Introduction¹

It may seem surprising to some to think about monsters, or the monstrous, alongside liberation. The word monster originates from the Latin ‘monstrum’, meaning ‘that which appears’ – from which we get the word ‘demonstrate’ – and is also related to the word ‘monere’, to warn or portend.² Traditionally, monsters are understood to be horrifying, disgust-inducing creatures because they do not fit into our constructed categories which provide us with order and control in the world, and because they represent that which is absolutely not us, they are completely Other; ‘difference made flesh’.³ Monsters threaten us as they demonstrate that our ordered systems, our normative ways of understanding the world, are no longer efficacious.⁴ Because of this, the monster can be read as a construction arising out of a particular cultural context which it simultaneously calls into question. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen theorised that the monster ‘resists any classification built on hierarchy’ and instead demands non-binary or polyphonic response to crisis.⁵ At the same time, according to Cohen, as entities from ‘the Outside’, or as external viewers of our cultures, monsters force us to reflect on how we may have been wrong in our ordering of the world, and specifically ‘ask us to re-evaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference.’⁶ It seems then that there may be something the monster offers for the liberative project of resisting the systems of oppression of minoritised and dehumanised communities. Indeed, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock comments that ‘The monster threatens, but also promises liberation – a liberation that itself can seem threatening.’⁷ This ‘promise’ is what I wish to explore using a case study, the monster from the film The Shape of Water.

Such an approach has been developed more rigorously as a method by Siobhán Jolley, named Liberative Reception Criticism, which carries out intentionally intersectional critiques of biblical receptions in order to identify how they may Other and harm men and women under hegemonic patriarchy on the basis of intersecting social locations and identities.¹¹ The critical lens of intersectionality, combined with reception history theory and liberation theology, offers biblical scholars an important framework for unpicking the complexities of living under patriarchy and providing new and oppositional readings of biblical texts.¹² Given the perceived potential for the monster to be of aid in the pursuit of liberation, attending to the monster and what it reveals accords with the agenda of Liberative Reception Criticism.

Erin Runions has noted that both the Bible and film are influential in our cultures in similar ways, and therefore the study of the Bible in film may well be generative for resisting different forms of oppression such as colonization, patriarchy, wealth and whiteness.¹³ In Runions’ work, How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film, the concept of hysteria is used to interrogate expressions of opposition to the oppressive status quo. She states: ‘Not only is hysteria caused by resistance, however; it also enables resistance by revealing the possibility of alternate identification to others.’¹⁴ The same may be said of monsters; the monster is created out of resistance and opposition to the current order, but it also demonstrates that there are alternative ways of being, different ways of relating to others. Both hysteria and monsters are ambivalent, however. Runions observes that while some may see hysteria as subversive towards the patriarchy, others may say it only perpetuates the patriarchy by giving it something to point to for its legitimate requirement. This ambiguity is something to be aware of when we read the monsters that are constructed in our cultures, they may pull in more than one direction; resistance and capitulation.

This article argues that Guillermo del Toro liberates two figures from earlier filmic representations: Delilah from Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), and the monster from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). In doing so, the film also offers a portrayal of the abject use of the Bible by those who seek to uphold dehumanising, patriarchal power structures, and thus suggests that embracing or entangling with the monster may lead to alternate, liberated ways of being. In the film, a (human) villain uses a biblical text as a tool to enhance his power and domination, and also seeks to utilise the monster for his own egotistic self-empowerment. The Bible is not used for good in this film’s story-arc. Instead, the use of the Bible highlights how certain readings of biblical stories contribute to systems of oppression and matrices of domination in our societies that have dehumanised those marginalised by patriarchy. The film particularly draws attention to intersectional experiences of oppression under patriarchy such as misogyny, ableism, racism, classism, and homophobia. The monster of the film, however, is portrayed as embracing difference and diversity. The monstrous thus impinges on us as potentially liberative for those who have experienced intersectional oppression.

