BuzzwordS
Ungeheuren Ungeziefer
(Big Bugs in Any Language)
May Berenbaum
H
ollywood certainly has no monopoly on creative ideas in the film
industry, but there are certain film
genres whose origins were distinctly and
irrefutably American. The Western is one
example—movies with cowboys wearing ten-gallon hats, native Americans riding mustangs, and tumbleweeds rolling
through frontier towns arguably couldn’t
have originated anywhere else. They are,
however, widely imitated around the world
and each nation manages to put its own
spin on the concept. Much the same can
be said of another home-grown genre that
now belongs to the world—what has come
to be known as the Big Bug Film.
It took a while for bugs to get really
big on film. Although legendary special effects master Willis O’Brien was rumored to
have created a giant spider for King Kong
in 1933, the footage ended up on the cutting room floor and has since been lost. In
1953, the otherwise forgettable Mesa of
Lost Women featured an oversized spider,
and in January 1954, Killers from Space introduced audiences to a giant alien grasshopper without much fanfare. By most accounts, the first really big Big Bug Film was
Them, which debuted in June 1954. By any
standard, Them was a blockbuster—the
biggest moneymaker for Warner Brothers
the year it was released—and is widely
considered by cognoscenti of the cinema
world to be “the king of the big bug flicks,
the one that started it all” (Stanze 2011).
(Considering its formicid focus, though, entomologists would more accurately regard
it as the queen of the big bug flicks).
The big bugs of Them succeeded in impressing the movie-going public where earlier versions had failed for several reasons.
First, its special effects really were special;
they were even nominated for an Academy
196
Award. Second, unlike its predecessors, the
film was actually well-written, expertly directed, and competently acted. According
to the New York Times, the film was “taut
science fiction” (A.W. 1954). The story begins with a rash of mysterious deaths outside a New Mexico town not far from where
an atom bomb was detonated back in 1945.
Whatever is responsible for the deaths
leaves behind very large footprints, has a
strange predilection for sugar, and smells
like formic acid. The Department of Agriculture sends its two ablest scientists to
investigate—ace myrmecologist Dr. Harold
Medford and his daughter Pat. They painstakingly gather evidence to test their hypothesis that ants are involved before sharing their suspicions with the skeptical local
law enforcement community, although the
officers are pretty much convinced when
a 12-foot ant crawls into full view behind
Dr. Pat, as she obliviously dusts off another
footprint.
One popular theory with film critics
is that giant radiation-induced killer ants
caught fire (figuratively) in 1954 because
they embodied anxieties over the Cold
War nuclear threat (Sontag 1966) and/or
the threat of communist takeover (Rogin
1987). What metaphorical depiction of the
Red Army could possibly top a swarm of
red ants, an “aggressive collectivist society”
(Tsutsui 2011)? Be that as it may, this film
boasted an illustrious cast of then-famous
actors, including Edmund Gwenn, beloved
as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street
(1947), as myrmecologist Medford. Thus,
when Dr. Medford intoned, “When man entered the atomic age, he opened a door to
a new world. What he will find in that new
world, nobody can predict,” it had great impact—as if Santa Claus suddenly stopped
being jolly.
One thing that anyone could have predicted was that, given its tremendous
success, Them would not long be the only
Big Bug Film. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Them has been extensively flattered over the past 50-plus years.
Hollywood entries in the genre included
Earth vs. the Spider, Tarantula, The Black
Scorpion, Monster from Green Hell (giant
wasps), The Deadly Mantis, and Beginning
of the End (giant grasshoppers), all before
1960. By 1961, however, the big bug genre
escaped America’s borders and traveled
across the Pacific; with Toho Studio’s release of Mothra (or, as the film was known
in Japan, Mosura), Big Bug Films became an
international phenomenon.
It’s unlikely that any specific U.S. film
inspired the creation of Mothra, a giant
bombycid moth with telepathic powers; to
an American, a giant mind-reading moth
American Entomologist  • Winter 2012
would seem to be an unlikely source of
horror except to a giant wool sweater with
dark secrets. Mothra seems to have arisen
directly from the heart of Japanese culture.
The significance of Bombyx mori, the Japanese silkworm, in sericulture and hence to
Japanese society may have made the insect
a familiar and even sympathetic figure. The
script even incorporates a few aspects of
silkworm biology into the plot: as a caterpillar, Mothra shoots out strands of silk and
spins a cocoon. Unlike B. mori, however, the
adult Mothra flies long distances and flaps
her wings to create destructive bursts of
wind; thanks to millennia of domestication,
silk moths can’t fly and mostly just vibrate
their wings in anticipation of mating. Moreover, in later sequels, Mothra acquires a few
attributes that don’t have any obvious realworld correlates (e.g., shooting laser beams
from her antennae).
In the first film, Mothra initially appears
as a conventional if oversized lepidopteran
egg on Infant Island, where she rests peaceably until atomic testing by the fictional nation of Rolisica disrupts the status quo and
blows a ship off course and onto the island.
When a joint Japanese-Rolisican mission
arrives to rescue the sailors, an unscrupulous Rolisican entrepreneur, Clark Nelson,
notices that the island inhabitants include
two tiny singing women (portrayed by a
popular Japanese singing duo called The
Peanuts). Although all involved in the rescue pledge to keep secret the unusual life
on the island, Nelson returns and captures
the tiny women, forcing them to perform
in a Tokyo nightclub. The tiny duo telepathically communicate their distress to
Mothra, who hatches and, as a caterpillar
the size of an aircraft carrier, swims to Japan. She eventually destroys part of Tokyo,
metamorphoses into a giant moth, and flies
to Rolisica, where Nelson has fled with the
tiny singers, to rescue her friends.
It must have been obvious to any 1961
audience that Rolisica was a stand-in for
America (among other things, when Nelson
absconded with the tiny girls, he headed to
“New Kirk City” and some Rolisican scenes
were in fact shot in Los Angeles). Despite
the vaguely anti-American tinge, the film
ended up in American theaters a year after its release in Japan, as did its multiple
sequels. Mothra was immensely popular
with Japanese audiences and returned to
defend Tokyo about a dozen times against
more formidable foes than nightclub promoters: Godzilla, the son of King Kong, Me-
American Entomologist  •  Volume 58, Number 4
chagodzilla, Dagahra (an energy-spewing
dragon), and Death Ghidora (a three-headed horned dragon that exudes toxic mist).
Just about the same time the Big Bug
Film genre crossed the Pacific, it also
crossed the Atlantic to establish a beachhead in Europe. Ein Toter hing im Netz
(which, literally translated, means “A
Corpse Hung in the Web”) was a collaborative effort between Germany and Lichtenstein (via the production company
Intercontinental Film GmbH), released in
1960. The film is, for want of a better description, a horror/sci-fi/soft-core porn/
Big Bug Film. Like Mothra, Ein Toter hing
im Netz has an American plot connection.
Gary, a New York nightclub owner, is flying
to Singapore with a group of exotic dancers
“...it’s nice to know that,
in an era when people
are divided by issues
of religion, race, ethnic
identity, and social mores,
we can unite in sharing
stories of human triumph
over physiologically
impossible supersized
arthropods.”
when the plane crashes in the ocean and
the survivors take refuge on an apparently
deserted island. Exploring the island, they
are happy to find a cabin, evidently built
by a professor prospecting for sources of
uranium, but dismayed to find its occupant
dead and suspended in a huge spider web.
Long story short, the nightclub owner is
eventually bitten by the same giant spider
that did in the professor and is transformed
into a “were-spider” who savagely attacks
scantily clad women and kills them whenever the opportunity arises (which it does,
especially during wild parties). Amazingly,
the film was successful enough that it was
dubbed into English and titled It’s Hot In
Paradise for its U.S. release in 1962 and retitled as Horror of Spider Island for its U.S.
1965 rerelease.
Ein Toter hing im Netz may owe an intellectual debt to Mesa of Lost Women (1954)
(if the word “intellectual” can be used
in connection with a film about humanspider hybrids and scantily clad women)
but, then again, it may not. No fewer than
three writers were credited with the film’s
screenplay. Writer Eldon Howard had written the screenplay for a film called Web of
Suspicion in 1959, and with fellow Ein Toter
hing im Netz writer Albert Miller, he wrote
the screenplay for the 1960 film The Spider’s Web; evidently, these writers liked to
stick to what had worked for them before.
