A Gorier Splash
The dark abyss of popular culture pullulates with terrifying tales of fish-tailed women, the fascinating yet dangerous mermaids whose voices lure sailors to a watery grave.
Cinema has been under the spell of these sea-dwellers for decades, creating a rich visual history of mermaids. From comedy to genre films, these mysterious beings have swum their way into the wider filmscape with decidedly mixed results. In a sea of mermaids films, recent European horror films have recaptured these creatures’ feral sexual energy within brilliantly gruesome coming-of-age narratives.
Polish horror musical The Lure (2015) and Swiss body horror Blue My Mind (2017) have mastered the balance of mermaid rage and sexual desire, flipping the script on the siren bride and sea monster clichés. What these layered female-fronted stories have in common is an attempt to humanise their protagonists. This doesn’t imply complying with human rules. It’s about allowing the most relatable aspects of these young mermaids to come to the surface.
The films steer clear from sugarcoating and glamorising mermaids. The protagonists’ tails aren’t vivid and colourful; they don’t have shells to cover their breasts. Half-women, half-fish, these creatures wear their scales in all of their translucent glory, caving to their most bloodthirsty needs.
Horror has always played a crucial part in the legends around these hybrid creatures. After the Odyssey, Greek mythology tended to equate these fish-women with sirens, originally portrayed as bird-like monsters singing seafarers to their untimely demise. Later conflated into one mythical species, mermaids and sirens have become synonyms and interchangeably used to designate beautiful, deadly creatures of the ocean sporting fishtails from the waist down. While they have also been known to be a symbol of fertility in certain lores, the representation of these ladies of the seas as enchanting killing machines has prevailed and reached the shores of our modern, collective imagination.
Despite their origin stories, these creatures’ horrific heritage has been co-opted by the male gaze in some popular depictions. Either sanitised or overly sexualised, mermaids have undergone a cinematic makeover that hasn’t always done justice to their complexity.
Black-and-white 1950s and 1960s horror movies exploited the mermaid trope, insisting on the otherness of these creatures and often presenting them as mere spectacle.
Night Tide (1961), written and directed by Curtis Harrington, follows wide-eyed sailor Johnny as he falls for Mora the Mermaid (Linda Lawson), a woman working as a half-fish enchantress at a sideshow attraction. But Mora’s past harbours an obscure secret, as her boss, Captain Murdock (Gavin Muir), warns.
Harrington’s film plays along the blurred lines of Mora’s identity. Similarly, The She-Creature (1956) lets viewers believe that Andrea Talbott (Marla English), a carnival hypnotist’s reluctant subject, really is able to inhabit a sea monster and wreak havoc on a coastal community.
It is disappointing to discover that neither woman is a mythical being. Both films use the idea of sea creatures solely to bind innocent, helpless women to older, powerful men. Mora and Andrea, in fact, are gaslit about their nature and convinced they are evil by those very men who have sworn to protect them. These women can’t escape their heteronormative fate, no matter how hard they try. A romantic bond to another, barely decent man is their only way out of abuse, but this doesn’t always mean a happy ending is on the horizon. While Night Tide, particularly, teases the existence of sirens in its open finale, it also lets Mora commit the ultimate sacrifice for the love of Johnny.
Conceptualised as victims and only loosely connected to the sea, Mora and Andrea are hardly ever afforded the chance to savour their most sensuous instincts in the same way sirens would. There’s a scene in Night Tide where Mora devours a mackerel for breakfast before Johnny’s curious eyes. It is a vaguely sexual incident on the cusp of violence whose power is watered down and turned into a comedic moment.
Just like Night Tide, many other mermaid films have fed into the unfortunate sacrifice trope. Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989), an adaptation of the much bleaker fairytale by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, is the epitome of this harmful narrative with its protagonist trading her voice for a pair of legs. A detrimental message that Disney has partly tried to subvert in the film’s straight-to-video sequel Return to the Sea (2000), focused on Ariel’s teenage daughter Melody. Hopefully, one they will challenge in the upcoming live-action starring Halle Bailey, too.
Splash (1984) goes the other way around in its finale, with Tom Hanks’s character Allen leaving with Madison the mermaid, played by Daryl Hannah. Yet, the film directed by Ron Howard doesn’t break any grounds by presenting Madison as a friendly, overly sexualised creature immediately falling for the protagonist and catering to his male desire. Allen lusts over Madison, but he shames her insatiability to suggest that women should be available but not initiate sex or be open about their sexual enjoyment.
The young mermaids of The Lure and Blue My Mind aren’t interested in being modest or in making things comfortable for those around them.
Directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska, The Lure is a pitiless retelling of Andersen’s fairytale incorporating cannibalism and musical numbers. The result is a compelling hybrid every bit as wild and exciting as its half-fish, half-women protagonists. A proxy for the director’s teenage self, mermaid sisters Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Golden (Michalina Olszańska) navigate 1980s Warsaw’s intoxicating, flickering nightclub scene where they are exploited for their alien bodies and mesmerising singing voices. The film’s conflict lies in the tension between Golden’s anger and desire to secure a better future abroad and Silver’s quest for love and acceptance among humans.
When Silver falls for a musician, she embarks on an unhealthy search for validation and starts questioning her own body. Similarly to the siren in The Lighthouse (2019), Golden and Silver are sexual beings. These mermaids don’t experience vagina envy as they’re able to indulge in steamy action through sexual organs nestled in their tails. Yet Silver knows this won’t make her human lover stay. She ignores Golden’s warnings and gets rid of her tail in a graphic surgery scene, giving up her voice.
What ensues is more similar to Andersen’s original story than any Disney animated movie could ever be. The film builds onto that well-known account by introducing a refreshing queer subplot involving Golden and the policewoman who’s investigating the siren’s ghastly murders. The sex scene between the two characters is disruptive on at least two levels. Alongside incorporating a sexually explicit LGBTQ+ storyline in a film produced and distributed in infamously anti-queer Poland, it also proves that mermaids don’t need to change their appearance to appeal to humans, invalidating Silver’s argument.
Queer desire is also explored in Lisa Brühlmann’s Blue My Mind, combining teenage rebellion à la Thirteen (2003) and body horror elements not for the faint of heart. The film is a teen drama in cold hues, slowly warming up to an intimate, tender attraction between protagonist Mia (Luna Wedler) and popular girl Gianna (Zoë Pastelle).
As Mia is grappling with her body going through scary, unnatural changes, a hormonal whirlwind prompts her to act on her physical desires for the first time. The protagonist doesn't just see heterosexual sex as a bargaining chip to increase her popularity at school, she also mistakenly believes it could ease her restlessness. In the finale, this mermaid-in-progress realises casual, often disappointing encounters with men and blackout benders may not be the answer to her hunger. A realisation that has already hit the audience earlier in the film when Mia feasts on her parents’ goldfish, her pleasure unparalleled by any subsequent sexual relationship. Blue My Mind includes upsetting assault scenes, but gives its lead the agency to conduct the game in other instances and write her liberating epilogue.
These films are very different in tone and character studies. Golden and Silver have been mermaids their entire life and fully own their identities. Mia, on the other hand, has only just started getting her head around her true self. Both tales, however, end with the protagonists leaving dry lands behind and seeking solace in their element. A riotous refusal to be part of this world that counterbalances Ariel’s will to assimilate and defies death, giving these sirens the chance to thrive and find themselves out to sea.
Stefania Sarrubba is a feminist entertainment writer based in London. When she's not working on her infinite, absolutely non-comprehensive watchlist, she can be found thinking about your dog, rage knitting and mostly just staring into the void. @freckledvixen
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