Monsters by the Millions: An Eco-cultural History of the Killer Bug Film
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Abstract
Since their release, most of the 1950s ‘big bug’ creature features and killer bug films, featuring monstrous arachnids, insects and other arthropods, have invited an ongoing panoply of cultural interpretations. However, one particular reading, that encompasses these films’ engagement with atomic anxiety, the Red Scare and Cold War tensions, is so prevalent and dominant throughout film scholarship that it has been termed a ‘critical orthodoxy,’ essentially relegating other readings of these films to the background. In turn, this orthodoxy also massively outweighs the level of critical interrogation that has been applied to the rest of the killer bug subgenre, that proliferated after the 1950s alongside its parent genre, natural horror. This thesis, then, attempts to address the imbalance by analysing almost half a century of killer bug films, from Them! (1954) to Bug Buster (1998), to reveal the eco-cultural significance of deadly ant invasions, sinister bee swarms, menacingly oversized arachnids and so on, as they have been imagined on screens big and small. By interrogating individual films and thematic cycles, it argues that the variety of cinematic killer bugs can collectively be understood as an evolving metaphor for numerous contemporaneous ecological and environmental anxieties pertinent to their particular time and place. Employing a methodology informed primarily by ideas and concepts proposed in Andrew Tudor’s Monsters and Mad Scientists (1989), Janet Staiger’s Interpreting Films (1992), Barbara Klinger’s ‘Film History Terminable and Interminable’ (1997), and more specifically, William Tsutsui’s Looking Straight at Them!’ (2007), this thesis explores its key case studies as unmistakable products of their eco-cultural moment. Accordingly, it aims to prove that the analysis of the cinematic killer bug should not be limited largely to the films of the 1950s, for the rest of the subgenre espouses equally important ideas about humankind’s continued destruction of the Earth and its natural inhabitants.