by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

“Fuck. You are a god.”

When Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 feature film The Shape of Water premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, it took home the highest prize from said festival: the Golden Lion. Quickly it became a front runner for the Oscar race that year, and it was in some great company. (And some bad! Please never talk to me about Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri ever again!)

The film is a dark fairytale (as del Toro is known for) about a mute cleaning woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) who works at a government aerospace facility in Baltimore in 1962. When something is brought into the building and housed there, she becomes curious. In her curiosity, she ends up building a relationship with the god-like amphibious creature who’s being held (and tortured) in the facility. With the help of Zelda (Octavia Spencer), Giles (Richard Jenkins), and Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), Elisa breaks the creature out. She ends up meeting her fate at the hands of a government agent, Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), before being saved by the creature and having her life forever intertwined with its own. 

It is not quite a horror, but certainly follows in the footsteps of 1954’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Both in a very clear visual element (comparing the look of the original creature to the way that Doug Jones looks in The Shape of Water) and anecdotally from del Toro himself. He is, after all, “At Home with Monsters.” 

But the general vibe of monster horror films from the 1950s isn’t quite what we’d call modern horror. And certainly the horror in this film is the way that Elisa and the creature are both treated, independently from each other, by outside forces. In other words, and pretty classically at this point, the humans are the horror element in The Shape of Water. Rather than the creature or the 1954 film. 

Now, something I’ve always been really fascinated by is the idea of “tie-in” novels. These come in many types (I’ve identified about four main ones), but specifically I’ve always been a fan of the “novelization,” in its present form. These are books that retell, often with added content and contextualization, the stories of films or television episodes. And they rule. Guillermo del Toro has had novelizations of his last three English-language films made and they’re all immensely fascinating for the types of insights they bring about the stories that del Toro is ultimately trying to tell.

A brief history of novelization, if you’ll indulge me. Nearly as old as cinema itself, novelizations are traced back to the early 1900s. Many silent films of the era had them. In fact, they were widely popular until the creation of home media, as they were one of the only ways to be able to revisit a film and television show outside of a particular time window. So, in the 1970s the novelizations of Star Wars, Alien, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture all sold millions of copies. Those numbers have decreased in recent years, but novelizations are still a big part of the tie-in deals that the publishing industry has with the film and television industry. 

In a Vanity Fair article from 2014, writer Alex Suskind talked about the modern appeal of novelizations. “It’s a way for fans to feel more connected to a story or property they love. When you have a novelization, you get to remember at least a piece of that enthusiasm you experienced the first time around,” he writes. And that’s the real appeal of novelizations. They allow a deep, sometimes different even, experience of a story you already loved seeing on screen.

Often novelizations are based on older versions of the scripts - since the aim is to have them come out alongside the film. This allows the writer some lead time, but it also means that the books won’t be a cookie-cutter version of the film, which has a lot of appeal. Like, not only will you get internal life and backstories for characters where it didn’t appear in the visual medium… but sometimes you get new plot elements. These give insight into where the story was going before the final shooting draft, or are changes that simply work better in a prose format. 

And with that… there are many things that are interesting about this particular novelization of The Shape of Water. For instance, the co-writer Daniel Kraus, was already working with del Toro on his Trollhunters project when they talked about the concept for The Shape of Water back in 2011. He’s also credited as a producer on the film, not just as one of the authors of the book. But more interesting, to me at least, is both the timing of the release of the novelization and how the novelization changes elements of the film in a much bigger way than is typical.

So, traditionally, novelizations are published pretty close to when the film is released. This is because they’re seen as part of the marketing for the film (and often treated like such). Like, the previous two novelizations of del Toro’s films, were both released within four days of the movie coming out in US theaters. This is pretty normal, since films come out on Fridays, while books tend to be released on Tuesdays, and you don’t want the novelization to fully spoil the film or anything. 

However, the novelization for The Shape of Water was released nearly three months after the film. Three months! Like, it came out two days after the film won Best Picture at the 90th Academy Awards. What a wild world! My assumption would be that the novelization wasn’t commissioned until after the festival in Venice, when the appeal could be calculated. However, that wasn’t quite the case. Not really. 

According to a Gizmodo piece from after the film’s release, but before the novel’s, Kraus’s story isn’t quite a novelization. Since it had been a shared story between them in 2011, eventually they decided to tell the same story through their different mediums. Del Toro with his film and Kraus with his novel. But it also is a novelization because they still collaborated, once they’d kind of figured out what they each wanted out of the story and plot elements. “I was still able to do all the things I had been planning and thinking about on my own, and they all kind of snapped perfectly into the plot and story he was envisioning,” Kraus said. 

Kraus, for his part though, doesn’t quite consider it a novelization since he and del Toro were working on their distinct stories at the same time. And, having read the novel… yeah. I think that’s pretty fair. It’s certainly much more of a companion piece to the film, but there’s not a specific name for the type of tie-in story that del Toro and Kraus have created here - so the marketing simply uses “novelization” as a catch-all. But, with all that being said, I thought I might mention a few things that I find really fascinating about the novel versus the film and how I think it kind of changes the tone, but keeps the spirit. (Hence, why it’s a really great companion piece.)

So, I really commend Kraus on his ability to give Strickland a lot of internal life, but never making him particularly sympathetic. He also manages to make Strickland’s wife, Elaine, into a fully formed character - with different versions of similar events from the film, just with Elaine in them. But like, she’s active and has a whole lot of agency. It’s a really interesting take, when her character only appears in one sequence of the film. As for Strickland, specifically, we travel with him to the Amazon at the start of the book, something he only tells Elisa and Zelda about in the film, and we get a lot of his internal monologue. Again, Kraus doesn’t make him sympathetic or anything, but he gives some perspective on where Strickland’s whole thing is at. 

Conversely, I find Dr. Hoffstetler to be just kind of okay. He’s one of my favorite parts of del Toro’s film, but Kraus doesn’t feel as interested in him. Like, he’s not the savior of the escape scene from jump, in the same way he is in the film. Which is fine, but it kind of changes his entire relationship with the creature, Elisa, and Strickland. I feel similarly about Kraus’s version of Giles, honestly.

However, there are a few chapters from the creature’s point of view and they are a goddamn delight. I wish there had been more, certainly, as the syntax and actual words really separate those chapters out in a really nice way. We could do with some more perspective from the creature. But while it’s not something del Toro needs in the film, it adds the kind of fairytale element that Kraus doesn’t quite have, at least not in the same ways, to the novel. 

In some ways the novelization of The Shape of Water is a more sanitized version of the story from the film. It’s certainly less sexual (not that there isn’t sex, but it feels less overt in the novel), but it’s not necessarily less violent. The violence is just shown in different ways and moments and is often less visceral than if you were to see del Toro’s depictions of it. 

But I think the biggest difference can be seen in Richard Strickland’s final words, in each version of the story. In Guillermo del Toro's film Strickland’s final words are the ones I opened this piece with, while Daniel Kraus’s novel has them as the ones that end this piece. They are similar, but they are distinctly their own. They indicate parallel versions of the same character. They are slanted mirrors of each other, ones that make Strickland no less the ultimate horror of both stories. Here are two very different ways to make a character function the same. And I think that’s rather neat. 

“You are a god. I’m sorry.”