Subgenres of the Damned: Animals Attack Movies

The Horror genre is the best genre, it turns out, and one of the best things about is how many different types of movies fall under the umbrella. There’s ghosts, monsters, vampires, any number of creatures, really, and all these movies have their own rules, but then there’s religious horror, found footage, slasher films, torture porn, evil cult movies, evil child movies and more. The list is long, and Subgenres of the Damned will be a deep dive into one specific branch of the Horror tree.

In today’s introductory entry, it’ll be an in depth look at Killer Animals movies, or Animals Attack movies, or if you’re feeling poetic, Nature’s Revenge movies.

ORIGINS

Killer Animals have always been fascinating to humans, no doubt because the further back in time you go, the more people are getting killed by animals. Greek mythology is loaded with super animals, from the Nemean Lion to the Calydonian Boar, and in just about every case, the story is the same. A big animal is killing the people of some region, and so a hero (or heroes) is dispatched to deal with it. While these stories tend more towards the fantastic, they’re all focused on the primal clash of Man and Nature. Historically, Nature is seen as a crucible, something to test ourselves against, to overcome; the oldest nemesis of Man. This theme will continue over thousands of years, from the oral tradition and Homer’s Odyssey through medieval art depicting St George and the Dragon up to modern times. We make legends of these stories.

But we’re talking movies, and there is of course one Killer Animal movie that deserves special mention, the original 1933 King Kong. In a sense, I wasn’t even sure if this one counts, as there’s other ways you could classify it, and Kong is considerably more human and more of a character than you generally see in films of this ilk. But at the end of the day, it’s a movie about a giant monkey run amok, and the appeal of watching that is an obvious component of the subgenre. Humans goes somewhere far away, a wild place where Nature rules, where Kong rules. This trespass ends up killing several of them, as do their attempts to harness Kong, an avatar of Nature’s dominance. Much can be said about King Kong, and while I can’t honestly speak to how frightening anyone found a giant ape climbing the Empire State Building in 1933, I would say it plays much more like a (racist) adventure movie now, which is also the tone all remakes and/or reboots have taken and run with. But did it give little 1933 kids some nightmares? I certainly like to think so. The scene that most resembles the subgenre as it would become, however, was the one famously cut from release and never finished, the so-called Spider Pit sequence, in which some sailors get dropped into a pit and devoured by giant bug monsters. It’s the best scene in Peter Jackson’s remake, and in possibly the coolest perk bonus of that whole ordeal, inspired Jackson and his Weta team to recreate the original sequence, using only technology available in 1933. If you haven’t seen it, check it out!

But Kong aside, the bedrock Animals Attack film is most likely Them!, the giant ant flick released in 1954. This, of course, overlaps greatly with the Fear of Atomic Energy subgenre, which is worth its own article, but the gist of it is that Mankind’s reckless pursuit of science has come back to destroy us, in the form of irradiated animal monsters, either extra large, extra aggressive, or most likely both. Them! is a watershed moment in the genre, still entertaining, and everything you could reasonably hope for, if you decided to explore atomic age monster movies. And even though I suspect it’s not well seen today, I’m sure everyone’s familiar with the black and white images of giant ants, excellent low-fi designs that are more or less emblematic of the entire Big Bug subgenre. You don’t often see the monsters from The Deadly Mantis or Attack of the Killer Shrews, outside of MST3K, but those killer ants persist, if not in our nightmares, at least in our montages of 50s drive-in cheapies. Will they survive the boomers? Only time will tell.

But the real Granddaddy of the subgenre is probably immortal, and that would be Hitchcock’s The Birds. The Master of Suspense was of course known for thrills and terror, but within his own resume, The Birds remains an outlier. Hitch generally offered spies, murderers, duplicitous poisonings and the occasional Nazi (even the formative horror of Psycho is rooted in reality), but almost never this kind of uncanny menace. In its own quotidian way, The Birds is Cosmic Horror, entering into Lovecraft territory. We never find out what the hell is going on with these birds! As Tippi Hedron and Rod Taylor slowly drive away in the final frames, it’s unclear if the attacks are over, or just amping up. Or if they’re confined to this corridor of the California coastline, or the beginning of a global bird apocalypse. The world has ceased to make sense, and the natural order has been upended.

And that’s the key to the Animal Attack film. Whether globally or in isolation, Mankind has found itself on the back foot, and Nature has come out swinging. That’s true of a country so focused on its Cold War that it witlessly unleashes radioactive dung beetles on the Nevada desert, and its true of weekend backpackers who decided to go camping in the part of the woods where the bears live. Mankind’s hubris in the face of Nature, in all its unblunted fury, is a bill that must be paid. And while the immediate fear might be the the jaws of some predator, the larger implication is that despite modernity, despite having bent the physical world to our will, we’re only one sharp kick in the teeth away from falling back down to the bottom of the food chain. We’re not the masters we imagined ourselves to be.

THE BIG ONE

But what about that jaws of some predator bit? Is there a more primal fear than being eaten alive? The notion that some creature, larger than yourself, might decide he wants to bite your leg off, because that’s what it does every day? That’s baked in to the human consciousness, something etched in stone by centuries of hunter/gatherers living together to protect themselves from sabertooth tigers. And with good reason, it would hurt like a bitch! Teeth are scary, and everyone has some sense memory of getting bitten by something. And that thing that might have bitten you, a household pet or maybe the weird kid in the playground, they certainly don’t compare to, say, a Great White Shark who outweighs you by at least a thousand pounds, with 4000 PSI behind that bite. And you can’t even see it coming

If Them! was the wellspring, and The Birds was the mission statement, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is the perfection, as it were. One of the most discussed films of all time, rife with fascinating production anecdotes, full to bursting with subtextual themes you can write essays on or completely ignore, and blessed with more spectacular moment-to-moment filmmaking than just about any film in history (just watching it is a master class in visual storytelling), it’s a difficult film to even try to reckon with. So rather than try to say anything new about a film of this magnitude, I’ll just recall that incredible opening, with poor Chrissie going out for a night swim and getting devoured. It’s everything the Animals Attack subgenre is chasing, crystallized in 3 minutes.

It’s amazing that Spielberg, 28 years old at the time, managed this. But it’s not too surprising, in retrospect, that the film connected as much as it did (ushering in a new age of moviemaking, changing the world completely). Because the fear being exploited in that opening sequence (and throughout the film) is primal. Everyone gets it. I’m too young to have seen Jaws in theaters (at least in its original run), but I remember in vivid detail seeing it on video at the age of ten. It created an avenue of thought in my head that kicks in whenever I find myself in any proximity to deep water. I’ve heard other people express similar feelings my entire life, some to the extent that they’re uncomfortable in even a public swimming pool, and I suspect this is a quality Jaws will always possess. After it became an absolute sensation in the summer of 1975, there has been no shortage of imitators, and sharks will go on to prove to be the most popular Killer Animal antagonist, appearing in films pretty much constantly over the last 45 years (that’s how old Jaws is now, how about that shit?) None have ever come close to taking down Jaws, as solid a lock for Best of Show as you’ll find anywhere.

Since we’re talking about sharks, which makes up a huge contingent of this subgenre, what can be said of that motley crew of imitators? The immediate sequel, Jaws 2, has its defenders, but I am not among them. It’s meat and potatoes shark stuff, not actively bad, but the gap between it and its predecessor might as well be the Grand Canyon. Then there’s Jaws 3D & Jaws: The Revenge, both of them classic faceplants. There’s all manner of parodies, intentionally shitty films (the endless Sharknado series), and even an attempt to make a slasher film with killer sharks (Shark Night, not worth the effort). In recent years, we’ve had several honest-to-goodness shark franchises, such as Open Water and 47 Meters Down. That’s to say nothing of the other aquatic beast movies that are shark films in everything but name, the most infamous of which is Orca, featuring Richard Harris doing his version of Quint, and the Piranha films, almost good enough to be their own thing, but not quite. The stand out would be the tongue in cheek Piranha 3D from 2010, but even that is most going for laughs. And tits. Even Peter Benchley, the original Jaws novelist, ripped himself off, offering Beast, a killer squid novel adapted into a trash TV movie.

So Jaws remains untouchable, but there’s certainly a few good ones out there, if you’re curious. If it’s cheese you’re after, you can’t do better than Deep Blue Sea, the semi-famous cliche machine from the 90s, featuring extra large ‘smart sharks’, a high body count and a pretty legendary Samuel L Jackson performance. But if you’re looking for a real shark movie, something to summon the same kind of suspense Spielberg managed, I’d suggest The Reef, an Australian flick about a pleasure cruise gone bad in the South Pacific. It mostly succeeds by not just duplicating the camerawork of Jaws, and finding its own tone, including some simple underwater images that linger in the mind long afterward.

ANIMAL VARIANTS

But you can get eaten on dry land too. Killer Insects have never quite gone out of vogue either, and you could probably find a film to match any specific phobia you might have (although I couldn’t vouch for the quality). If you want more ants, regular sized, Saul Bass’s Phase IV can’t be beat. It features ants getting smarter, building geometrically perfect towers in the Arizona desert and battling science teams trying to communicate with them. It’s way out there, something like an auteur’s take on 50s bug movies, and is all about humanity getting kicked down the food chain. It’s nuts. There’s the campy Empire of the Ants, utilizing both giant ants like Them! and hyperintelligent empath ants like Phase IV, but adding Joan Collins at her goofiest low ebb. You got movies about killer bees (The Swarm), killer mosquitos (uh, Mosquito), killer cockroaches (Mimic, courtesy of a young Guillermo del Toro), killer worms (Squirm), and my personal phobia, killer slugs. The films Slugs is reportedly an ineffective piece of shit, but I’ll never find out, because I refuse to watch it. Spielberg himself has inserted typically strong insect sequences into two Indiana Jones films as well, the cave full of creepy crawlies from Temple of Doom, and the pit of carnivorous ants in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which dodgy CGI aside, still manages to be one of that poor film’s better-than-awful parts.