As for the semi-nude exotic dancers in Ein
Toter hing im Netz, those were probably
the contribution of the third screenwriter,
Gaston Hakim, whose other credits around
1960 included screenplays for Naked Venus (1959) and Her Bikini Never Got Wet
(1962). Producer Georg Krause may have
pitched in some recycled ideas as well; in
1960, he also produced Flitterwochen in
der Hölle (“Honeymoon in Hell”), the plot
of which is eerily reminiscent of Ein Toter
hing im Netz: “On the way from Mexico City
to Caracas, a plane crash-lands at an uninhabited island. The criminal…terrorizes
the other survivors” (http://www.imdb.
com/title/tt0053828/).
By the late 1960s, England had established itself as a world leader in horror film
production, specializing on atmospheric
movies featuring updates of classic movie
monsters. Tigon British Film Productions
was the company responsible for England’s
sole contribution to the Big Bug genre,
1968’s The Blood Beast Terror, a lepidopterous take on the Wolfman legend. Set in
nineteenth-century London, the plot revolves around a rash of gruesome murders,
all of which involve exsanguination of attractive young male victims. An investigator
from Scotland Yard discovers a few scales
the size of dinner plates at the scene of the
murder of two entomology students, which
immediately casts suspicion on the local entomology professor. As it turns out (SPOILER ALERT), the actual exsanguinator is the
entomologist’s daughter, a “were-moth”
who metamorphoses into a giant death’s
head moth (Acherontia atropos) at night
and craves the blood of young men (hence
the name under which the film was released in the U.S., The Vampire Beast Craves
Blood). Death’s head moths, named for the
skull-like scale pattern on the thorax, were
undoubtedly familiar to British audiences
in part due to longstanding superstitious
associations between the moth and, well,
death (Victorian novelist and London theater manager Bram Stoker even mentioned
the death’s head moth in his most famous
novel Dracula). The movie didn’t translate
197
well to audiences in America when it was
released there in 1969; according to the
review in TV Guide, “This silly mad scientist
drama is undone by an incompetent production team which utterly fails to persuade
an audience to suspend their disbelief of the
outlandish concept” (http://tinyurl.com/
c8qsode). Notwithstanding, the movie went
international, as Blutbiest (Germany), Den
Blodtörstiga Vampyren (Sweden), El Deseo y
la Bestia (Spain), Il Mostro di Sangue (Italy),
Le Vampire a Soif (France) and O Drakos tou
Prasinou Dasous (Greece).
Elsewhere in the former British empire,
India had a burgeoning Bollywood film industry but didn’t produce an entry into the
Big Bug genre until Centipede! was released
in 2004. Like the award-winning 2008 film
Slumdog Millionaire, this movie was a U.S.
collaboration with India, filmed on location
using local talent. Other than that, it has
nothing in common with Slumdog Millionaire or, for that matter, any other film that
has ever won any kind of award for excellence.
In the film, preppy rich kid David Stone,
in lieu of a bachelor party, takes his exgirlfriend and other spelunker buddies to
the Shankali caves of Hyderabad, India, to
visit a cave three miles below the surface. A
local tour guide takes them belowground,
where they party until they run into trouble in the form of giant killer centipedes,
an earthquake that blocks their sole route
to safety, and ensuing horrible deaths. It’s
not implausible that centipedes are found
in caves; it’s not even implausible that big
centipedes are found in caves. In the Cueva
del Guano in Venezuela, e.g., Scolopendra
gigantea, the world’s largest centipede
(about 30 cm in length) has been recorded
capturing bats in midair (Molinari et al.
2005).
Whether the screenwriters were aware
of any of this information is unclear. The
700 cm centipede in this cave must live on
air, because there are no other organisms
in the cave that it can eat until the bachelor
party crew arrives. Moreover, unless you’re
playing the videogame Centipede, if you cut
centipedes in half they die—they don’t turn
into two 700 cm centipedes. And, despite
the presence of (SPOILER ALERT) a “whole
hive of them,” centipedes are not only not
social, they’re cannibalistic, so it’s unlikely
any large group of them would survive for
long (particularly with no alternate prey
available nearby). Consistent with the postThem longstanding Big Bug film tradition
198
of not spending a lot of money on special
effects, the film is clearly on the low-budget
side—puppets were used unadorned by
expensive CGI effects and the “transponder
box,” a sophisticated piece of equipment
that supposedly tracks the cavers, appears
to be just a flashing light in a box.