The Shape of Water and Samson and Delilah (Judges 16)

The Shape of Water (2017), directed and co-written by Guillermo del Toro, is set in 1960s Baltimore, in the middle of the Cold War and Space Race between the United States and Soviet Union. The narrative follows the life of a non-speaking cleaner named Elisa Esposito, who works at a secret government research institute called the Occam Aerospace Research Facility with her African-American colleague Zelda D. Fuller.¹⁵ The head of the institute, Colonel Richard Strickland, has captured an amphibian creature from the Amazon River in the hope that American scientists will be able to learn from the creature’s two breathing systems and give their astronauts an edge over the Soviets.

This non-human creature appears, due to physical difference, to be a monster. Indeed, traditionally monsters have been conceptualised as entities which do not fit our systems of categorisation, they may be hybrids, or gigantic in size, and thus evoke disgust and represent something disordered, which infers a real or perceived threat.¹⁶ Noël Carroll refers to ‘fusion’ as one way of constructing monsters in film, that is, a combining in one being of two opposing aspects, such as living-dead, insect-human, or flesh-machine.¹⁷ Essentially, a monster formed via fusion ‘is a composite that unites attributes held to be categorically distinct and/or at odds in the cultural scheme of things in unambiguously one, spatiotemporally discrete entity.’¹⁸ In The Shape of Water the monster appears to be a human-amphibian fusion; he can walk on two legs, breath in and out of water, his skin is iridescent, and his eyes are large and golden like those of a frog (Figure 1).

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The monster is an amphibian-human fusion.

Citation: Biblical Interpretation 33, 04-05 (2025) ; 10.1163/15685152-33450007

the shape of water directed by guillermo del toro, fox searchlight pictures © 2017. all rights reserved.

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Zelda comments that her mother may not have read the Bible, pointedly using its alternative title, ‘the Good Book’, to remind the audience of its socially accepted status.²¹ Strickland’s view of the biblical Delilah as a deceptive and dangerous femme fatale reflects her depiction in popular culture as the woman responsible for the downfall of Samson.²² One of the most influential pieces of this popular culture is Cecil B. DeMille’s film Samson and Delilah (1949). The film was a commercial success, won multiple awards, and inaugurated the appetite for biblical epics on the silver screen in the 1950s.²³ DeMille’s rendering of Judges 13–16, including his particular portrayals of the eponymous characters, is considered to have become as dominant a source of the tale as the biblical text in the minds of the general public.²⁴ Following his American Christian ideology, DeMille presented Samson in his film as heroic, or even ‘as a rustic Christ-figure’ or ‘proto-Jesus’.²⁵ In tandem with this, DeMille also rendered Delilah as a femme fatale, a deceitful temptress pushed even to the point of a serpent or devil figure, using plums as her forbidden fruit of choice in the film.²⁶

Likewise, Wil Gafney characterises Samson’s life as ‘one of twisted games, riddles, and blood sport’,²⁹ with the riddle in particular leading to ‘the brutal deaths of thirty innocent men and later the bride and her father followed by an untold number of Philistine people in addition to their crops and the tortuous deaths of wild foxes burned alive.’³⁰ Robert Alter describes him as someone ‘whose formidable brawn will not be matched by brain, or even by a saving modicum of common sense.’³¹ Many similar criticisms of Samson have been observed by scholars and commentators as meticulously documented by Anton Karl Kozlovic.³² Even Judg. 15:10–13 suggests that his actions were not always perceived as heroic by his own people, as a group of Judahite men criticise Samson for his violence against the Philistines, and bind him up to deliver him into the hands of the enemies. DeMille’s legacy in the distorted reception of Samson as righteous hero, and Delilah’s character-assassination, is remarkable.

