The Lady from the Black Lagoon Quotes

“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. They are at risk of attack from real-life monsters. In America, a woman is assaulted every nine seconds.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“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, 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.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“Women don't need an idol to worship. We need a beacon to walk toward.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“The best monster films don't just parade some sort of terrifying beast in front of your eyes. They pull at a hidden element of your mind, a part that feels ugly, or afraid, or lonely. They give it flesh and blood, and sometimes sharp teeth.

The power of a monster movie is in seeing that dark part of you running around on-screen. You get to watch it wreak the havoc and devastation you should never effect in real life. It's cathartic to see what happens if you let that part of yourself loose instead of shunning it and banishing it to its own Black Lagoon.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“To the privileged, equality feels like oppression”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“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.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“Women have always been the most important part of monster movies. As I walked home one night, I realized why. Making my way down dark city streets to my apartment in Brooklyn, I was alert and on edge. I was looking for suspicious figures, men that could be rapists, muggers or killers. I felt like Laurie Strode in Halloween. 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 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. They are at risk of attack from real-life monsters. In America, a woman is assaulted every nine seconds.

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, creating and writing and directing. We need to tell our stories, too.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“After my initial disappointment, I realized that Milicent being a normal, non-royal was more important to her position as a role model. It was more inspirational. She didn't have superpowers or a magic wand. She was simply intelligent and savvy and good at what she did. We need women to be allowed to be simply good at what they do. We need them on set, in meetings, behind cameras and pens and paintbrushes. We need them to be themselves, to be human: ordinary and flawed. That way, more girls can see them and think" I can do that. "That way, no one can look at them and say" She got that job because she's beautiful. She got that gig because she slept with someone. "

Actually, she got hired because she was damn good.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“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.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“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, i your hands or on your ears.”
― Mallory O’Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“At what point are women forgiven for not being supernaturally resilient Amazons who spend all their waking hours fighting injustice?”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“Women don't get to be colossal monsters. Women don't get to fuck shit up.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“Women are the most important part of horror because, by and large, women are the ones the horror happens to.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“The beauty of Milicent's life and work was, like that of many other women, purposefully hidden to rob her of her power and her influence. 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 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.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“Millicent was holding a door open for me I never realized I had considered closed”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“One hundred percent of the top American films of 1954, the year Creature from the Black Lagoon was released, were directed by men. Ninety-six percent of the top American films for 2016, the year I started writing this book, were directed by men. In sixty-two years, we have improved gender equality in American film directing by four percent. At this rate, we'll be colonizing Mars before we see an qual number of female directors.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“Ultimately, the important thing to companies isn't ethics. It's money and power. For decades, they've been happily complicit in this bullshit system as long as money was being made. Men like Harvey Weinstein aren't losing their careers because movie studios are growing spines and hearts. They're losing careers because of the Everest-esque mountain of damning evidence stacked against them and that the public outcry might make those studios lose money.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“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).”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“To the privileged equality feels like oppression”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“Having a new tattoo really sucks,”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“At first, it made me so angry that she, as I saw it, took this gross offense to both her and her career lying down. She should have made a giant stink, she should have fought back, she should have, she should have, she should have. So often, the onus of these situations is placed on the victims. You shouldn’t have been wearing that miniskirt if you didn’t want to get groped. You shouldn’t have been rude to that cop if you didn’t want to get harassed. You should have said something when your Boss was making sexual advances. You should have fought harder, been smarter, been more careful. The truth is that these situations shouldn’t happen at all. Milicent Patrick should have triumphantly returned from the Creature tour and gone on to a long and successful career designing monsters for Universal Studios. Yes, it would have been absolutely badass if she marched into Bud Westmore’s office and dumped a bucket of manure on his head. Yes, it would have been amazing if she went back to all those newspapers who interviewed her and gave them a new story about what a turd Bud Westmore was. But why was I being so hard on her? Wasn’t she allowed to say “fuck this”? At what point are women forgiven for not being supernaturally resilient Amazons who spend all their waking hours fighting injustice? Milicent was thirty-seven and had been working in and out of male-dominated artistic industries for fifteen years. She had a more successful and varied creative career than many people could dream of. My frustration with her was just a way of protecting my broken heart. I needed to forgive her and direct my anger at a place where, instead of corroding my insides like battery acid, it could actually accomplish something.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“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.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“In fact, it’s not just Hollywood. It’s most industries. 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.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“There is always a part of us that longs for the things we couldn’t have as a child. We’ll always desperately want them. A lost parent, financial security, beautiful things, a sibling. Milicent grew up in the most extreme version of this. Sometimes, it’s as big and indefinable as love. Sometimes, it’s as opulent as your own Wonderland.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“Milicent found an objective happiness in her new life, but she still battled with depression. Remember, depression is a mental health issue. When you have depression, you don’t need a specific trigger or thing to get depressed about. Depression takes care of that for you, finding worries in your life or inventing reasons to be depressed. You can be depressed during the times in your life when you should be happiest, whether because of work success or finding a great romantic partner or going on a wonderful trip. Milicent was also struggling with the migraines that had tormented her since Disney. These two malefactors would sometimes keep her laid up in bed for days at a time.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“Women need to see themselves fighting monsters.”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

“In a low-cut, tight-fitting black crepe dress, worn under a white lace coat, with flashing necklace, earrings and bracelets, Miss Patrick, who is of Italian German descent, looked a lot more like a fashion illustration herself than a creator of bizarre monsters. Unmarried, she admits to no current romance. “Why should I bother with the Hollywood wolves?” she murmured. “I’m happy with my monsters.” —Milicent Patrick in an interview with journalist Jane Corby for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Valentine’s Day, 1954”
― Mallory O'Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick