Giant Rats

One common category for the deformed destructive beings (DDBs) of horror films is the berserk biota. These are natural creatures gone crazy in some way, breaking free of their place in the natural order, often attacking humans. They may, for example, be magnified to giant size, or they may behave in homicidal swarms. In The Food of the Gods (1976), both are true--swarms of giant rats hunt people, like a cross between Willard and Tarantula.

The Food of the Gods is not a good movie, but it has its moments. Based loosely on H.G. Wells's novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, it tells the story of a pro football player (why is he a pro football player? we don't know), played by Marjoe Gortner, who happens upon an island where animals grow to prodigious proportions. A giant rooster nearly pecks him to death, prompting the immortal line of dialogue, "Where the hell did you get those goddamn chickens?" A swarm of enormous wasps kills his buddy. The island's only living resident, a nutty farmer played by Ida Lupino (in the tradition of aging movie stars relegated to grade B horror movies), fights off very big larvae.

It turns out that Lupino and her husband (introduced only to be killed) have been feeding their chickens with a mysterious food that enlarged them, along with any vermin that happened to take a bite. With the addition of a few more characters (including Pamela Franklin as something called a "female bacteriologist"), the island is stocked with normals to be attacked by the giant DDBs, principally the rats. The movie comes down to a giant rat vs. normal-sized human story, with the house boarded up in Night of the Living Dead style while the rats keep charging and getting rebuffed through gunfire, improvised explosives, and finally a burst dam.

The effects vary from nearly convincing to ludicrous; the flying wasps are particularly bad, appearing as ghost images because of some failure in the optical department. Live rats on miniature sets are the key effect, and, depending on the editing, this can work well. The acting is frequently wooden--with the principal exception of Lupino, who knows how to wield a hatchet--and the characterizations one-dimensional. An annoying ecology theme (nature takes revenge against pollution) is periodically raised, but luckily not much is done with this. The best contribution of the ecology theme to this horror movie is a frisson at the end, in which we realize that cows may have been drinking traces of the food of the gods and it may have gotten into their milk and--gasp!--a child is now drinking that milk...

For all its flaws, The Food of the Gods has a lot of monsters and bloody deaths, and for that reason alone deserves a look. It is also interesting as an example of the oeuvre of director Bert I. Gordon, who, in The Amazing Colossal Man and elsewhere, had done these magnified DDBs before.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

Kong in Love

A common motif in horror movies is the monster who is sexually attracted to, or even in love with, a normal. Usually the monster--or deformed destructive being (DDB)--is a male, and the normal a female. This was the case in both versions of The Fly, and in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and in Psycho, in which Norman Bates's attraction to Marion Crane triggers his killing spree. But the archetypal version of this setup is found in the original King Kong (1933).

Kong, a giant gorilla, is deformed with respect to his size and destructive of life and property, qualifying him as a DDB. In addition, his love for the blonde Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) is destructive because it violates the rule against transspecies romances (with implicitly, perhaps, a racist fear of miscegenation). Biomechanically, the romance could never work--how could conventional vaginal intercourse ever take place? And Kong fails to win Ann's consent--this is why she is always screaming at him whenever he picks her up--making his advances tantamount to rape.

For all these reasons, Kong's love is wrong: the most fundamental sort of deformity and destructiveness. Yet a great deal of audience sympathy is worked up for Kong's love. He is tender with Ann, even when he strips off her clothes, in a mix of curiosity and randiness. He is protective, zealously fighting dinosaurs for her and breaking his chains when he thinks the photographers are attacking her with flash bulbs. He does prodigious feats for her--breaking through the monumental island gates; climbing the Empire State Building. Before he dies, he carefully puts her down so that she will be safe. Finally he dies for her. The idea that Kong's story is a modern-day "Beauty and the Beast" is played up throughout the film, and this is the strongest cue for audience sympathy: despite Kong's DDB status, he is to be understand as a fairy-tale hero, a star-crossed lover.

The combination of rampaging horror--embodied, above all, in the screams of the beloved--and the unrequited love that drives the agent of horror are what make Kong such a great film. Kong welds together two great passions--fear and love--and holds them together until the end. The failure of its remakes to do so (1976, 2005) is among the factors that makes those films weaker. In both of those films, particularly the 2005 version, the blonde feels affection, even love for Kong. Mistake. The blonde's love for Kong makes him less of a DDB, breaking the balance between fear and love. The first movie had it right: Kong picks up Ann, Ann screams, Kong is in love. And Ann keeps screaming.

George Ochoa

Author

Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

"Chosen Survivors": When Genres Collide

Chosen Survivors (1974) has a wonderful premise that is dying to get out and be made into a good horror movie. Sadly, it was made into Chosen Survivors.

The premise of Chosen Survivors is this: hand-picked survivors of a nuclear holocaust settle into a secure underground bunker only to find that it is infested with deadly vampire bats. When I was a kid watching commercials for Chosen Survivors on TV, I was sure this would be a good movie. Somehow I couldn't convince my parents to take me, and the film passed into deep cultural oblivion, and it took until yesterday, 37 years later, for me to see it.

Part of the problem with Chosen Survivors is that it is not readily clear to what genre it belongs. I am reasonably sure it is a horror movie because, among other things, the blog Horror Movie a Day includes it as one of its entries. Also, Chosen Survivors ultimately focuses on the vampire bats and their destructiveness in a setting to which they do not belong (positional deformity), making this a movie whose primary purpose is to present a deformed destructive being (DDB); this meets my theoretical definition of a horror movie. More precisely, this DDB belongs to the berserk biota category, subcategory swarming, which also includes the birds in The Birds, the rats in Willard, and the piranhas in Piranha: small animals that become dangerous when grouped in large numbers to prey on humans.