According to Cheryl Exum, the femme fatale is a male construct, a projection of male fears of inadequacy; she is an expression of the need to protect a man’s self-esteem by feeling superior to women.³³ The femme fatale’s ‘unknowableness’ and ‘mystery’ is why she is feared by men.³⁴ In The Shape of Water, Strickland represents the all-American power male whose desire to remain in control and be recognised as a man by his superiors must be aggressively enforced through his control of the disempowered beings beneath him.³⁵ Strickland is threatened by Zelda and Elisa because they are unknowable to him, and later in the film he eroticises and disempowers them just as the biblical Delilah is eroticised and disempowered into the femme fatale figure. In doing so he neutralises the threat they pose to his self-esteem, masculinity, and power. Strickland’s recounting of the biblical story is in line with DeMille’s film version, and given the setting of The Shape of Water in the decade following DeMille’s Samson and Delilah, Strickland shares the wider culture’s version of the characters as proffered by DeMille. Maybe Zelda’s mother had read the story closely, it was just DeMille’s film that she was unaware of.

The process of negative characterisation reflected in Strickland’s description of the amphibian man (an ‘affront’, ‘a filthy thing’ which originated in ‘river muck’) is often referred to by Monster Theorists as monsterisation.³⁷ Such a process was often used in Medieval rhetoric and art about the so-called Monstrous Races, whose monsterisation by Christian thinkers was frequently linked to their ‘godlessness’.³⁸ Physical difference, regarded as physical deformity, was associated with inward moral character deemed unacceptable, as medieval art historian Debra Higgs Strickland observes: ‘Men of the East, then, [were seen as] both products and perpetrators of sin … We are attractive, They are ugly. We are civilized, They are wild. We are moral, They are sinful.’³⁹ In this scene, Strickland observes that the lack of similarity in the amphibian man’s form to the imago Dei marks him as non-human. It is by dint of being made in the Lord’s image that defines humanity, for Strickland. As the amphibian man does not look similar to Strickland, who is assumed to be made in the imago Dei, then he cannot be one of us, he is Other from Strickland’s perspective. Not only does the amphibian man exhibit physical difference, he is also rendered godless in form by Strickland.

Strickland invokes God as part of his self-identification. Strickland views his humanity as directly linked to God, because he believes (white male) humans were made to look like God. For Strickland the amphibian man is an affront to God’s creation, something filthy that does not belong and so should be eradicated once its usefulness has been extracted. This monster is abject for Strickland, who is repulsed. However, Strickland also offers an illustration of Cohen’s sixth thesis on monsters, that the fear of the monster is also a kind of desire: ‘The monster also attracts. The same creatures who terrify and interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint.’⁴⁰ Through dissecting the monster’s body, and potentially improving American male bodies with the body of the monster Strickland can manifest his ‘fantasies of aggression, domination, and inversion’, because the monster, according to Cohen, also functions ‘as an alter ego, as an alluring projection of (an Other) self.’⁴¹

Strickland’s last word, however, is not a comment on the amphibian man but an Othering of black women through Zelda. Strickland says God looks like humans, but more like humans who look like Richard Strickland, a white man, than those who look like Zelda, a black woman. This remark reveals the unsettling legacies of certain theological interpretations which have propped up white male privilege by rendering non-male and non-white people less godly: colonialism, slavery, racism.

The phrase ‘ugly as sin’ explicates the idea mentioned earlier that “Monstrous Races” were thought to display physical difference because they were perceived as godless and morally inferior.⁴² The Amazon peoples who apparently worshipped the amphibian man as a deity are also rendered inferior by Strickland, who mocks them for their food offerings as well as their weaponry which stands little chance against the tools of Western colonialism. For him, the Amazon peoples must be godless and sinful (like other so-called Monstrous Races), because they worship this amphibian being, not the Christian deity.

Medieval Christian thinkers intriguingly used the unclean animal species in Leviticus 11 as justificatory evidence for the uncleanness, and thus sinfulness, of some “Monstrous Races” that were thought to present bestial features.⁴³ Thus, Strickland’s earlier speech presents a coalescence of the ideas of sinfulness, filthiness, animal-hybridity and godlessness which displays his sense of abjection towards the amphibian man.

