Wasps.
Locusts.
Spiders.
Ants.
These insects and the almost 900,000 others like them, make up 80 percent of the world’s
species.
Seen or unseen, the creepy crawlies, flying insects, and burrowing creatures are necessary
to our ecosystems and can contribute positively to our everyday lives.
But, they can be devastating menaces, spreading disease, and causing famine.
Despite my own misgivings, when our friends at Deep Look invited me to get up close and
personal with these destructive insects—I couldn’t let you all down and say no.
There is perhaps no more infamous insect swarm than the locust.
Appearing in mass since at least the days of Ancient Egypt, the migrating insects will
tear through crops in their hunger.
Tales of destructive locusts plagues, e, go back thousands of years, prominent in the
Bible and the Quran.
Unsurprisingly, these real-life anxieties have been the subjects of science fiction
and horror narratives for hundreds of years—taking on monstrous form.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” the main character is driven to madness after
being bitten by a mysterious gold beetle.
H.G. Wells' story “The Empire of the Ants,” features an intelligent, aggressive Amazonian
ant swarm—one that will purposefully attack humans.
But bugs became visibly monstrous on screen in the 1950s—when the “big bug” subgenre
of science fiction and horror was hatched.
But why did this decade in particular latch on to the idea of freakishly monstrous bugs?
The 1950s monstrous insect Renaissance peaked most notably with 1954’s Them!
While not the first of these bugs gone rogue kinds of films, it was certainly the most
influential.
Them! was a commercial and critical success and was Warner Bros. highest grossing film
of 1954.
In the movie, the FBI, police, government officials, and scientists discover a nest
of giant ants at a nuclear testing site.
They try to hide the discovery using cyanide bombs--but two queens survive.
They and their offspring are driven from the desert to the city of Los Angeles, where they
are eventually killed with flamethrowers.
By today’s standards the special effects and even the plot seem underwhelming, but
at the time viewers and film critics found the story believable.
One reviewer from the New York Times described the film as “tense, absorbing, and surprisingly
enough, somewhat convincing.”
Another from The Saturday Review wrote that the film was “as persuasively realistic
a horror story as one could possibly imagine.”
Why so convincing and realistic? The nuclear test site origins of the giant ants make this
movie a commentary on the impact of atomic energy and nuclear weapons.
While Japanese kaiju films emerged following WWII as a response to the horrors of the destruction
of nuclear bombs, the American-made Them! is more about the unknown lingering effects
of nuclear testing—and arguably, the guilt felt for developing and using nuclear weapons.
Many of the big bug films that followed Them! incorporated nuclear weapons or radiation.
Like 1957’s Beginning of the End, which features massive locusts who grew to a freakish
size after eating giant vegetables grown with radioactive fertilizer—fertilizer produced
by the US government’s experimental farm.
As the locusts continue to feed on the products of other radioactive experiments, their size
continues to increase.
After they’ve torn through all vegetable life—they turn to humans.
Moving from the countryside into Chicago they destroy all in their path before finally being
lured to Lake Michigan and killed.
The lingering effects of atomic energy and nuclear weapons weren’t the only cultural
commentary present in these films.
Between 1940 and 1970, as part of the Great Migration, over 4 million Black Americans
moved from the South to cities in the Northeast and West, like Chicago, New York, Detroit,
and Los Angeles.
The height of this migration­—the 1950s—was marked by a period of what is commonly referred
to as “white flight,” the increased movement of millions of White Americans away from inner
cities to newly constructed suburbs.
These movies mirrored the anxieties of white audiences who viewed the Great Migration as
a type of invasion, a theory supported by the very real violence White urbanities inflicted
on minority residents and some science fiction films seemed to support this racist viewpoint
Driven in part by federal policy and economic processes, the socioeconomic divide between
White and non-White citizens was reinforced, and broadened, by the physical movement of
both populations.
This movement is mirrored in the on-screen insects’ journey from a more rural landscape
to suburbs or cities.
The postwar movement’s outlawing of racial segregation also seems significant.
The Brown v. Board of Education ruling was in 1954—the same year Them! became a box
office success.
These Big Bug movies have also been read as a response to growing fears of Communism from
the Cold War, with the insects standing in as a metaphor for perceived foreign predators
secretly embedded in society, invading quietly before rising in mass to destroy Americans.
Some of these films suggest this more explicitly, like in The Deadly Mantis (1957), where the
titular bug’s movements from the Arctic Circle are detected on radar meant to monitor
the Russian military.
These films also play on the fear of the crowd.
The concept of the “crowd” only solidified at the turn of the 20th century, when Industrialism
and urbanization contributed to the collective anxiety of the masses, of being a cog in the
machine.
On-screen these masses became invading aliens and swarms of insects.
