Ants in your kitchen? Silverfish skittering around your bathroom floors? Invisible mosquitoes dive-bombing you in the middle of the night?
This is nothing compared to the horrors of bug infestation immortalized by Hollywood over the past sixty years. From the sweet sadness of “My Girl” to the creepy-crawliness of “Arachnophobia,” from the hysterical, fifties “ban the bomb”- inspired monster movies like “Them” to the species dysphoria in “The Fly,” insects and spiders have been playing the heavy in movies for decades.
In “My Girl” (1991), young actress Anna Chlumsky plays the preteen daughter of a widowered small-town funeral director. The girl develops a friendship with her neighbor, played by a post-“Home Alone” Macaulay Culkin. Everything is going swimmingly until Culkin ticks off a colony of bees (or is it wasps?) and dies of a massive allergic reaction to bee stings. Or wasp stings. Or hornet stings. Luckily, Anna’s father is the mortician, so…
In “Arachnophobia” (1990 – and no, spiders are not insects, they’re arachnids; but they’re still bugs!) a South American spider with attitude hitchhikes to the U.S. in a crate containing a dead guy, gets romantic with a local spider babe, and starts creating thousands of cute little baby spiders. Unfortunately, these little baby spiders, apart from being very cute, are also very, very poisonous, and have inherited their parents’ attitude. People start to die, and moviegoers start to develop… arachnophobia!
Ant problems? Consider the hapless victims in “Them” (1954). While TV audiences were ignoring the Cold War in favor of “The Milton Berle Show,” moviegoers were scaring the living daylights out of themselves with movies portraying menacing aliens and the frightful consequences of atomic radiation. In “Them,” a nuclear test results, unbeknownst to nearby townspeople, in the development of a nest of giant mutant ants. When folks start disappearing or turn up dead, looking suspiciously like they’ve been chewed on by giant ants, the police bring in the FBI, who brings in a bug expert (and his beautiful daughter); the motley crew finds and destroys the mutant ants, but not before two queen ants and their drone buddies fly off to breed…
Anyone with a touch of gender dysphoria? You and Christine Jorgenson got nothin’ on the poor slob in “The Fly.” This interspecies mix-up was originally filmed in 1958 and then remade in 1986, and features a scientist obsessed with his creation, a teleportation device. Of course, the creators of the “Star Trek” franchise later worked the bugs out of the whole teleportation issue, but in 1958 a fly ended up in the ointment when an actual fly flew into the teleportation device as the scientist was experimenting on himself. The result? A man’s body with the head and arm of a fly, and a little teensy fly with the head and arm of a man, and a tiny little voice crying, “Help me! Help me!” to a horrified wife. Flyswatter, anyone? The 1986 version, with Jeff Goldblum as the unfortunate scientist, puts a modern spin on the story and adds a bit of dark humor, amazing special effects costuming, and -eighties production quality, but doesn’t surpass the horror of the original.
So the next time you see a few ants skittering across your kitchen counters, or jump when a silverfish scoots across the bathroom floor, relax. Things could be a lot worse.