Beyond Horseshoe crab helmets and my Horseshoe crab painting, Dali and I discussed this animal on several occasions, resulting in a script for an erotic/romantic movie depicting the love that exists between the moon and the sea.​



One fall evening, under a full moon I took a walk at Fairfield beach, CT. The beach was deserted except for many horseshoe crabs, which had come to shore and mystically started wagging their tails like metronomes. It was an arresting moment, which caused me to stop and contemplate the effect of the moon on the tides, beyond the obvious cycle of the tides.

In relaying the story to Dali we spoke of the deep love of the moon and the sea, and how this love and its gravitational effect formed the exoskeleton of the horseshoe crab, fluid, aerodynamic and rhinoceric.

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The story was to start as a love story between the moon and the tides. This love story would be depicted by full moons pulling massive waves towards the heavens, and the tide swelling to reach its desire. Over the millennia, the forces of this love shaped the exoskeleton of the horseshoe crab, from the soft undulating nouveau jellyfish to the hard, ‘rhinocerotic’ horseshoe crab. The crabs surface with their metronomic tails onto the beach of a V-shaped cove. The rhythm of the waves crashing and retreating, the tails wagging, and the moon with swiftly travelling clouds are interspersed until one realises the waves swell and retreat into the cove are actually the act of sex...............Sex between the moon and the sea.

At the moment of this realisation, the first subliminal frames of actual sex are brought into the film, in the same perspective as the shore/waves. Slowly, more and more of the actual lovemaking would be shown. At the point of orgasm, the crabs would first slow and stop their metronomic tails, and then slip back under the water. A school of small shimmering fish would thrash outward from the inlet, jumping into the air, their silvery scales reflecting the full moon, emerging from the bottom of the ‘V’-shaped (genital) cove and spreading out into the water. The water still swells and recedes  in an ebbing motion.  The camera would turn to a close-up of the horseshoe crab, which, seeing the full moon through the surface of the water, begins a metamorphosis. It rolls itself into a ball like an armadillo; its spikes and spines grow to cover it, turning it into a sea urchin with spines flailing in all directions. The spines eventually drop to reveal the exoskeleton of the sea urchins. As the camera pulls away, seaweed passes in front of the exoskeleton, morphing into the image of the cloud swept moon so that one cannot tell the difference between the moon and the sea urchin.

Fin