Deep Freeze (or, as it was called for
video release, Ice Crawlers [2003]), a collaboration between Germany’s ACH Productions and Regent Entertainment in Los
Angeles, might not count as an international Big Bug Film, given its American writers
and directors, but it deserves mention as
possibly the oddest representative of the
genre as, to my knowledge, the only trilobite fear film ever made anywhere. Director
and special effects artist John Carl Buechler
hails from Illinois and is renowned for special effects-intensive low-budget films. The
concept of the film was to create a 1950sstyle creature feature with the new millennium oil crisis as a backdrop. Notable German contributions to the film were several
very famous German movie stars as cast
members, including tall, blond Götz Otto,
who played a variety of mostly Nazi villains
over the years. To summarize, unscrupulous U.S. oil company Geotech Industries
establishes Geo 1, a state-of-the-art drilling facility in Antarctica. Drilling through
the ice shelf sets off some earthquakes and
the company sends down a team of naïve
graduate students to investigate, in the
hope of evading censure by the United Nations. But, unbeknownst to the crew at the
facility, the drilling unleashes a prehistoric
terror—bloodthirsty killer trilobites the
size of German shepherds.
It’s not clear what inspired screenwriter Robert Boris to feature trilobites.
Maybe it’s that Germany is rich in trilobite
fossils (including the Devonian Hunsrück
Slates, the Goerlitz Synclinorium in eastern Saxony (Geier and Elicki 1995) and the
Ordovician Ebbe Anticline (Herscheider
Schichten) (Koch 2010). It is clear, though,
that the screenwriter didn’t bother to do
too much research into trilobite biology,
as evidenced by one graduate student’s
evaluation of the DNA analysis of the mysterious blue goo found all over the research
station, identifying the source as “Either a
premillipede they never got around to classifying as an official species or it’s a aphedactic trilobite…It’s been extinct for about
ten million years. It’s like a cross between
a worm and a mosquito—a parasite.” In a
single sentence, this character manages to
make more biological errors than can be
found in some entire screenplays (not the
least of which is missing the extinction of
trilobites by minimally 240 million years).
While this film is unique in many ways, it
carries on the rich post-Them tradition of
skimping on the special effects budget. The
Antarctic research station was actually a
sewage treatment facility in El Segundo,
California, and the bleak Antarctic landscape was stock footage from John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing.
In summary, is there some greater significance to the fact that Big Bug Films have
succeeded in transcending cultural barriers? Have Big Bug Films promoted international understanding and mutual tolerance? Probably not, but it’s nice to know
that, in an era when people are divided by
issues of religion, race, ethnic identity, and
social mores, we can unite in sharing stories of human triumph over physiologically
impossible supersized arthropods. And can
it hurt the image of entomologists if an actor is viewed as suitable to play both Santa
Claus and a heroic myrmecologist?
References
Geyer, G., and O. Elicki, 1995. The Lower Cambrian trilobites from the Gorlitz Synclinorium
(Germany)—review and new results. Palaontol. Zeitschr. 69: 87-119.
Molinari, J., E.E. Gutierrez, A.A. De Ascencao,
J. M. Nassar, A. Arends, and R. J. Marquez.
2005. Predation by giant centipedes, Scolopendra gigantea, on three species of bats in a
Venezuelan cave. Caribb. J. Sci. 41: 340-346.
Rogin, M. 1987. Ronald Reagan, the movie,
and other episodes in political demonology.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 263-64.
Sontag, S. 1966. The imagination of disaster. In
Against interpretation and other essays. New
York: The Noonday Press.
Stanze, E. 2011. Top Five Big Bug Films. http://
www.fearnet.com/news/news-article/topfive-big-bug-films.
Tsutsui, W. Looking straight at “Them.” Environmental History 12: 237-253.
W., A. 1954. Warner Brothers chiller at Paramount. New York Times June 17, 1954
(http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review
?res=950CEED71431E43ABC4F52DFB0668
38F649EDE&pagewanted=print).
May Berenbaum is a professor and head of the
Department of Entomology, University of Illinois,
320 Morrill Hall, 505 South
Goodwin Avenue, Urbana,
IL 61801. Currently, she is
studying the chemical aspects of interaction between herbivorous insects
and their hosts.
American Entomologist  •Winter 2012