In 'The Snail-Watcher,' a man named Peter Knoppert, like Highsmith, caught a couple of snails engaged in their unique form of sexual activity, and raised their children and their children's children as the snails exponentially reproduced. Highsmith's snails eventually found their way into her writing in a short horror story titled 'The Snail-Watcher,' which Lyne used to characterize Deep Water's Vic. Highsmith's preoccupation with these odd creatures fits in with her well-documented love of the macabre and the grotesque, which is easy to find in her fiction. This marked the beginning of her fascination with snails of all kinds, raising hundreds of them in her garden in England, bringing them gleefully to house parties in her purse, and smuggling them illegally from England to France. Legend has it that she once saw a pair of snails in a New York fish market that were either fighting or copulating (the answer, as it turns out, is both), and took them home in a fishbowl to watch their strange interaction.

Ripley, and many others) was obsessed with snails. Patricia Highsmith, who wrote the book Deep Water (and The Price of Salt, and The Talented Mr. So then what, aside from giving a weird guy an even weirder pastime, is the purpose of Deep Water's slimy co-stars? He doesn't use them to poison anybody, even though he does explain at one point that snails raised to be served as escargot must be starved before they're prepared, or the contents of their stomachs can poison anyone who eats them. He does not feed his unsuspecting victims' decomposing flesh to them, Hannibal-style. Vic forbids his wife's houseguests from cooking them: 'The snails are not for eating!' he snaps. In case you're halfway through the film and wondering whether the snails will have anything more to do with the movie's actual plot-they don't. Every now and then we see him sneak into his Snail Room to decompress from whatever terrible revelation he's just had about his wife Melinda's infidelity, and tend lovingly to his gastropod pets, which he keeps in plant-filled glass terrariums periodically misted by a complex series of hoses. Ben Affleck's character Vic needed a hobby after he retired from military drone chip manufacturing, and so, for reasons left mysterious in the film, he decided to keep snails. You may notice, while watching Adrian Lyne's somewhat erotic thriller Deep Water, which pits Ana de Armas against Ben Affleck in a battle for sexual supremacy, a persistent motif that slimes and slithers its way between scenes of violent marital strife.

Patricia highsmith dark water