The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

by Mallory O'Meara

I had never seen myself reflected in the world of horror filmmaking. The possibility of it never crossed my mind.

Milicent was holding a door open for me that I never realized I had considered closed. Come on, she said. We belong here, too.

Horror is a pressure valve for society’s fears and worries: monsters seeking to control our bodies, villains trying to assail us in the darkness, disease and terror resulting from the consequences of active sexuality, death. These themes are the staple of horror films.

There are people who witness these problems only in scary movies. But for much of the population, what is on the screen is merely an exaggerated version of their everyday lives.

These are forces that women grapple with daily. Watching Nancy Thompson escape Freddy Krueger’s perverted attacks reminds me of how I daily fend off creeps asking me to smile for them on the subway. Women are the most important part of horror because, by and large, women are the ones the horror happens to. Women have to endure it, fight it, survive it—in the movies and in real life. The...

Horror films help explore these fears and imagine what it would be like to conquer them. Women need to see themselves fighting monsters. That’s part of how we figure out our stories. But we also need to see ourselves behind-the-scenes, creat...

It wasn’t just because some crusty old dude insulted my hero. It was because having to justify and validate a female presence in a male-dominated space was a reflex.

Everyone suffers from imposter syndrome sometimes. It’s the feeling that you aren’t qualified and that you have no idea what you are doing. It’s the feeling that you are an impostor and soon, someone will discover that fact and kick you out. I wanted to buy a hat that declared IT’S OKAY I BELONG HERE mostly so that I would believe it myself.

Julia Morgan was a practical workaholic with no artistic ego. A small woman, she subsisted mostly off black coffee and candy bars. She always wore glasses and eschewed makeup. Morgan refused to carry a purse, but as far as I can tell from photos, had an impressive collection of shapeless felt hats. She cared about her work first and foremost and expected everyone else in her employ to do the same. Most of her time was spent at the office and her staff became a kind of extended family. She made a point of hiring women, both as artists and for drafting. In other words, she was a badass.

Milicent was right, her father did deserve remembrance for a decade’s worth of hard work and creative problem solving at one of the most famous and beautiful estates in the country. If he is going into the history books, all of him needs to go in, not just the talent but also the darkness. Because the truth is, that’s why he was left out in the first place. His time at Hearst Castle was so fraught and his exit so tense that it overshadowed his many contributions to the estate.

It’s hard to stay professional when you’re a nerd.

The only thing that I accurately remember from this conversation is thinking, over and over again, “Chernabog. Chernabog. Chernabog.” The strings of Night on Bald Mountain surged in my ears. I saw that colossal monster as he raised his sinister wings and struck terror and love and instant devotion deep into my young heart. Chernabog. She worked on Chernabog. Of course she did.

Now a third of the company’s employees were female. No other animation company had anything close to that number. No other production company did, for that matter. If you were a female artist, Disney was probably one of the best places that you could work.

Having over 30 percent female employees working at Disney studios was a progressive number in 1940 and sadly, it would still be a progressive number today. As of 2017, women make up only 23 percent of union animation jobs. There are many more women working as freelance artists and animators, but for big studio jobs, the numbers are pathetic. It wasn’t until 2012 that the first woman (Brenda Chapman) won an Oscar in the Best Animated Feature Film category for the movie Brave.

The problem with being the only woman to ever do something is that you have to be perfect. When I found out about her as a teenager, I thought that for Milicent to be the first and only woman to ever design a famous monster, to be one of the first female animators, she had to be superhuman. She had to have been better than any other woman who ever wanted to design a monster. She had to have been the only one worthy enough to enter that boys’ club. This way of thinking is a maladaptation women have developed over the years to be able to deal with the fact that we’re getting passed on for jobs because we’re female. You force yourself to believe that there just haven’t been any women good enough for the job, rather than accept the fact that the entire system just doesn’t want you in it. Anyone who flouts that system must be an outlier. “Ah!” we think when we see a woman who does the thing we want to do. “Of course. She must be perfect. She’s got a three hundred–point IQ and can levitate and breathe fire. That’s why she got the job. Normal women can’t get jobs like that.” Milicent was the only one, so she had to carry the weight of all my hopes and dreams. She had to be perfect, she had to be a genius, she had to be the very, very best. She was more than a hero, she was a goddess, shedding her human form. That’s the danger in having so few women acknowledged and hired in the film industry. Instead of looking at these women and thinking “Yes, I can get there, too!” girls can ju...

