SCYLLA

Elizabeth Férauge

From the 1950 cult classic Orpheus by Jean Cocteau to thrillers such as Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2017 The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the stories and personages of Greek mythology have a long history of representation in film, which continues to this day. Further, with its preponderance of tragedy, gore, and monstrous creatures, Greek mythology is an ideal well from which to draw ideas for a horror story – as we are seeing with recent releases such as Medusa (2021) and A Wounded Fawn (2022). In his 2014 film Mamula, otherwise known as Nymph or Killer Mermaid, Serbian director Milan Todorovic draws from a mythic creature less ubiquitous in popular culture: the sea monster Scylla. This essay will consider the place of Killer Mermaid within a larger artistic and literary tradition. I argue that while it continues the well-documented trend of feminizing Scylla, the film calls back to her monstrous attributes as described in her earliest occurrences. Such a blend of the beautiful and the monstrous is highly characteristic of the ambivalence described in scholarship of horror around the depictions of gender and sexuality.

Killer Mermaid was initially released in March 2014 as Mamula in Serbia, before being distributed by Epic Pictures group in September of the same year. Milan Todorovic tells the story of two American tourists, Kelly (Kristina Klebe) and Lucy (Natalie Burn) who are visiting their friend Alex (Slobodan Stefanovic) and his fiancée Yasmin (Sofija Rajovic) in Montenegro on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. After some drinking, dancing, and drama, they decide to take a day trip to the island of Mamula – where they encounter a seductive and dangerous flesh-eating mermaid (played by Zorana Kostić Obradović and Mina Sablić). The creature is named “Scylla” in the plot synopsis - though at first glance she shares little in common with the creature first described in The Odyssey:

“Her voice may be only as loud as that of a newborn puppy, but she is an evil monster, the sight of whom would please nobody, were it even a god who encountered her. A dozen legs she has, all waving in the air, and six necks, very lengthy, and on every one of them a horrible head, with three rows of teeth in each, close-set and crowded, all full of black teeth. From below the waist her body is hidden inside the hollow cavern, but her heads she stretches out from that fearsome abyss and goes fishing there, searches all around the rock face for dolphin or dogfish or whatever larger creature she can catch of the thousands loud Amphitrite breeds. Past her no sailor yet can boast of having voyaged unharmed, for with each of her heads she carries off a man that she snatches out of his dark-prowed vessel.” (Green, 191)

Fig. 1 Zorana Kostić Obradović as Scylla in Killer Mermaid (2014). https://mermaid.fandom.com/wiki/Scylla_(Mamula). Accessed: 2/12/2023
Alt text: Still from the film Mamula, a mermaid with pale skin and long golden brown hair emerging from a dark pool.

This description of Scylla seems a far cry from her portrayal in Mamula, where she more closely resembles what we would call a mermaid, a woman with a fish tail. Her “true” form, into which she metamorphoses a few times throughout the film, comes closer – her mouth widens into a gaping maw full of sharp “black teeth”- but she retains her mermaid-like form and feminine attributes (and, disappointingly, does not grow any extra heads).

Fig. 2 Mina Sablić as Scylla in her “true form,” in Killer Mermaid (2014). https://mermaid.fandom.com/wiki/Scylla_(Mamula). Accessed: 2/12/2023
Alt text: Still from the film Mamula, a blue-toned sea creature with a long fish tail, long dark hair, black eyes, and a wide mouth full of teeth, emerging from a dark pool.

However, the choice to portray Scylla as a beautiful mermaid is consistent with a longstanding trend in the artistic record, where she is often depicted as a woman with a long serpentine tail, which is characteristic of sea monsters more generally (La Fond, 2023). Diana Buitron-Oliver and Beth Cohen point out that while depictions of Scylla in Archaic Greek Art retain her monstrous features, later representations, particularly after the fifth century, tend to give her a human female upper body and a fish-tail – a process they describe as idealizing, anthropomorphizing, and taming (Buitron-Oliver & Cohen, 34). Mercedes Aguirre Castro also notes this feminizing transformation, positing that such an evolution may actually have its roots in the folklore of prehomeric legends involving fantastic women representing the dangers of sea journeys – she argues that the preponderance of woman-monster hybrids, such as Echidna in Hesiod’s Theogony or the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey indicates a convergence in the cultural imagination, creating an archetypal ‘dangerous female sea creature’ (Castro, 327).

In contrast, Sarah Alison Miller posits that this artistic trend reflects an increasing popularity of Ovid’s later version of her story, wherein Scylla was originally a beautiful virgin nymph pursued by the sea god Glaucus and turned into a monster by a jealous Circe. This is the version briefly related in our textbook, nestled within Chapter 7 on “Poseidon, Sea Deities, Group Divinities, and Monsters,” though Poseidon, not Glaucus, is her amorous pursuant (Morford, Lenardon, & Sham, 169). This version of Scylla as a beautiful nymph in later written accounts was evidently very popular, and may have served as inspiration for her more feminine portrayals. However, Miller argues that such artistic depictions represent an increased alienation of Scylla from her monstrous form, a kind of dis-embodiment, and as she loses her monstrous attributes she subsequently gains a kind of “erotic power.” As such, Miller continues, Scylla joins the ranks of such creatures as the Sirens in showcasing “the alluring but perilous nature of feminine charms” (Miller, 317). Indeed, the creature in Mamula features some decidedly Siren-like features, sporting a mesmerizing voice with which she hypnotizes and seduces men, luring them to their deaths. Thus, Mamula’s Scylla can be situated within a broader trend of feminization of the monstrous in art, as well as a convergence of different female monsters into a singular prototype – the alluring sea-creature with the (typically nude) upper torso of a woman and a serpentine fish tail.

