A film has haunted me since childhood.
I first bumped into it in the early 80s. I can’t say exactly what year it was, only that I was five or six years old and that I caught it by chance on the telly one evening. Although I didn’t retain anything of the dialogue it was no doubts dubbed into Spanish, like all foreign films on Argentine TV back then. I watched it in black and white — our local stations started broadcasting colour in 1980 but my grandad bought our first colour TV set later.
The film was very likely a few years old, because these were the days when movies would take some time to arrive at your home screen. There was no cable, no telly on demand, no VHS. Then there were just waning cinemas and the telly. So, for most of my childhood I was stuck with the limited taste of film programmers trying to keep neighbourhood cinemas alive and the limited budget of two provincial TV stations with their non-stop advertisement, soap operas, Argentine films of questionable quality, and low quality American movies bought in bundles, most often than not family-friendly comedies. But this film was a different thing. Even if for a long time it existed in my mind only as a cluster of sensations and scattered details. I could just recall a convoluted and melancholic story of giant turtles, with a beautiful dark-haired mermaid (let’s call her that for now), what appeared to be a tragic love story, some fussy references to the devil, and a suspenseful and romantic music.
That’s all I could say of the film for years, because I didn’t even know its name: I missed the title as the film was a few minutes in when I started watching it — another occurrence of life pre everything-on-demand. So the film was there before me and it was also already gone and this is something I was aware of at that time. Or maybe I didn’t know that back then, and I only knew it later. Because we’re constantly rewriting the past and ourselves. I have rewritten that specific moment — and myself watching — many times. I am doing it right now, once more. I might do it again.
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Later on, as a teenager, I would occasionally remember the film, ruminate about it, perhaps bring it up in some conversation. Most of those I discussed it with didn’t have a clue about what I was talking about but there was at least one friend who thought he could remember something about a giant turtle but couldn’t be sure, which betrayed he didn’t have a clue either. Every now and then I would write a couple of lines attempting and failing to get to the bottom of my fascination with this half-remembered movie. Sooner than later I would let my obsessive thoughts recede and bin whatever it was I had written. Just to start all over with the process a couple of years later.
Obviously, I was getting some sort pleasure from this cycle of recall and forgetting. Back in the mid to late 90s — even if my English was limited and the internet was still in its infancy — it would still have taken just a web search to be pointed towards the right film. And perhaps not in Rosario but for sure in Buenos Aires there were many places where you could find a bootleg copy of pretty much anything1. I don’t know why I kept avoiding the film. Perhaps I wasn’t old enough to start properly revisiting my childhood yet.
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It must have been 2006 or 2007 when I learned that the object of my reveries was The Bermuda Depths, a 1978 Rankin-Bass TV production directed by Tsugunobu Kotani. Rescuing it from oblivion was a pretty easy deal: I just googled turtles + mermaid + green eyes, and there it was the IMDB page, with its rather unusual 8 out 10 stars. I don’t know why I made the move then. I guess there is a right time for things to happen.
A couple of weeks later I bought a pirate DVD copy from a US Ebay seller2. In the same way I had delayed finding its name for a while, I delayed watching it, perhaps worried that The Bermuda Depths would end up being one of those movies that, after playing too many times in your mind’s cinema, you end up regretting watching again on a real screen. But in the end I did watch it a second time and the experience was uncanny. The DVD was ripped straight from an old VHS, static and hiss included, and I could see my childhood playing before me. There was no rewriting here: this was the proper madeleine, with Combray, the tea, and all the rest of the oft-misquoted (although not so frequently read) Proustian references. I won’t bore you with the things I recalled. Not today at least.
