Ancient Egyptian deities purposes. Egyptian texts often refer to deities' true, underlying forms as "mysterious". The Egyptians' visual representations of their gods are therefore not literal. They symbolize specific aspects of each deity's character, functioning much like the ideograms in hieroglyphic writing. For this reason, the funerary god Anubis is commonly shown in Egyptian art as a dog or jackal, a creature whose scavenging habits threaten the preservation of buried mummies, in an effort to counter this threat and employ it for protection. His black coloring alludes to the color of mummified flesh and to the fertile black soil that Egyptians saw as
Curse of the Swamp Creature terror from another age," other than brief, partial glimpses down into the mist-filled glass tank where its body is being modified from its original human form, the titular burly, bald, Spock-eared and slit-pupiled, protruding ping pong ball-eyed creature only appears at the climax of the film for less than five minutes before meeting its demise, and no scenes take place underwater. The webbed-fingered, hospital gown-clad creature was created using primitive prosthetic make-up and greyish green body paint and not the infamous cheap and phony-looking scalloped-scaled rubber wetsuit and fiercely-fanged fish head mask with painted ping-pong-ball eyes Buchanan later used in