OLL LEWIS: Release the Kraken

Kraken have been popular foils for heroes in literature and folklore for many, many years and in these tales have had quite a number of different forms as kraken became a catch all term for any large sea monster that was not serpentine. So when it comes to imagining and designing what a Kraken should look like film makers have a huge selection of forms to choose from including great island beasts, enormous crabs, gigantic barnacles, oversized octopodes, whales, colossal squid, terrifying turtles or even something of the film makers own imagining. It is a great shame then that in resent years film makers have settled on giant cephalopods as the acceptable face of the Kraken because this limits the publics perception of what a kraken could be and when you mention Kraken to the man on the street he naturally assumes you are just talking about giant squid rather than any one of the full gambit of monsters the word Kraken was liked to in history.

Not so, Ray Harryhausen’s Kraken in Clash of the Titans, which took the form of a gigantic four armed merman like creature. The size ferocity of the monster could easily to the earliest greek myths about the creature which described it as the ‘asp turtle’. These tales recorded in a poetic form in the Physiologus as follows:

“This time I will with poetic art rehearse,
by means of words and wit,
a poem about a kind of fish,
the great sea-monster which is often unwillingly met,
terrible and cruel-hearted to seafarers, yea, to every man;
this swimmer of the ocean-streams is known as the asp-turtle.

“His appearance is like that of a rough boulder, as if there were tossing by the shore a great ocean-reedbank begirt with sand-dunes,
so that seamen imagine they are gazing upon an island,
and moor their high-prowed ships with cables to that false land,
make fast the ocean-coursers at the sea's end,
and, bold of heart, climb up on that island;
the vessels stand by the beach, enringed by the flood.

“The weary-hearted sailors then encamp, dreaming not of peril.

“On the island they start a fire, kindle a mounting flame.

“The dispirited heroes, eager for repose, are flushed with joy.

“Now when the cunning plotter feels that the seamen are firmly established upon him,
and have settled down to enjoy the weather,
the guest of ocean sinks without warning into the salt wave with his prey, and makes for the bottom,
thus whelming ships and men in that abode of death.”

When reading that you can certainly imagine a creature like Harryhausen’s cinematic version of the Kraken being more than capable of such ship bothering deeds but not a giant squid. For starters, how exactly could you walk about on a giant squid mantle or light a fire on it, it’s the tentacles of the squid which form the bulk of the length and the mantles are not much longer than the average adult man. In reality many tales like this of Kraken were likely based on tidal islands but when it comes to imagining what a mythical and fictional beast capable of this scale of devastation could look like Harryhausen’s Kraken fits the bill better than any squid.