zelda and her middle name is D for Delilah and he talks about the Bible and he compares himself to Samson because he mentions that Samson, after being disgraced and left for dead, calls upon the Lord to re-grant his strength one last time. And then he grabs the columns of the temple and brings it down on everyone inside, killing everyone and himself. And he said something to the effect of like, he may…he was going to die, but he’d take every last one of those motherfuckers down with him. And then he rips his own fingers off???.

 Blech. Yuck.

 But then he gets his sort of Mama White moment where, for being so convinced that he is the biblical hero of this story, he gets his throat slashed by Charlie and goes down like a punk, just like Mama White did.  (Both laugh)

 Brandon:  Okay. I think that about does it. If you want to join the discussion and share your own thoughts with us, hit us up online. We’re on Twitter @eerie_earfuls. Our email is eerie.earfuls@gmail.com. And our website is eerieearfuls.wordpress.com.

 Justin:  You can subscribe to us on Google Play, iTunes, and many other places. If you like the show, please spread the word. And if you’re feeling extra generous, we’d love it if you left us a review.

 Our theme music is “Baba Yaga” by Kevin MacLeod. Our synopsis music is “Anxiety” and “Night of Chaos,” also both by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under a creative commons license. You can find more of that in the notes. Find more of his music at Incompetech.com.

 Brandon:  Thank you for listening. And stay scared everyone.

(“Baba Yaga” by Kevin MacLeod outro plays)

 Justin:  The US military,  hoping to exploit the creature from an American advantage…

 Hoping to ex…  (smacks lips)

 Hoping to ex…

 Hoping to…  (Both chuckle)

 Hoping, hoping, hoping, HOPE-HOPE-HOPE-HOPE-HOPE-HOPE-HOPE– (imitates bass drop in dub step song while actual dub step plays over it — thanks Brandon, lol)

 Brandon:  (Brandon laughing, imitates a hip hop air horn, which also has the real thing dubbed over it) Bow-bow-bow-bow

[…]

Justin:  And then there’s the other side of the corn…wh… (laughs)  and then there’s the other side of the coin  (laughs more). (Said in an exaggerated southern accent) The other side of the corn!  

(Both laugh harder)

 Brandon:  The thing about the other side of the corn…is that there’s always another side. Because it’s 360.  (Justin laughs hard)  It’s just continuous.  

(Both continue laughing hard)

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