The bizarre horror short Eel Girl plays out like the darker flipside to The Shape Of Water's romantic fantasy. Nearly all of Guillermo del Toro's work paints monsters in a sympathetic light, from his debut Cronos to Pan's Labyrinth or even Hellboy. The director has a deep affection for monsters, and it was this that gave him the idea for a fresh spin on The Creature From The Black Lagoon, which he saw as a boy and wished for the Gill-man creature and the movie's leading lady to end up together.
The end result of this was The Shape Of Water, where a mute janitor works in a lab that houses a humanoid amphibian creature. Where most movies with that setup might see the creature escape and start killing people, del Toro's The Shape Of Water instead explores a surprisingly tender romance between the two, with del Toro's also giving them the ending he wished for while watching Creature From The Black Lagoon. While it's easy to imagine a version of that concept that went terribly wrong, The Shape Of Water was perfectly judged by the filmmaker and became one of the most acclaimed movies of 2017.
Going back to the idea of del Toro's movie being a potential creature feature, 2008's Eel Girl is the flipside of Shape Of Water's tender love story. Eel Girl is a horror short written and directed by Paul Campion. The story takes place in a secret Navy laboratory and sees a scientist who is infatuated with the titular creature breaking protocol so he can see her. While the setup is broadly similiar to The Shape Of Water - which was the first sci-fi movie to win Best Picture - the outcome is very different.
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Julia Rose played Eel Girl in the short, with the creature makeup being provided by Weta Workshop (The Lord Of The Rings). The movie also plays on the siren mythology, with the luckless scientist being lured into Eel Girl's chamber and meeting his doom. In keeping with The Shape Of Water comparisons, Eel Girl lacks the romantic whimsy or sweetness of del Toro's film completely, conveying a much more menacing atmosphere and playing things for dark comedy.
This is best seen in Eel Girl's final moments, where the scientist leans in for a kiss and gets much more than he was expecting. In fact, the whole of Eel Girl feels like a joke leading up to a blackly comic punchline, and for those who wanted The Shape Of Water and its creature origin to be a little more horror-focused, Eel Girl shows what that version could have looked like.