When you try your very best and it’s good, but you know, good for a girl, you need to become more than yourself, more than human. Ginger Rogers, doing everything Fred Astaire did, backward and in high heels.

Women don’t need an idol to worship.68 We need a beacon to walk toward.

I didn’t feel the film-producer-making-it-in-LA part, I felt the woman-who-didn’t-know-what-she-was-doing-and-also-wasn’t-wearing-pants part.

I could understand Milicent’s desire for a persona. A persona could both dazzle people and shield them from your ordinary and flawed self.

Instead of imagining that actor falling into a manhole, all I could think about was whether or not that would have happened if my hair was a natural color. If it would have happened if I was older, or wearing a business suit or looked more “professional.”71 The answer is yes.

I was failing her if I didn’t write the truth of her life. Her flaws were a part of the story that needed to be told. It’s far more impressive to me that she made her career as a flawed woman instead of as a perfect baroness.73 Her legacy should be founded on the strength of the art that she created and on the trails that she blazed.

Every “overnight success” story you hear is likely the result of years and years of hard work and tireless dedication to a craft.

Charles Laughton, after dealing with Perc Westmore for days on end, told him that he was “full of shit.”

The studio head, a man named William Goetz, was still determined to get a Westmore. In the 1940s, getting a Westmore brother for your studio makeup department was like getting a Lamborghini (a very expensive status symbol that definitely performed well, but was still sort of douchey).

Even when everyone is being respectful and polite, if you are the only woman in the room it’s impossible not to be acutely, uncomfortably aware of it. This feeling only intensifies if you are a marginalized woman. When I started making movies, I was terrified of being seen as too girly or too emotional. It took me years to stop monitoring my language, my behavior and the way that I dress while at work. I didn’t want to remind everyone that I was female and have them kick me out of the boys-only movie treehouse. At best it’s awkward, at worst it’s isolating and depressing.

Monster stories are powerful. They explore prejudice, rejection, anger and every imaginable negative aspect of living in society. However, only half of society is reflected in the ranks of the people who create these monsters. Almost every single iconic monster in film is male and was designed by a man: the Wolfman, Frankenstein,99 Dracula, King Kong. The emotions and problems that all of them represent are also experienced by women, but women are more likely to see themselves as merely the victims of these monsters. Women rarely get to explore on-screen what it’s like to be a giant pissed-off creature. Those emotions are written off. If a woman is angry or upset, she’ll be considered hysterical and too emotional. One of the hardest things about misogyny in the film industry isn’t facing it directly, it’s having to tamp down your anger about it so that when you speak about the problem, you’ll be taken seriously. Women don’t get to stomp around like Godzilla. Someone will just ask if you’re on your period.

But, surprise folks, women get mad about things that don’t have to do with men. Women feel anger and isolation just as intensely as men. Women have desires for power—destructive desires—that aren’t satisfied with mean-spirited gossip and a bold lip color. Women need to be able to see themselves reflected in the monsters playing out these emotions on the big screen. Our only options shouldn’t be either banishment to a shack in the woods or growing fangs and becoming part of a bloodthirsty sister-wife troupe. Women rarely get to weigh in on monster designs, but when she got the chance to, Millicent made it count.

Internalized misogyny is real and it is rampant in the horror community. When you are inundated with images of beautiful women who don’t have a lot of clothes or a lot of agency,108 it implies that women have value only for their beauty. When you see only scream queens109 and monster victims, those messages sink in and they sink in deep. It puts a lot of women off the genre.

