This is like. a genuine question I swear. but wasn’t the eel a monster first, that then started absorbing people like the scientists in the SM-8 etc? Like when people make the eel a cat or whatever etc I never interpreted that they were portraying it as “yeah those women are now reduced to being a cat” I interpreted it as the “original” eel who didn’t necessarily have people “in” it. Or was there no original eel and the eel was “birthed” by the first people in the blood ocean that started drinking it/fusing together??
apologies for the delay, was trying to find my own reasons for why I had started to believe that lol. a lot of this is taken from the eel's official page by Molly Brown, where she has tidbits on the design process, some from tumblr posts, rest from the film dialogue.
So first off; I don't think there's an original eel because there would have been some mention of it in the SM-8 black box if the original had been hunting it down. If I'm not mistaken, they either go out choking on blood, suffocating or through an implosion, since she mentions turning off the pressure warning at the start of the recording, but at that point there's no established mention of alien life.
Official description of Elli on the website: 'Comprised of the tangled bodies and minds of scientists left down in the ocean of blood, her pursuit of Simon is both out of past aspirations and primordial fear.'
Someone on here put forth the idea of the eel's shape resembling the submarine because that is what the Pinhole god thought a living object should be shaped like, not realizing the actual living creatures were the people inside. Instead, it squeezed them together and crushed and mutated them to form a shape that it perceived them to be.
In this image, you can more clearly see the faces and teeth in front, the ribs squashed upwards to form a second mouth, the spine overextended to form a body and the arms and legs for locomotion (like the submarine's propeller....) in the back.
you can see a bit more of this in the og eel concept below:
'My second approach played into the illusion of two faces joined together, looking more like a usual eel at a distance and obscured by fluids.'
I also thought that the eel was multiple people in a hivemind at first, because of the legs and hands and echoing voices during the film, but if you break down the dialogue you can kind of make out that it's only Elsie (the research lead, credited as the 'Speaker' on the wiki and voiced by Elsie Lovelock, who is the more normal sounding one when talking to Simon) and Elle (the research assistant, credited as the 'Whisper' on the wiki and voiced by Elle LaMont, who is the one slurring her words and is obsessed with the Light.) who are really talking through all of this.
there could have been others on the sm-8 that died and were fused on? there's one line where Elsie says 'we know' in regards to Elle unable to stop drinking blood, before she switched to 'I know'. she also tells simon "Some of the others went that way. Not the worst fate, down here," which is confusing, but it could always refer to the people manning the submarines before the SM-8.
but considering how big and mutated the eel has become + the cancerous nature of the blood and all +
so I don't think the eel has killed any other people sent down after that honestly? apart from the fact that Ava and David both are excited by signs of life in the ocean, from the eel's dialogue I don't think she's even seen anyone in ages- her first line is her calling for Ava and talking about working together (negotiating to be rescued just like simon is, actually, holy fuck?) and having gotten the answers; she doesn't know that the filament station is gone; she talks about being in the darkness for ages, enough to forget the Light entirely.
anyways yeah tldr: the eel is the women of the SM-8 who were also left down there like simon, maybe with extra add-on consciousnesses/body parts, maybe not, but I'm leaning towards probably not.
thanks for the ask!!!! really appreciated lol I love talking about iron lung. it's my favourite thing.