In the way he addresses her, Strickland explicitly aligns himself with Samson, and Zelda with Delilah, and implies that the biblical story (mediated by DeMille’s film) predetermines the outcome of their social interaction. In the biblical story, Samson is able to use his strength to realise his will, thus Strickland, viewing himself as Samson, assumes that he too will be successful. Samson is popularly regarded as a heroic figure who efficiently dispatches Philistines with the jaw of an ass and has God’s favour, enabling him to pull down the columns of the Philistine temple.⁴⁴ Strickland’s interpretation does not deviate from this perspective and seems to inform Strickland’s sense of superiority over the amphibian man, and the two female cleaners, one black and one non-speaking. His privileged position in the patriarchy has its roots in his belief that the Bible confirms the hierarchical structures of the world in which he finds himself at the top. Seeing himself as made in the image of God and positioning himself as the righteous and favoured Samson justifies Strickland’s mistreatment of those whom he deems inferior.

Delilah and the Monster

In addition to DeMille’s popular and influential film, other media have exacerbated the negative femme fatale portrayal of Delilah, and a righteous warrior portrayal of Samson. For example, animations of Bible stories for children often depict Delilah as a betrayer or Judas character, who uses her femininity or sexuality to bring Jesus-like Samson to his downfall.⁴⁵ Other modern media such as pop songs and musicals also use this stereotype of Delilah as a common cultural reference, which reinforces these misconceptions of the story.⁴⁶ Caroline Vander Stichele comments in her work on Delilah that it is easy to despair about these portrayals of Delilah, but that because there are many textual gaps in Judges 16, there is also hope for portrayals of ‘a different Delilah’.⁴⁷ The Shape of Water responds to such a hope. Because the film presents Strickland as the villain, the popular, though inaccurate, understanding of Samson and Delilah is subverted. Zelda is presented in the film as a loyal friend and a self-declared bad liar. Indeed, the biblical Delilah is truthful to a fault in Judges 16 – she never actually lies to Samson, and she may well have made her decisions knowing Samson was a visceral threat to many innocent people.⁴⁸ Through Strickland, Samson’s treatment of the Philistines becomes cast more as an act of terrorism than one of valour.

It is well established that del Toro, as the director and co-author of this film, wanted to retell the 1954 film Creature from the Black Lagoon with his desired ending; the monster is good and ends up romantically with the female protagonist.⁴⁹ However, del Toro also appears to have retold another story: DeMille’s Samson and Delilah. In depicting Zelda as an honest and loyal friend while Strickland, as Samson, is nakedly driven by egotism and violence, the film appears to rehabilitate and liberate the biblical Delilah from her popular interpretation (just as the monster is liberated from his earlier 1954 depiction). In both retellings, del Toro switches the good character and the bad character with their inversions. It is Zelda’s husband, Brewster, who ends up betraying Elisa’s secret, and it is Strickland who tries to seduce Elisa, subverting the usual tropes of woman as betrayer and seductress. Zelda/Delilah does not fulfil the role of the foreign, deceitful femme fatale she has commonly been seen to inhabit, her role in this film is liberated from DeMille’s popular misogynistic and racist interpretation. Thus, this film creates an alternative and unfamiliar rendering of Samson and Delilah for the majority of viewers. Delilah is no longer a femme fatale, the being men should fear, rather Strickland, or Samson, is the repulsive figure that should be reviled. Strickland uses the Bible not as a force for good, but as a text of terror; he actively intimidates Zelda in her own home through his retelling of Samson. Portraying the Bible in this way, as a force for violence and discrimination, demonstrates ways in which appeals to biblical authority have been used historically in the (re)constituting of power dynamics between white males and everybody else.