When I became an adult, I realized how harmful this mindset is. I was participating in a toxic culture. I was being a fucking idiot. Identifying as a woman and expressing your femininity is awesome and badass. My feelings about Milicent’s wardrobe choices drastically changed. How absolutely incredible that Milicent was creating these masculine monsters while reveling in her lady glory. How marvelous that she refused to try to fit into the boys’ club, that she was unapologetically herself and marched into that male-dominated space in her heels. That’s some badass shit. It was a revelation to me that you can be a strong woman in a pair of steel-toed boots or a pair of sparkling pumps.

Milicent loved dressing up. She loved looking glamorous. It made her happy. The ways in which women are pressured to look a certain way to attract men are abysmal. It took me years to realize that it was possible to want to look a certain way just for yourself, to want to dress up and wear pretty, fancy things because that’s just what you like. Every day that Milicent got dressed in something fabulous, she was high-fiving that little girl in San Simeon who was forced to wear heavy, draping clothes.

“So many people, including youngsters, are so well-informed scientifically that even science fiction has to meet certain standards. Imagination by no means runs entirely riot. Somebody puts a foot down promptly if you ramble too far.”

But, as they say, to the privileged, equality feels like oppression.

Monster movies, bible movies, they’re sort of similar, right? Lots of drama, powerful forces, the eating of flesh.

The thing about depression is that it lies to you. Depression will find the one thing you are worried most about and convince you that it is real.

It takes a very strong person not to succumb, to stand up to the ridiculous sexist bullshit. It’s constant hard work resisting the pressure to think that your only value as a woman is in your youthful looks, even for someone who isn’t dealing with mental health issues.

Being perceived as pretty shouldn’t have to be a priority, but feeling pretty for yourself can be if it makes you feel good and it’s not destructive to other parts of your life. Feeling pretty, just for yourself, can be amazing.

I’m estranged from my own parents for similar reasons. My mother has spent a large amount of time obsessively following my career in the creative world on various social media platforms and she has spent absolutely no time supporting said career. Some people try to convince me that this means that she really cares. It doesn’t. It’s just weird. Knowing that she’s seeing everything I do but not acknowledging anything about it to me feels terrible. Whether it’s resentment or disapproval or jealousy or something else I can’t understand, I don’t know, but the Rossi family subjected Milicent to the same thing. It’s especially sad in Milicent’s case because she’s a much better person than I am, forgiving her family, reaching out again and again over the years. I just found a great therapist and adopted some cats.

“She lent her presence to art, society, humanity and to those she held dear.”

Milicent Patrick’s final resting place is in every single Creature from the Black Lagoon T-shirt, every Metaluna Mutant toy, every VHS tape of Fantasia, every DVD of The Shape of Water. It’s on the desk of every female animator and in the pen of every woman doodling a monster in the margins of her notebook. It’s always been there. It’s just been hidden, purposely obfuscated. Now, it’s in every copy of this book, in your hands or in your ears.

At Milicent’s memorial service, Gwen shared something that her aunt would always tell her. “Everyone is beautiful. Some choose to share it, while others hide it. It’s much better to share!”

Milicent Patrick is the lady from the black lagoon and she’s not alone. She’s raised out of it now, but there are so many other women—in every industry, living and dead—who are still in there. So many other stories are sunken in the depths of history and so many women are still shouldering the burden of harassment and abuse while trying to create. Thanks to technology and the bravery of countless women, the tides are finally changing.

When I was a teenager, Milicent showed me the way forward into the creative life that I wanted to live. She demonstrated that it was possible for me to make the art that I wanted to make. Now, as an adult, she has showed me the way forward to help create the world I want to live in. Uncovering her life over the past two years has helped me see the things I need to do to protect more women from her fate. It’s helped me be brave, be strong and be loud.

Thousands and thousands of women are out there, feeling alone in their creative passions. Thousands more haven’t even entertained the idea of making art because they can’t imagine a place for themselves in that world. Milicent Patrick’s legacy isn’t just a body of influential work. It’s also an invitation.

Why? Because monster stories are cool. They’re fun and exciting and sometimes cheesy. But they can be important, too. As Guillermo del Toro said during his 2018 Golden Globes acceptance speech for Best Director: Since childhood, I’ve been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them, because monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection, and they allow and embody the possibility of failing.