In The Naked Jungle (1954), the ants aren’t abnormally sized or mutated; there are just
a lot of them—a massive “forty square miles” sized swarm.
The giant wasp swarm created from cosmic rays in The Monster from Green Hell is another
example.
While many big bug films featured singular monstrous arthropods, like The Black Scorpion,
Tarantula!, and The Earth v. the Spider, those creatures' real-life counterparts are poisonous
to humans.
It is the smaller insects that swarm in these films—it is the masses that are more difficult
to defeat.
Another interpretation that focuses on the arthropods at the heart of these movies is
the cultural conversation surrounding the pesticide industry.
In an era of literal movement (from rural to city, or city to suburb) where the domestic
space was prioritized, people were freaked out about regulating bug populations.
The 1950s marked a boom in pest control with etymologists, agricultural associations, and
government organizations, not to mention chemical executives, promoting the destructive potential
of insects.
Even small, seemingly harmless populations of bugs that live quietly below ground, largely
out of sight of humans, could become a physical threat as their populations literally grew.
Increased populations of locusts, Japanese beetles, boll weevils, fire ants, and gypsy
moths were all targeted in the United States during the 50s.
The desire to eradicate these creatures was even referred to as the “War on insects.”
When DDT was developed as a synthetic insecticide in the 1940s, it was literally promoted as
“the atomic bomb of insecticides.”
But by the time the Big Bug films emerged, it was already becoming apparent that not
only did these chemicals have a negative effect on all life—they also weren’t as effective
as previously believed.
Some of the Big Bug films even incorporated this revelation, showing large dosing of insecticides
to have little effect on the creatures.
To put it simply, bugs were everywhere and we wanted them dead.
The defeat of giant insects on the silver screen was a welcome image.
The role of the military in these films is also interesting.
While plot details often include government cover ups or secret experiments, in the same
films the military ends up killing the bugs and saving the day.
Science is portrayed similarly.
While a “mad scientist” is behind the helm of the bug's mutations, other scientists
are responsible for coming up with the solutions to eliminate them.
1953’s Mesa of Lost Women features mutant spider women and giant spiders created by
a scientist's pituitary experiments.
Tarantula’s scientist possessed altruistic motives—his experiments aimed at combating
world hunger and increasing lifespan.
Likewise, Beginning of the End’s scientist also wanted to solve world hunger—with radiation.
The Big Bug films also presented audiences with a basic fear —these were creatures
that they could encounter in their own backyards.
While giant rampaging lizards, aliens, and deep-sea creatures were scary, they also maintained
a greater sense of escapism.
Insects, on the other hand, are a part of daily life.
While insects aren’t going to hunt down humans to eat them alive, they do pose a threat.
Besides the obvious poisonous ones and their harmful bites, swarms of insects can also
damage human lives and livelihoods.
While honeybees, gnats, and termites are all among the species that swarm, some of the
most damaging (and notorious) are fire ants
Fire ants swarm as part of their reproductive cycle, forming strange floating masses.
Their powerful and painful bites make them a threat to humans and animals, and they can
decimate crops.
Originally from South America, following World War I, fire ants traveled to the United States.
But it wasn’t until, you guessed it, the 1950s when the invasion gained attention.
In 1957 the federal government targeted fire ants with their own bug-killing propaganda
films.
So what about stories featuring our beloved Locusts?
Locusts are actually a variety of grasshopper species that undergo dramatic transformation
when environmental circumstances are just right, locusts swarms can number into the
billions.
So I went to a lab to learn about locusts—annndddd ended up holding one.
I may or may not have screamed when one unexpectedly jumped on me.
I could feel its little claw tips.
I hated it.
After 1957’s Beginning of the End, locusts interestingly faded away from science fiction
narratives—until the 21st century.
As global warming causes locust swarms to increase, we have again found them on our
screen (Locusts: The 8th Plague; The Swarm).
But it's not just these monstrous flying creatures that endure.
Following their golden era in the 1950s, big bug horror continuously plagues horror narratives.
From The Mist to 8-Legged Freaks, The Swarm to Arachnophobia—it doesn’t seem like
we will be squashing these monsters anytime soon.
But after all, it’s hard to dismiss something that infiltrates our lives everyday—seen
or unseen, we live in a bug-eat-bug world.
Thanks again to our friends over at Deep Look for their really close up view of the locust.
Most of the time, desert locusts are solitary, mild-mannered insects.
But under *just* the right conditions… they have an explosive dark side.
Those conditions trigger a hormone that changes their bodies - and behavior--creating plagues
of biblical proportions.
And guess what?
Your body makes that same hormone!
Check out this new episode from Deep Look that gets up close and personal with these
incredible insects.