Strickland and the Abject

The two columns of the temple that Samson topples to kill the Philistines appear to be evoked by Strickland’s fingers. Strickland’s abject fingers, used to disgust and intimidate Zelda, are the abjection of Strickland’s actions and Samson’s killing of hundreds of people. Strickland’s retelling of the biblical story, his attempted distortion of Samson as righteous hero, thus becomes associated with his decaying, abject fingers. He is willing to self-destruct, like Samson does, in order to bring the ‘Philistines’ to their deaths, to foil the plans of those he has Othered. Strickland lost his fingers because he physically harmed the amphibian man with a cattle prod after he had captured him from his home against his will. The amphibian man then acted in self-defence, not innate violence or hunger. Strickland’s abjection is a direct result of his dehumanising treatment of the Other. The film renders Strickland’s version of the Samson and Delilah story abject, as evoking disgust through Strickland’s oppression and dehumanisation of any being who is not a white male. The use of the Bible in this way, is condemned as abject.

The Monster Demonstrates Liberation

The monster in this film may fulfil Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s seventh thesis on monsters, that is, that monsters prompt us to question ‘how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place’ and ‘to re-evaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance toward its expression.’⁵⁵ In doing so, the monster points towards the possibility of alternative, liberated, worlds. Forms of Otherness, or intersectional experiences of oppression under the patriarchy, saturate The Shape of Water: Elisa’s best friend and neighbour, Giles, is a gay man who feels he was born in the wrong era, Elisa herself is a non-speaking woman who was orphaned as a child, and Zelda, a black cleaner married to an abusive husband. Unbeknownst to others at the science facility, one of the lead scientists is an undercover Soviet, representative of the most Othered and maligned identities in the Cold War era. These intersectional identities find liberation through the monster in the film. The amphibian miraculously enables Giles’s hair to grow, providing him with confidence and joy, Zelda stands up to her husband to save Elisa and the monster (and breaks free from the femme fatale interpretation of Delilah), the Soviet scientist resists both American and Russian chains of command to protect the monster, and Elisa enters a whole new liberated life with the monster (discussed further below). During a 2017 interview, del Toro commented that the movie is ‘about our problems today and about demonizing the other and about fearing or hating the other, and how that is a much more destructive position than learning to love and understand.’⁵⁶ As a Mexican, immigrant, filmmaker, it is not difficult to imagine how del Toro’s South American monster’s story took shape against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s announcement speech in 2015. In that speech, Trump promised tighter controls on ‘illegal immigration’, a Mexican border wall to keep ‘rapists’ out, and also called for ban on Muslims entering the country after the 2015 Paris attacks. Indeed, commentators of this film have regarded it to be a Trump-era update to del Toro’s earlier works.⁵⁷ While the film is set in the 1960s, del Toro has explicitly stated that America has not actually progressed in terms of equality and liberation since 1962 and so the film is really about the present, rather than the past.⁵⁸

The Hebrew Bible promotes an ideal of physical wholeness or perfection.⁶² Indeed, texts concerning the senses, including speech are often used metaphorically or literally to identify a person without a sense as less independent, lacking in God’s support, or sinful.⁶³ Avrahami even notes that this biblical perception of sensory difference dehumanises: ‘[it] could also lead to people without all their senses being regarded as essentially inferior, as almost “non-persons”’.⁶⁴ This is the way Strickland appears to view Elisa. He also dehumanises Elisa by animalising her lack of speech during his inappropriate sexual advances: ‘I bet I can make you squawk a little’. The normative body is often modelled on God’s body – another legacy of the imago Dei – God walks and feels (Gen. 3:8), God speaks, thus humans made in his image should too, and if not, they are less than. Jesus too carries out his “normalising” acts of healing by restoring speech, sight and other somatic functions to characters perceived as disabled in the gospels.⁶⁵ Difference is not allowed, physical “perfection” of the human body must be rigorously reinforced.

