The Water Horse - a fairy tale for the silver screen

by - 21:02 on 27 February 2008

Go and see The Water Horse, now on general release from Sony Pictures. It’s the latest manifestation of the Highland kelpie legend that assumed its modern form in the mid-20th century when the Inverness Courier had a quiet day and ran a wee story about mysterious splashes in the loch. Funny, you can never tell which stories are going to grow legs – or, in this case, flippers. 

And here’s the real confession – I really enjoyed the film. I resisted the temptation to harangue the silver screen on the way it played fast and loose with Scottish history and geography – because that wasn’t the point. Actually, Hollywood’s Scotland is quite a nice cosy place, in spite of the presence of a long-necked creature growing at astonishing speed in every loch. Film magic makes the mountains bigger and everything is played with a kind of amused fondness. And the screen writers tend to make people with funny English accents the baddies, as a bonus. 

The Water Horse is a charming and wistful fairy tale. If only we really did have a colony of, well, prehistoric thingies cavorting in the peaty waters. Instead, we only have the expectation. And it’s an expectation we’ve had for some time. It is said that, by the late 1930s, an Automobile Association officer on patrol by Loch Ness had only to get off his motor-bike and raise his arm across the water to create a kind of instant traffic jam. (And that was practically in the days before cars.)

And of course we have a monster industry that’s really important for the economy, where every fuzzy photograph has been interpreted as a possible sighting. Ordinary objects caught on film shape themselves into curious curvy or hump shapes.

Here’s a classic – a picture taken near Urquhart Castle by an overseas visitor several years ago. The innocent tourist only noticed later that an object had appeared in frame. It’s a gull. But there’s something about the shadow of the wing that means that if you’re looking for a monster, you can make it into a long-necked creature rearing out of the water. Really it all depends on what you expect to see. Having been brought up in a coastal town with gulls everywhere from earliest childhood memories, I’m bound to see the image as a flying bird. Equally well, if you believe in kelpies, then to interpret it as a gull, you might say, is perverse.

Anyway, let’s enjoy The Water Horse, with its gripping special effects and happy ending. Isn’t Scotland lucky to have done so well with such a legend? Our thanks to Jenni Steele of VisitScotland for inviting us to the screening.

---

Add your comment

Your Name


Your Email (it won't be made public on the site)


Your Comment


Enter this number in the box below and click Send - why?Unfortunately we have to do this to prevent the website being swamped by automated spam