Finnegan turns as the DANCE FLOOR and the D.J. BOOTH EXPLODE as SOMETHING RISES UP from below them. His eyes widen. And there it is — The huge, horrible, mutated, mucus-covered, sucker-faced HEAD OF THE CREATURE.

A giant mutated protoplasm. Jutting up from a breach in the floor. The trunk of the Creature, the part where all the Tentacles come from is below the next deck. A slimy, translucent MEMBRANE slowly RISES, REVEALING what appears to be some sort of ORGANIC LIQUID EYE.

This is how the massive, unidentified deep sea Beast is finally revealed in Stephen Sommers’s and Robert Mark Kamen’s script for Deep Rising. In the climax of the film, it is revealed that the multiple worm-like entities infesting the Argonautica are actually the tentacles of a single, gargantuan Monster. Bringing the abomination to the screen was a task assigned to Dream Quest Images, the visual effects division of Walt Disney Company, and Industrial Light & Magic, for a limited number of shots. Dream Quest Shop supervisor Mike Shea had first to ‘cut down’ the original script, which conceived an unreachable — for the time — effects complexity. “When we first came on board in October 1995,” he told Cinefex, “there was a draft that called for some 500 effects shots. We were able to devise Steve in terms of what could and couldn’t be done, and assist with some of the early script rewrites.”

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