Elisa and the amphibian man, however, communicate and show feeling to each other beyond words. Elisa’s lack of speech is not a deficiency here but a productive means of connectivity. Elisa teaches the amphibian man sign language and uses body language, acts of giving, and touch to communicate with the amphibian man in a way that none of the speaking characters have been able to achieve. The dominance of the spoken word as the primary and privileged vehicle of communicating is re-ordered. Other ways of sensing, knowing, and being are possible. In the beginning was the Word (Jn 1:1), but perhaps it does not have to be the end. Logocentric, Christian America is wordlessly critiqued.

After being injured by Strickland’s gunshot, Elisa is led into the sea by the amphibian man who heals the bullet wound and enables her to breathe underwater using gills transformed from the scars on her neck. This has been read by scholars of disability studies as a return to Elisa’s natural form, rather than a transition into something she was not previously.⁶⁶ Elisa is reported to have been found as a baby abandoned (or exposed, left Outside), by a river with the scars on her neck, and she has lived much of her life as a ‘fish out of water’.⁶⁷ The monster’s ability to heal Giles’s baldness and a wound on his arm suggests that the divine amphibian is a healer, rather than a transformer. Elisa therefore is returned to her truest state, one which allows her to fulfil her desire for her monster. I would resist viewing this as equivalent to Jesus’s healings, wherein the wholeness of the human body based on the imago Dei is reified. The monster’s healing is an alternative to the restoration of the God-Human form, that which is viewed as “normative”. Elisa’s healing is to a form which is absolutely different, amphibian and human, fusion and hybridity, monstrous. She is liberated from the restriction and oppression imposed by the imago Dei.

This emotive climax is Elisa and the amphibian man’s fairytale ending, their ‘happily ever after’. Just as the monster doesn’t make Elisa more human, Elisa too does not try to humanise or civilise the monster as if the only way for the Other to be acceptable is if it meets some sort of predetermined standard set by the dominant, privileged group. Elisa’s ‘desire for the monster’ demonstrates that the amphibian man’s difference is to be welcomed as an alternate way of being in the world, rather than being demonised. The amphibian man’s body is not colonised into acceptability, and Elisa’s life is saved by his monstrous healing powers and the Otherness of her scars, those marks which indexed her status as “mute”, as different. That which was seen as disempowering before (likely based on biblical scripts of bodily wholeness and perfection), now, through her desire of the monster, becomes the source of her empowerment and liberation in their watery world. Traditionally, the fear of the monster signified the cultural anxiety of sexual practices deemed to be deviant,⁶⁸ but in Elisa’s desire and sexual relationship with the amphibian man the audience’s expectations of exactly what we should fear is realigned. As Dawn Keetley observes, these kinds of entanglements are a feature of recent horror films, where desires to become human-plant, or human-animal, hybrids imply a rejection of our normatively ordered world.⁶⁹ Entanglement with monsters may be terrifying but it can be embraced in order to enter new worlds or become something new. The monster and Elisa entangle; their sociality and celebration of their difference, the imago Monstrum, is revealed within the film to be a potently efficacious means for liberation.

General Hoyt confirms that ‘a decent man’ is simply a man who successfully carries out the orders of other men above him, the embodiment of obedience and efficacy. Strickland’s failure to find the amphibian man will lead to his unmaking, he will be unmanned, a non-person. Hoyt claims that the other type of decency, implied to be synonymous with morality, goodness, or faithfulness, is not useful in their context, and it is therefore sold. It acts as a façade, a simple advertisement, for Christian America, but it has no real worth or value, according to him. Strickland is thus also at the mercy of patriarchal hegemony, he is not quite at the top of the hierarchy because he is currently failing to meet the bar set by his male superior, the father figure. The only way Strickland can grasp at retaining his position of superiority is through the successful capture and oppression of the amphibian man and those who helped him escape: Elisa, Zelda, the Soviet spy and Giles. These subordinated Others embody the difference with which Strickland, and Hoyt, refuse to reconcile. In order to maintain the status quo of their biblically endorsed power they consistently maintain an understanding of the subordinated Other, because their male superiority is contingent on this difference being preserved. The liberation that the monster offers is indeed threatening for them, as it is for many still today. Strongmen, like Samson, cannot always come out on top, and if they do not, they will take down whoever they can with them.

