In Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles, a pair of giggles named Manu and Jean-Gab (think dumb and dumber, but French) steal a Mercedes and find a housefly the size of a pit bull in the trunk. They call it Dominique and train it to rob banks. At no point do they find it scary, even after it has eaten a dog. It is so adorable that you will share her feelings.
This is a surcharge for the books as flies in the cinema are usually a sign of death, decay and evil. Sometimes, like when Annie Graham goes to the attic in Hereditary, her presence foreshadows the discovery of a corpse. In Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia they hum symbolically around the dingy bundle wrapped in cheesecloth, while Father Delaney’s attempts to bless the cursed house in The Amityville Horror are thwarted by demonic blowflies. In Phenomena, Jennifer Connelly plays a schoolgirl insect whisperer who can conjure up flies for protection, but that doesn’t keep her from being submerged in maggots up to her neck. In the insane Indian action fantasy Eega, a man murdered by his rival is reborn as a vengeful housefly, but merging your molecules with those of a Musca domestica is more likely to result in the loss of important anatomical parts, as is the case in both the 1958 and 1986 versions by The Fly. (Help meeee!)
At best, insects are a nuisance in movies. In the worst case, they can be downright vicious and reflect the attitude of western society towards scary crawls in general. It is estimated that 6% of people have some form of entomophobia – and for the purposes of this article, I group arthropods (spiders, millipedes), gastropods (snails, slugs), and non-arthropod invertebrates (worms) under the broader entomological banner . In the immortal words of Shaun Hutson’s novel Slugs, “They ooze. You slime. They kill. “Depending on the number of legs or wings, they crawl, hop, sink and fall. They can be trained to kill, like the deadly lepidopterans in Tsui Hark’s directorial debut The Butterfly Murders, who act more like Alfred Hitchcock than The Birds the brightly colored tinsel we know and love while The Abominable Dr Grasshoppers gnaw the flesh of one of his victims by drizzling crushed Brussels sprouts on her while she sleeps.
The Xenomorph in Alien (1979) exhibits insect traits: egg-laying queen, parasitic behavior, and metamorphic life cycles. Photo: 20th Century Fox / Allstar
Why do insects make our skin crawl? Maybe because they’re difficult to humanize. They’re not furry and you don’t want them to sleep in your bed, although I believe there are many phasmid breeders out there who have built close relationships with their pets. Insects already look half alien with their bug eyes and exoskeletons. So it’s no wonder that filmmakers in films like The Mist or the horror comedy Infestation regularly portray our planet under attack by creepy creeps from space or alternate dimensions (shown a decade before A Quiet Place by extraterrestrial insectoids that used sound to track their prey). The Xenomorph in the Alien franchise has insect traits (an egg-laying queen, parasitic behavior, metamorphic life cycles), and the Martians in Quatermass and the Pit, initially mistaken for the devil, are seen in atavistic memory clips hopping around like giant locusts which should be funny – but somehow it isn’t, especially when you learn that they are involved in some kind of ethnic cleansing. As Seth Brundle says in The Fly, “Have you ever heard of insect policy? I neither have. “
Creature traits are usually based on the premise that when people are freaked out by woodlice and earwigs, imagine how scared they will be when radiation or pollution mutate these living things into colossal versions that will decapitate you with one blow of a lower jaw (Starship Troopers) or use the power of the brutal giant cockroaches to fold you in half like Ivan the hapless waiter in Men in Black. And of course, you don’t want to run into Shelob, the giant spider from Lord of the Rings, or The Deadly Mantis, Tarantula, the giant bees from Mysterious Island, or the giant parasites from Cloverfield that will blow your head off for just one bite.
But I’d argue that giant insects aren’t nearly as creepy as normal-sized ones. The ants from you! are too big to crawl into your ear like an ant once crawled into my ear when I was gardening. (I rinsed it out with a wet cotton swab, but was afraid it might have laid eggs in my brain.) The gigantic eight-legged freaks in the film of the same name are nowhere near as creepy as the full-size spiders in Arachnophobia and the slow but deadly ones Tarantulas interrupting William Shatner’s attempts to entertain a handsome arachnologist in Kingdom of the Spiders. Giant worms like the ones in Dune, Beetlejuice, and Tremors and the bloodworm that Andy Serkis sips in King Kong are obviously best avoided, but for that extra creepy skin-creep factor they can’t hold a candle to the regular. large annelids in squirm that seep from shower heads and dig into people’s faces.
William Shatner succumbs to a tarantula in Kingdom of the Spiders (1977). Photo: Dimension / Allstar
The insect eco-horror peaked in the 1970s with exploitative entrepreneurs like William Castle, whose latest production, Bugs (1975) features mutant cockroaches setting people’s hair on fire and spelling “WE LIVE” on the wall, and Irwin Everyone whose The Swarm patriotically proclaims: “The African killer bee depicted in this film bears absolutely no resemblance to the hardworking, hardworking American honey bee.” Damn wandering bees; come here and kill beloved Hollywood veterans like Olivia de Havilland and Henry Fonda!
But the insect threat is dealt with more seriously in the 1971 faux documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle, which includes fascinating real-life footage of insect life with “Dr. “A senseless, unstoppable killing machine dedicated to destroying everything that gets in its way”. More worrying, if obviously more fictional, is the only feature film directed by legendary credit designer Saul Bass: In his 1974 film Phase IV, two scientists investigating unusual ant activity in the Arizona desert are besieged than each other the swarming spirit of the colony fends off. Ants clearly appeal to the mindset of surrealist writers who pour out of a hole in the palm of the hand in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, crawl over a severed ear in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and – in Bass’ original end of Phase IV, rejected by the studio, because he’s too strange – conquer the world. Bow down to your insect overlords!
Olivia de Havilland as a teacher attacked by killer bees in The Swarm (1977). Photo: Warner Bros./Allstar
It is possible that the “When Insects Attack” subgenre has had its day, given recent developments on the ecological front. Dr. Hellstrom says, “In the fight against the insect, we killed ourselves, polluted our water, poisoned our wildlife, and infused our own flesh with deadly toxins. The insect becomes immune and we are poisoned. In the struggle with superior intellect, we have outwitted ourselves. ”Even more disturbing than the thought of being overrun by crawfish is the emerging information that in the past two decades three-quarters of the world’s insects have simply disappeared. This may be encouraging news to entomophobes, but it is a terrible omen for the future of mankind, which not only has not recognized the importance of insects to the ecosystem, but will continue to destroy their natural habitats and spray them with environmentally safe insecticides, until every last one is gone.
While eco-horror cinema has recently focused on climate change, filmmakers still seem squeamish about insects; see for example Wounds, Mosquito State, or the 2020 French film The Swarm. Maybe a few more adorable giant animals like Dominique wouldn’t hurt, so we could trade our entomophobia for entomophilia, or we could pause Godzilla and start celebrating Mothra , a gentler, friendlier kind of kaiju.
And maybe we should emulate the 80% of the world’s population who eat insects on a regular basis. For example, crickets are a rich source of protein and emit less than 0.1% of the greenhouse gases produced by cows. So let’s hope we’ve seen the final dinner scenes like the ones in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, in which the heroine turns up her nose at the crunchy bugs. Now is the time to adopt Renfield from Dracula (1931) as a gourmet role model who has no qualms about getting caught up in spiders and flies.
Mandibles will be released in the UK on September 17th.