Spiders too. There’s a lot of killer spider movies. You’ve got Kingdom of the Spiders featuring William Shatner battling pesticide-irradiated tarantulas, you’ve got Eight Legged Freaks, if you want big, stupid spiders attacking the likes of David Arquette and Scarlett Johansson. You’ve got one of the most memorable sequences in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, the lair of Shelob (and uh, one of the better sequences from The Hobbit films as well). Jackson likes his killer animals, clearly. Killer spiders, rendered giant by mutable scaling, appear in two of the scariest moments from the entirety of 50s horror, The Incredible Shrinking Man and the original The Fly, with that famous nightmare image from the ending. Help meee! But for my money, your best killer spider movie is the unassuming Amblin production from 1990, Arachnophobia, a PG-13 film that flirts with light comedy before creeping you out with a very tactile presentation of sticking your hand in small enclosed space and feeling a mess of webs, or the touch of tiny feet scuttling over your bedsheet. If you want the spider equivalent of Jaws, look no further.

But what about big animals? The ones that if you were to meet them on their home turf, they’d pretty much wipe their ass with you? One of the classier entries would be The Ghost and the Darkness, which stars actual movie stars and adapts a true story of killer African lions. Bears are also popular. Anyone who’s come across a wild bear knows there’s no contest there. There’s Backcountry, a recent entry that starts making you think it’ll be about killer rednecks, but nope, it’s a bear! That one’s got a mauling for the ages. There's the star-studded Into the Grizzly Maze, an attempt to be the Jaws of bear films (it falls on its face). There’s Prophecy, a return to Atomic fears again, but with a giant mutant bear. There’s Grizzly Park, produced by the owner of this very website. Check that one out! But maybe the best one is an oddity, 1997’s The Edge, scripted by David Mamet. It’s a theatrical narrative, focused on two men’s symbolic struggle over masculine dominance, that just happens to have a kickass killer bear chasing them through the wilderness. And if you want to cheat, I’d also suggest Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, a documentary about how fucking dangerous bears are, and possibly the most sobering watch in this entire article. It may not be a horror film, but it’ll mess you up, for sure.

(left to right) Sir Anthony Hopkins, bear

Every biome has its own bugbears. If bears rule the mountains, the wetlands are the feeding ground for the alligators. Last year’s Crawl showed them devouring Floridians during hurricane season, from the same director as Piranha 3D, Alexander Aja. They often show up when adventure tourists go too far off the beaten path (into the wild, where Man’s power is muted and unreliable), such as in Rogue, Primeval, or Black Water, a bit of a (wet) dry run for The Reef from director Andrew Traucki. There’s campy cult classic Lake Placid, if you want Betty White to curse at the alligator. There’s way more gator movies than you’d think. And if you’re thinking, ‘Well, I live in the city, why would I care about gators?’ there’s 1980’s Alligator, where they live in the New York City sewers. That one was written by John Sayles, and directed by a guy named Lewis Teague.

Teague also directed Cujo, the most famous killer dog movie out there. It’s also probably the best (killer dog movies don’t have that deep a bench). It seems natural that Stephen King would have eventually hit this subgenre, and Cujo remains a classic. The twist of course being that dogs, unlike gators, spider or bees, are mostly beloved and trusted, Man’s Best Friend, making its subversion a natural subject for Horror. The specter of rabies had mostly been played for pathos up to this point, as in Old Yeller, and by pointing the killer dog right back at the American family, King told the definitive rabies story. Even more impressive, he apparently wrote it in a haze of drugs and alcohol, and remembers nothing of the process. Killer dogs feature elsewhere, of course, from garish crap like the cyborg dog of Man’s Best Friend to the understated arthouse take on canine revolution, White God. Many different flavors. There was even a planned Cujo remake, entitled C.U.J.O., which I came across while working on that Stephen King article from the other day, but that appears to be long dead. A shame, because it sounded profoundly stupid. C.U.J.O. stands for Canine Unit Joint Operations, so make of that what you will.

So, I could go on. There’s movies about killer tigers (Burning Bright), killer monkeys (Monkey Shines), killer rats (Willard, Graveyard Shift), killer bats (Nightwing), killer boars (Razorback), and more. You get the idea. On the surface, these are relatively similar films, for the most part, and do the things you expect them to do. You assemble a cast, and the cast gets picked off in unpleasant ways until someone stops the animal, or not, as the case may be. It’s cheap and dirty, and yet, the subgenre contains two of the most popular and acclaimed films in history in King Kong and Jaws, two of only three horror films deigned important enough to land on the AFI List of Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time (the third is The Silence of the Lambs). But quality aside, there’s good reason they keep getting made, and will likely continue to for the rest of our lives. The hook is undeniable, and one of the cornerstones of what we’re looking for in the Horror genre. In short, our position as Master of the Natural World is tenuous at best, and only situational. There’s always something untamed out there, completely disinterested in our innately human qualities, who just wants to eat dinner. And if we, individually or as a species, expand beyond the invisible borders of the world of man, they’ll be out there, red in tooth and claw, ready to correct us. At least in the movies. In real life, it looks like Nature’s gonna roll with viruses and climate disasters.