Jim Henson’s Creature Shop designs some amazing creations. I see their name on a production, and it can get me on that alone. It got me to watch Farscape on their work alone, and I’m glad I watched. One of their earlier forays into the realm of non-Muppet film-making was an icon from my childhood: The Dark Crystal.
This movie is absolutely loaded with amazing creatures in it. Their designs are enthralling and they all tend to have more to them than just looking cool. One of my favorite creatures was the Garthim, the foot soldiers of the evil overlords of this high fantasy world, the demonic Skeksis.
Yeah, one of the annoying things about high fantasy worlds is a lot of made up words and names.
The Garthim, however, are not your standard mook monster or stormtrooper type bad guy. They exist for more than the heroes to defeat en mass. Heck, the heroes in The Dark Crystal don’t really defeat many of them in the entire movie, and have to get help to do it. They are a force to be avoided, not confronted.
Symbolism
The Garthim are physically imposing creatures to the leads of the film, though they are played by men in complex suits and thus weren’t all that big in terms of height, but their mass more than compensated for their hunched over form. This overall works to express their power and their might, which is what they are. As the main foot soldiers of the Skeksis, they are hampered only by their simplistic and single minded natures. Physically, they are implacable, smashing down walls and being the main factor in the genocide of the elf-like Gelflings and enforcing the iron fisted rule of the Skeksis. If putties are the ogres that can be defeated, these are the darkness itself: implacable, constant, and unknown.
They are also an extreme ‘other’ from a visual perspective. Despite being little better than men in suits, these creatures have the form of a crab and have a face designed to frighten humans. The form of the shell combined with the head creates a pseudo-face within the body’s structure which somewhat resembles a skull the true ‘face’ is the ‘nose’ off this skull, and it twitches back and forth in a truly alien manner.
It’s a thing of dark beauty.
Biology
The expanded universe material (novelization, art book, and so on) state that the Skeksis (or rather, the creatures which the Skeksis split from, called the UrSkeks) are actually alien to the planet of the Dark Crystal (which is called Thra), and that the Garthim were created by them after memories of crab-like creatures from their home planet.
Be it by science, sorcery or some combination of both, these creatures were born. Because of their non-evolutionary origin, it’s safe to not worry about a lot of biological problems related to the square cube law that come from being a giant arthropod. Their closest earthly resemblance is that of a crab. Many consider it a form of fiddler crab in appearance, but its claw design is more akin to the lobsters of the Atlantic Ocean: with each limb ending in a specialized tool.
For the Garthim, this is a capturing hand and a crushing and slashing claw. It’s a middle ground between the two designs: sharp and pointed, but powerful. It’s not designed to hold, but to slash like a sword.
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| Lobster Claw |
Another thing they resemble are coconut crabs, the largest arthropod on earth today, with the hunched over posture and relatively thick legs, it’s a good design to draw from. However, the head of each Garthim is more akin to a humanized beetle than any crab, with small mouth parts (if any, I could not determine which).
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| Coconut crab |
But the Garthim are apparently not biological in full, and only appear as such. Their glowing eyes they have when cloaked in the darkness (which makes a lovely ‘sheening’ noise) hints at a more supernatural origin rather than standard eye-shine found in nature, due primarily to its purplish coloring. They are likely a spirit of darkness which inhabits a suit of metallic armor. This would add to their implacability tenfold, making them extremely hard to destroy physically. This build is all but confirmed at the end of the film when the creatures fall apart in the light of the purified and unified crystal, the spirits animating them banished or destroyed by its light and power.
This is further reinforced when the crystal shard harms the creature. Whatever energies within the crystal are, they appear to interfere with the form within the shell. Some expanded media (a tie-in manga) also show a structural weakness in the body, but I have been unable to track this down to speak of it further.
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