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The plot is straight forward: Magnus Dens (Leigh McCloskey) is a blond hunk who returns to Bermuda, after a long absence, to visit an old family friend, Eric (Carl Weathers, aka Apollo Creed), a marine biologist. There is a shimmer of melancholia in this return, something that is emphasised by the non-diegetic music and Magnus’s aloof demeanour — this is not a happy return, the film screams. Soon, when he is sleeping on a beach we learn through flashbacks that he was once a kid here, that he fell in love with a mermaid-like child called Jennie Haniver3 (the adult Jennie is played by a stunning Connie Sellecca). As the story of Magnus’s visit to the island unfolds we also learn that his scientist father was eaten by a giant turtle during a terrible storm, and that Jennie disappeared into the sea with the same turtle, without much of an explanation to Magnus. Magnus is left fatherless and mermaidless and of course he has spent his life haunted by these events. The grown-up Jennie remains an elusive and mysterious figure as ever and the fact that she died in a shipwreck some 300 years ago and made a pact with the devil in order to live forever doesn’t make it easier for Magnus. Then things finally happen and I won't spoil the film for you. But it’s all pretty contrived and there are a lot of Lego-SFXs and a key moment when Jennie’s diabolical nature is revealed with a close-up of her fluorescent green eyes4. At some point: THE END and the haunting music once more.
By all means The Bermuda Depths is proper B stuff. It’s corny, it looks cheap, the acting isn’t very good, the script is quite anaemic. And yet here I am, writing about it now — thinking about it forty years later.
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And I’m not alone.
“Am I the only person who has ever seen this? Giant sea turtle, and a mystery girl. What more could you ask for? I know it sounds kind of corny, but there was just something about this film that I found fascinating. I wish I could see it just one more time.” — Kris-55, 8 March 1999
“Haunting definitely seems to be "the" word to describe The Bermuda Depths! This movie had a very profound effect upon my brother and I. We saw it in 1979 when I was 11 years old, and my brother was 7. I spent the next 20 years trying to tell people about the movie with the “Giant Turtle”.” — Jaxmetal, 25 December 2004
“Memories of this great film. I don’t know why it affected so many people so. I was probably about 7 the first time. Like most I’ve remembered it off and on for years, and couldn’t remember the title.” — Hodorhodorhodor, 16 May 2007
“Stunned. I am absolutely shocked at how many kids of the 70’s this movie has stuck with after all these years! Like everyone else, I was 7 or 8 and never forgot this movie. I’ve mentioned it in passing several times and always got a crazy look. A movie about sea turtles?” — burlyd114, 15 June 2007
And it goes on and on.
The comments above are just some from the many on the film’s IMDB page. And now there are several forums and sites that discuss it, a Facebook page with over 700 members, fan videos on Youtube. And there is a pattern that repeats. Everyone mentions getting hooked with it as a child, forgetting or ignoring its name, being haunted by it for years, bumping into it once more, travelling back to the first time they watched it, to their childhoods — the Proustian madeleine, you know. I cannot but find it hard to believe that an obscure flick, screened once over four decades ago, only on TV, could have had this lasting effect on kids all over the world.
I always assumed my childhood to be peripheral and yet I share a childhood obsession with people in Devon, Kathmandu, someone in Paris, a miserable New Yorker, and who knows where else. There is a community of unknown people out there who have all been touched by this film, at around the same moment of our lives, in complete different parts of the world, in different languages. And we’ve kept coming back to it for over forty years; and we’ll keep coming back to it as long as live. Maybe, then, with all its flaws, The Bermuda Depths is one of the best films ever made5.
Or maybe we just needed an excuse to keep looking into the past, rewriting the past, as we get older and life slowly loses its magic for us. And don't we all? Proust had the madeleine; we have a giant turtle and the girl with fluorescent green eyes6.
Like this I found a VHS copy of another favourite (underwater) film: Whale Music — Richard J. Lewis’s 1994 adaptation of Paul Quarrington’s comic novel of the same name. The soundtrack, by Canadian band Rheostatics, is incredible too.
Since then the film has been reissued by Warner Brothers on DVD and more recently Blue Ray. It can also be found for free online.
The names derives from Jenny Haniver — a human-made sea creature that must have scared the shit out of a lot of people back in the day. Jenny Haniver is also the name of a great song by Discovery of Magnetic North, of which I don’t know anything, can’t find any information online, and only came across searching for songs called Jennie Haniver. If anyone knows anything about this band, please hook me up.
Obviously the first time I watched the film I wouldn’t have been able to tell her eyes were green. I should watch the film again, this time in B&W, see how that felt.
Another possibility is that the spectacle can leave a dent on some children. But I don’t want to ruin this film thinking about that. We can’t always be all Debordian about everything. Even Debord loved westerns.
A very early version of this essay was published with 3:AM Magazine in 2014.