There exists an obscure genre of porn in which an actor dressed in a mass-market sea monster costume has his slimy, scaly way with terrorized female performers.

More than 100 clips of this niche fetish exist on various websites, shot by different production teams. But in each video, they use the same costume, made by Zagone Studios in Illinois. The videos aren't produced by traditional adult entertainment studios, but are part of a cottage industry that makes porn commissioned by private fans. Much of this consumer-driven smut consists of foot worship, faux-incest, face-sitting, femdom flicks, and other more recognizable fetish categories. But what makes the sea monster genre unique is that the entire canon appears to have been commissioned by a single patron.

“There’s just this one German guy,” said Guda*, who co-runs Bitch Slap Studios and its “monsters, aliens, superheroines” imprint, Xxxtremecomixxx. Guda explained to me that this mystery man “has spent who knows how much money” to produce possibly all of the existing sea monster porn content.

It's impossible to say definitively that this man is the only person creating sea monster porn, but at the very least we know that he's creating the vast majority of it. It’s hard to tell exactly how many films the superfan has ordered because some custom videos are never released for general sale and others are tough to locate. But Cory Chase, of Ted Cruz Twitter porn fame, who runs the porn studio Cory Chase Customs, says he has made around two dozen films for the fan in recent years. Guda, who also works as a producer, director, and actor, has made about five dozen films for the fan since 2009. Guda also told me one of his colleagues, who used to produce clips at his own studio and now works at Bitch Slap Studios, has worked with the fan for even longer than that. But Guda couldn’t give me a specific range of years or number of films.

From $100 to upwards of $15,000, custom porn studios will make almost anything a fetishist wants (think: necro porn), so long as the customer provides them with a few specifications and the cash upfront to cover the costs. In this case, this mysterious fan sends a producer like Guda a script detailing the monster fucking that he wants to see and the costume from Zagone Studios.

(When I emailed Zagone to ask if they were aware that one of their costumes had become a feature of a sub-genre of fetish porn, a member of the sales and marketing team responded, “We did not know that our Sea Creature Costume was being used in pornographic films. We hope the actors find the costume comfortable, easy to wear, and that the audience enjoys the artistic beauty of the costume.")

I wanted to speak directly to the mystery fan and find out exactly what it is about monster fucking that he enjoys. So, I asked some of the studios he's worked with to pass along an interview request. Unfortunately, but perhaps understandably, he declined to talk about these videos or his interest in the scenarios they depict. And none of the producers I spoke with have ever discussed with the fan what he finds so alluring about the sea monster, either. He simply sends notes, the suit (if the company doesn’t have one already), and email clarifications when necessary.

However, Bitch Slap Studios provided me with notes he submitted to them for a recent hour-long sea monster shoot, which offers a little insight. “I just want wide open regular missionary without any fancy variations. Just a lot of angles from that basic pose,” reads the notes. "Either all of the girl and monster, mostly the girl and some monster, but never mostly the monster and some girl.” He takes great pains to specify that the girl should be naked throughout the shoot. He wants to see as much torso as possible, and he always wants to be able to see her face. Sim fucking, in which one performer just dry humps another, is fine. But if a cock is shown, he prefers the production team use a strap-on monster dildo (like something from Bad Dragon). The important thing, it seems, is seeing the woman reacting to the monster.

Ultimately, the final products vary significantly by studio, especially when it comes to their interpretation of the monster. In clips like The Horny Monster from Beyond (2014), Peachy Keen Films—a studio from which I’ve found about three dozen monster clips via one of their distribution channels—plays the character campy with the monster making wavy arm motions and screaming, “Nya nya!” Guda plays it more serious, with growling and menace in Sea Monster Got Me (2017) or O__ut of the Abyss (2017). Chase, who often plays the monster herself, uses a bright green strap-on for fucking in Alli Rae in Swamp Monster vs the Beauty (2014) and Melanie Hicks in the Swamp Monster Attacks (2016). The studio Chris’ Corner, on the other hand, just has a male performer dangle his pink, human dick out of the black slacks he wears under the monster shirt in A Monster Rape (2016). (This is the only monster video I have found from Chris’ Corner, but their archives are not easily searchable.) Although Chase’s videos almost always feature penetration with a dildo, Guda and others usually just stick to sim fucking.

The fan appears less fond of campiness, though. “I want a horror feel without any goofy/funny monster behavior,” he writes in the same order form. The abbreviated blow-by-blow of the scene specifies that the monster should roar and hiss. The actress “is terrified, so crying, pleading, struggling, etc. She hates it and shows it but lets him have his way with her from fear. Obvious looks of shock, terror, and fear from her... The monster gets off on her fear!”

We don't know what drives the customer behind the sea monster genre. But every producer I interviewed about monster fetishes like this—there is a broader canon out there of more widely consumed witch and vampire fuck films—suspected that their customers’ desires stemmed from some hardwiring that happened after watching a horror movie in their adolescence. In this fan’s case, seeing a beast carry away a breathy maiden, who is terrified at first but succumbs to the creature’s animalistic force—á la Dracula, King Kong, or _Creature from the Black Lagoon—_could have been a formative erotic experience. This makes some intuitive sense, because these creatures and their films are often sexually charged. The beast-eroticism connection theoretically gets baked-in and becomes a strong turn-on later in life.

Mark Griffiths, an expert in the psychology of sexual fetishes at Britain’s Nottingham Trent University, agreed with this broad speculative explanation. He told me, “Most research into the origins of paraphilias and fetishes suggests that it starts in childhood and adolescence via associative pairing of something sexual with a fetish object that is not normally considered sexual.”

Whatever’s driven this fan’s habits for so many years, he probably can’t keep the sub-genre afloat forever. Chase, in fact, said that orders have dropped off in recent years. Guda credits this to the fact that some studios, to make up for losses due to piracy and intense competition, have had to raise their rates. “He only orders from us when we have a local model that he likes, because it’s less expensive for him,” said Guda, rather than paying to fly in a performer from Los Angeles, Miami, or New York for a week of shoots.

Studios, however, may not miss the super fan’s business entirely. According to everyone I’ve spoken to who’s worn the costume, it's hot and hard to see out of, making even simulated fucking difficult. Plus, it involves growling and acting like a convincing monster-movie beast while trying to grind away on someone. “We had this one model who was wearing the costume for us, and she just quit altogether,” recalled Guda, “because she was just hating life” while wearing it.

While Chase said the sales on monster porn in general are pretty good, Guda notes that sea monster scenes sell like crap. His best-performing clip has seen maybe 80 or 90 downloads in five years. More people have probably accessed it via pirated copies, but that’s barely enough to cover basic pay for his cast and crew, which go beyond the production costs the fan's payments cover. For him, the sub-genre breaks even at best.

Basically, if this one patron ever drops out of the market, the entire sea monster porn genre would probably dry up. In some ways, it makes the genre unimpressive: It didn’t spark a trend, awaken widespread desires, or change even a niche audience’s perceptions of sexuality. But it does show how disruptive the custom porn model can be. All you need is one person with a few thousand dollars and a very specific kink. If they have the time and the desire, they can flood the market with content, making it seem to unsuspecting searchers as though their singular desires are legion.

“Sometimes I wonder,” said Guda, about what drives custom porn consumers. “But I could probably get into all sorts of crazy hypotheses about this stuff.” Best, he maintains, not to think too hard, and just roll with it.

*In the fetish world, some performers, producers, and directors go by mononyms or aliases. In those cases, we've used their preferred monikers.