However, Todorovic’s film does not just borrow Scylla’s nymph-like features from later myths, but hearkens back to older, more monstrous versions of the story. At a bar the evening before their excursion to the island, the friends are interrupted by a mysterious and disheveled looking man, who warns them against going before launching into an ominous and very familiar monologue:  

“The Scylla snatched six men from our hollow ship. The toughest, strongest hands I had. And grasping them, the Scylla swam them up a cliff. And there, at her cavernous mouth, she bolted them down raw. Screaming out, flinging their arms towards me. Lost in that mortal struggle. Of all the pitiful things I’ve had to witness, suffering, searching out the pathways of the sea, this wrenched my heart the most.”

                This is a less verbose but otherwise close paraphrasing of Ulysses’ description of the event:  

“Skylla meanwhile snatched up from the hollow ship six of my comrades, the strongest and most active. Though my eyes were on the swift ship and my company, I still caught a glimpse of their hands and feet above me as they were whirled aloft. They cried aloud, called me by name one last time in their anguish. (…) There at her entrance she devoured them, as they screamed and stretched out hands to me in their dire death struggle. That was the most piteous sight of all that ever I endured throughout my whole exploration of the paths of the deep.” (Green, 195-196)

It is later revealed that the incident which the old man is referring to closely parallels Ulysses’s misadventure. He was part of a diving team of seven men who encountered the creature in the subterranean passages under the island - she then killed six of his men, just as Scylla ate six members of Ulysses’ crew. Another similarity is her ravenous hunger for human flesh. One of the most jarring scenes in the film occurs when the young friends spot and spy on an unknown man emptying buckets of human body parts down a well to feed Scylla.

Thus, she retains monstrosity, specifically the deadliness and ravenous hunger for human flesh of the “original” Scylla. This blend of the beauty and the monstrous is emblematic of the ambivalence which characterizes depictions of female monsters. As Barbara Creed has notoriously argued in The Monstrous Feminine and Jess Zimmerman more recently clarifies with regards to Greek Mythology in Women and Other Monsters, such depictions of alluring yet monstrous creatures reflect male anxieties about female bodies and power.

In closing, it is worth noting that while most historical representations of Scylla give her a characteristic “belt” of dogs – referencing a particularly poignant passage from Ovid’s account where her lower body turns into a series of canine creatures – Mamula does not even allude to this characteristic. Perhaps it was too difficult to produce on a tight budget, or maybe a belt of dogs would have cut down on Scylla’s “sexiness”. Further, while in The Odyssey Scylla is a fearsome creature capable of single handedly devouring six men at a time, in this film Scylla is seemingly mostly dependent on the male guard for nourishment and protection. On the other hand, this man is revealed to be a thrall – she has bewitched him into servitude. Such subservience could be read as further evidence of Scylla’s monstrosity and dangerousness, particularly to men, but could also signal a necessary limitation of her powers. The question remains whether it is a win for feminism when a woman, or, as the case may be, a mermaid – uses sexual charms for violent ends.  

Works Cited

A Wounded Fawn. Directed by Travis Stevens. AMC, 2022.

Buitron-Oliver, Diana and Cohen, Beth. “Between Skylla and Penelope: Female Characters of

the Odyssey in Archaic and Classical Greek Art.” The Distaff Side: Representing the

Female in Homer’s Odyssey, edited by Beth Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp.

29-58.

Castro, Mercedes Aguirre. “Scylla: Hideous Monster or Femme Fatale? A Case of Contradiction

Between Literary and Artistic Evidence.” Cuadernos de Filologia Clasica: Estudios

griegos e indoeuropos, Vol 12, 2002, pp. 319-328.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Peter Green, University of California Press, 2018.

La Fond, Marie. Lesson 3, Video 2 : Creatures from the Deep: Poseidon and Sea Divinities.

Mamula. Directed by Milan Todorovic, written by Marko Backovic, screenplay by Barry

Keating. Epic Pictures Group, 2014.

Medusa. Directed and written by Anita Rocha da Silveira. Music Box Films, 2021.

Miller, Sarah Alison. “Monstrous Sexuality, Variations on the Vagina Dentata.” The Ashgate

Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman, and

Peter J. Dendle, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2012, pp. 311-329.

Morford, Mark; Lenardon, Robert J.; and Sham, Michael. Classical Mythology (Eleventh

Edition). Oxford University Press, 2019.

Orphée. Directed and written by Jean Cocteau. DisCina, 1950.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. New Sparta Films, 2017.

Zimmerman, Jess. Women and Other Monsters: A New Mythology. Beacon Press, 2021.