Despite these affiliations to the horror genre, Chosen Survivors at times plays more like a science fiction film, the kind with metallic sets, blinking lights, a futuristic setting (here post-apocalyptic), and a lot of philosophical discussion about how we are losing our individuality and becoming machines. It is also a paranoid thriller about how the government is manipulating and lying to us. SPOILER: In this case, the nuclear holocaust turns out to be a hoax, a setup to an elaborate psychological experiment conducted by the government.

Because Chosen Survivors is not entirely sure of its genre, it suffers from jarring shifts in tone and uneven pacing. And there are other defects. The acting consists basically of shouting for emphasis; the script contains howlers like the rape victim who suddenly decides to lie back and enjoy it. The hair and costumes reek of the '70s, making the film look dated. Real vampire bats are used for close-ups, and these are effective, but for long shots of attacking swarms a fake-looking bat swirl is used, complete with matte lines around the actors.

So Chosen Survivors is not perfect. It is not the best post-apocalyptic vampire bat movie that could be imagined. But it is the one we have, and it has its moments. The bats flocking into bedrooms late at night; the bats tearing holes into people's faces; the spectacle of Diana Muldaur and Alex Cord lying in bed post-coitally and talking philosophy. All in all, it was worth waiting 37 years for.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

Phagic Nightmares

Many horror movies are based on the idea of the normal characters (the normals) being eaten by the abnormal ones (the deformed destructive beings, or DDBs). These are phagic stories, tales of being eaten. This is true of zombie movies, and partially true of vampire movies, where what is consumed is only a part of the victim, blood. Berserk biota, natural non-human creatures acting strangely, are always munching on humans: sharks (most famously Jaws [1975]), anacondas, piranhas, rats, resurrected dinosaurs, man-eating plants, and so on. Alien monsters, such as the creature in Alien (1979), also seem to have a taste for humans. So do cannibals, such as in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

These movies suggest an insight into the nature of DDBs. Every species that has evolved has to procure food, and most species (aside from most green plants) do it destructively, by devouring some other living thing. Every species that has evolved is deformed with respect to its ancestors: it evolves through deformation. Therefore most species are DDBs, or monsters. Humans are no different. We are monsters to all the animals and plants we eat. A good horror movie would be set in a slaughterhouse, from the point of view of the cow. In fact, that movie was made, with humans standing in for cows: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Horror movies--at least the phagic ones under discussion here--are like recurrent nightmares we have been having since our evolutionary childhood, the prehistoric days when there were many more creatures around that could eat us. Even today, when there is little danger of being eaten, we know that we could be eaten: that we are no less vulnerable to teeth than the animals we ingest. And we know that we survive by eating, giving us cause for both delight and guilt. Unless we ever become indigestible or cease digesting, our phagic nightmares are likely to continue.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

A Better Piranha

I don't know what I was doing in 1978: probably watching Claude Chabrol's Violette, or some other film that I thought was good for me. It was a period when I wasn't watching horror movies because I mistakenly thought they were too un-intellectual. This is my only excuse for having missed Piranha that year. Now, 33 years later, I finally caught up with it after finding it in the old movie rack at Best Buy for $10.

The odd thing is, I watched this original version only after having already seen the remake, Piranha 3D, last year. So the 1978 Piranha seemed to me like a 2D remake of the much splashier 3D original, with the setting unaccountably moved to the 1970s, the budget lower, and the facial hair thicker. All told, Piranha 2D was much better than Piranha 3D. I say this even though I enjoyed Piranha 3D.

The test of a horror movie is how good the monster is, and Piranha 3D had pretty good monsters--well- designed, fast, luminous, toothy, CGI fish that nimbly slashed to pieces countless spring break frolickers. By comparison, Piranha barely showed its monsters: they were usually in shadow, or momentarily glimpsed through a fog of underwater blood. They were less destructive too, attacking in little bites, with relatively little damage shown, rather than peeling off whole appendages. Jerry O'Connell lost his manhood to a school of piranha that then played with their food underwater, all in 3D: that was the level of mayhem in Piranha 3D.

So why is Piranha better than Piranha 3D? Part of it is a better cast, particularly Barbara Steele and Heather Menzies, who played Louisa in The Sound of Music (1965) and, by the time of Piranha, was so grown up as to be flashing her breasts (though it happened so fast I have to wonder if they were stunt breasts). Part of Piranha's superiority is the showmanship of executive producer Roger Corman, the skill of director Joe Dante, and the effects work of people like Phil Tippett, Chris Walas, and Rob Bottin.

But here is the main thing: Piranha has better monsters. They are not shown clearly, but that very epistemic shroud, coupled with a chilling, whirring sound effect that signals their presence, allows the viewer to imagine their menace and feel their presence. They seem more real than the piranhas in the remake, which, just because we can all recognize CGI at work, look like digital cartoons despite their moderate effectiveness as monsters. The original piranhas don't destroy as quickly or completely as their remade cousins, but that too makes them seem more real: they have to work at eating. It's not a video game; it's a meal.

In the end, what is essential to a movie monster are 3 features: deformity, destructiveness, and being. The piranhas in both movies are deformed, in the sense that they do not behave the way that normal piranha behave (eg, they like cold water rather than tropical water). They are both destructive. But only the piranhas in Piranha really seem like beings. They seem obscure but actual, whereas the piranhas in Piranha 3D are luminous but fake.

In this blog, I will write more about horror movies and my theory of monsters as deformed destructive beings, or DDBs.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films