Gods and Monsters

Timothy Beal observes that we often respond to monsters in one of two ways: demonization or deification.⁷¹ Strickland witnesses the monster heal his own body before resurrecting from the blood-soaked ground after he had shot him several times. He looks at the amphibian man and declares, ‘You are a god’, conceding to the same appreciation of the creature as the community in the Amazon which revered him. This monster is deified, while Strickland is demonised. Mikles and Laycock note that ‘Demonized monsters challenge the social order but paradoxically reinforce it as the community rallies against them. Deified monsters appear as a manifestation of the transcendent or the holy that calls the accepted order into question.’⁷² In The Shape of Water the amphibian man demonstrates that Strickland’s accepted order, his worldview and its hierarchical structures, cannot continue to be efficacious or productive. Simultaneously, the demonization of Strickland perhaps rallies audiences against hegemonic structures of racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia and other expressions of discrimination and Othering.

Strickland’s final comment that the monster is a god is significant given his earlier rhetoric of the amphibian man as an affront, not made in the Lord’s image, and sinful. Strickland’s capitulation to the monster as a god signifies his apparent revelation that there are alternate forms of godliness. We may consider this revelatory moment that Strickland experiences in light of Rudolf Otto’s idea of the mysterium tremendum,⁷³ or as Beal puts it, ‘religious experience as aweful encounter with monstrous otherness’.⁷⁴ Strickland sees the divine in this monstrous being and we see on his face ‘the stupefying combination of fascination and terror, wonder and dread.’⁷⁵ The amphibian-man-as-deity appears to Strickland as ‘wholly other’, incommensurate with his own self-identification with the imago Dei, thus he recoils and yet also is drawn to it. The knowledge is undeniable and also irrational. Strickland’s confirmation of the monster’s divinity in this moment of mysterium tremendum discloses that there are cracks in the world constructed by monotheistic American Christianity.

The final words of the film are del Toro’s rendering of a 13th century Sufi poet: ‘Unable to perceive the shape of you, I find you all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with your love. It humbles my heart, for you are everywhere.’ The poetic words of another marginalised group, the Muslim community, are left here for the viewer, and it is perhaps another move towards the embrace of difference and liberation. The narrator who reads the poem tells us they were whispered a long time ago by someone in love. This ancient, sacred text, a message about love, is not from the Bible. There are alternatives. There are other voices to which we should listen.

Conclusions

W. Scott Poole notes that while stories about monsters have been used in the past as ‘exhibitions of power over the oppressed’, monsters can also be engendered ‘by the oppressed and socially marginalised to unsettle and challenge the powerful.’⁷⁶ I argue that The Shape of Water does just this. Del Toro liberates both the monster and Delilah from earlier film versions, in which they were vilified, evil, monstrous. Strickland’s characterisation of Samson and Delilah is not true to the Hebrew text, but it is true to the Christianised version made by DeMille who wanted to render Samson as a Christ figure. The ways in which biblical stories have been distorted in American Christian culture, to uphold white American male dominance, is depicted in this film as abject. Through Strickland’s retelling, and his abject, rotting fingers caused by his dehumanisation of the amphibian man, he shows that this use of the Bible is truly abject, horrific. Strickland’s distortion of the Bible into a tool for the reconstituting of the patriarchal hierarchy alongside his abject treatment of others and his abject fingers may make explicit to the viewer the causal relationship between biblical interpretation and oppressive, dehumanising patriarchal structures. The liberative power of the monster disintegrates the popularised narratives culture clings to that justifies histories of inequality and exploitation.⁷⁷ The monster, as both Cohen and Weinstock have observed, represents an unexpected potential for ways of relating to difference that promote liberation. Viewers may recognise that if we pay critical attention to these alternative ways of being that the monster demonstrates, and embrace or entangle ourselves with the monster, there could be liberated futures ahead.