The creature from the Black Lagoon has the best possible pedigree. As director Jack Arnold was planning the iconic monster’s 1954 debut, his eye fell on his Academy Award nomination certificate for With These Hands, a documentary he’d worked on three years earlier.

“I said, ‘If we put a gilled head on [the Oscar statuette], plus fins and scales, that would look pretty much like the kind of creature we’re trying to get,'” he told Cinefantastique in 1975. “So they made a mold out of rubber, and gradually the costume took shape.”

Former Disney animator Milicent Patrick and makeup artist Bud Westmore collaborated on the creature. “They gave him some human characteristics, which helped to make him sympathetic,” Arnold said. Today the film is regarded as a classic of monster horror — but it didn’t earn an Oscar.