Probing Loch Ness to tame the monster behind the myth

“The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep,” based on a children’s book by Dick King-Smith, takes a Celtic cautionary tale and washes it clean for family audiences. In legend, “kelpies” were beautiful, tame-looking horses that would lure riders to watery graves. In the new film, opening Christmas Day, they’re lovable leviathans. If that sounds like turning “Wolfman” into “My Dog Skip,” director Jay Russell is fine with it.

“It is and it isn’t about a kelpie,” says Russell, who says the film weaves a story about a family with the legend of the Loch Ness Monster. “We have a great deal of fun exploring the old myths and legends and creating our own myths and legends around them. We’re drawing from the different stories.”

That fun is evident in some of the visual storytelling -- keep your eyes peeled during the underwater scenes. The film’s realization of the creature strays from the mythic gray-coated horse, melding with modern notions of dinosaurs.

“The larger story is, is this creature good or bad and how do people affect its behavior? That’s the larger theme and where we strayed from the book,” says the director. “Our movie is set during WWII, and the boy has been greatly affected. . . . So the creature becomes a metaphor for things affected by war.”

In the film -- which stars Emily Watson and Ben Chaplin -- a Scottish boy, played by Alex Etel (“Millions”), is obsessed with his absent sailor-father. The boy finds and nurtures a sea monster from a pup until it grows too large to be kept a secret at home. What else can the boy do but release it into the local body of water . . . which happens to be Loch Ness?

“When you go there, it’s this really long lake, it goes on for miles, and you see people standing on the shore, just looking out at the water, wanting to see something,” Russell says.

“Just a couple of months ago a guy came up with a videotape of something swimming in the loch. Every newspaper on the planet picked up that story.

“What that said to me is that we still want our myths, our unexplained creatures. We desperately want our magic in a world that says there is none.”

-- Michael Ordona