Sunday, October 01, 2006
Halloween@TFL: The A-Z of Horror - A
A is for Animals Attack!
Sharks. Spiders. Bunny rabbits. Horror movie makers have been fascinated with animalistic antagonists ever since the days when they realized that they didn't have to rack their brains coming up with new monsters to match Frankenstein's, as nature had already done it for them.
Hollywood had already done their best with dinosaurs in movies like The Lost World and The Beast From 20, 000 Fathoms, and everyone remembers when a giant gorilla had his way with New Yorkers in King Kong, but it wasn't until the 50s when they realized that there were a whole host of creepy crawlies just lying around ready to haunt our dreams.
The atomic age brought us films like Them! and Tarantula, where the ants and spiders respectively had been super-sized thanks to various SF theories, but it wasn't until the seventies when they gave up convincing us nuclear bombs were dangerous, and just decided animals were already pissed off enough to come and attack us anyway. Even frogs. Alfred Hitchcock himself saw an opportunity when he unleashed The Birds on Tippi Hedren and the audience, but it all exploded when a little picture called Jaws came along, proving zombies and werewolves don't really amount to much when you have a twenty-five foot great white shark added into the equation.
And of course, Jaws opened the floodgates for a whole cavalcade of rip-offs and parodies, including such classics as Grizzly, Orca: Killer Whale, Monster Shark, Piranha, Alligator, and even gave birth itself to three sequels. But the sharks didn't have it all to themselves. Spiders did themselves no favours with the rep they already had by attempting to kill a multitude of celebrities, including William Shatner in Kingdom of the Spiders and Tom Atkins (okay, D-list celebrities) in Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo. Hell, they even had a cameo in Lucio Fulci's The Beyond.
But after the 70s, it all kind of died down. After Star Wars, Hollywood turned its attention to aliens, and your average aggravated arachnid couldn't even get a pitch meeting at Avco-Embassy. Over the years, the animals managed to sneak back into theaters with limited success, probably the most high-profile being 1990's Arachnophobia, a fun Spielbergian ride as deadly spiders take over a small American town after grabbing a ride in a coffin from Venezuela. It's always small American towns. Why not cities? Why not at least a small German town?
Dogs took a little bit of the spotlight in Cujo and Man's Best Friend, alligators had their fun in Alligator, Alligator II: The Mutation and Lake Placid, but Cujo aside, these were all subscribers to the theory that a huge alligator isn't scary enough, you have to give it the Rod Serling motivation to make it really scary.
Oh well. Maybe they'll bring back Jaws. After all, a new Jaws has to be at least better than Deep Blue Sea.
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