Editorials
When Pests Attack! 8 Kills that Came From the Garden
Slugs (1988)
Arrow Video recently released Juan Piquer Simon ‘s Slugs on Blu-ray and the oozy 1988 shocker has never looked better. As a film that lives or dies by the quality of its visual creature and gore FX, it remains a top notch curio of the era and has stirred in me an interest in revisiting more in the garden variety, killer pests sub-genre.
From worms to bees, filmmakers have certainly loved playing on our fears of the dangerous creepy crawlers that live just outside our door.
These are only a few of my favorites.
Squirm (1976)
When millions of worms are driven from the earth and mutated by electricity, they begin to wreak havoc on the peaceful people of Fly Creek. Such is the premise for Jeff Lieberman’s Squirm, a notorious gross-out from the drive-in era. The film has remained extremely popular over the years, so much so that Scream Factory recently released a Collector’s Edition of the film which seems bananas.
Quick side note: Lieberman would go on to write and direct the LSD panic movie Blue Sunshine the following year, easily one of the most bizarre films of the era.
Mosquito (1995)
After Tremors, the 90’s got slammed with creature features hoping to cash in that film’s success. While some, like del Toro’s Mimic, took a serious approach, most aimed to replicate the fun, comedic flavour of Ron Underwood’s instant classic. Enter Mosquito, Gary Jone’s fun and gruesome bug movie whose influence can still be felt today with recent films like Infestation or Stung.
The craziest thing about Mosquito is that it’s a bit of a genre bender in that it’s alien blood that mutates the pests. last year, Synapse released the film as a 20th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray.
Ants! (1977)
From Them! to Empire of the Ants, Phase IV and many others, Hollywood has had an odd fascination with ants as predatory monsters. The most bizarre is probably the 1977 TV movie It Happened at Lakewood Manor (later re-titled Ants!) starring Suzanne Somers, Lynda Day George and Robert Foxworth. In the film, an army of poisonous ants traps a group of people in an old fashioned hotel.
The best news? The entire film is currently available for free on YouTube.
Bug (1975)
The craziest thing about Jeannot Szwarc’s Bug – and what helped it make this list over other mutant cockroach flicks – is that the cockroaches in the film have the ability to start fires. Fires! Hair goes up in smoke! Trucks explode! All from an invading army of roaches from the center of the earth.
Perhaps from the success of Bug, Swarc would famously go on to helm one of the most anticipated sequels at the time, Jaws 2. He is still a busy director of television, working regularly on shows like Supernatural.
The Swarm (1978)
There are a TON of killer bee movies and all of them are objectively bad. In fact a quick perusal of IMDB will reveal none of them, including this Irwin Allen production starring Michael Caine, breaks a 5/10 rating.
The Swarm is about a cloud of African killer bees that sweeps across America, laying waste to the land. Before Roland Emmerich picked up the honors, Irvin Allen was the king of disaster movies churning out classics like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure among others. Here he adapts from the book by Arthur Herzog III (real name) which was a hit at the time, capitalizing on the panic of the more aggressive”Africanized bees” which were being cross-bred and introduced into various regions around the world.
Ticks (1993)
Another slimy 90’s outing, Ticks comes from director Tony Randel who, only a few years earlier, had earned his stripes with the no holds barred Hellraiser 2.
Once again, Ticks follows on the heels of Tremors so it has a lighter tone, even though it is unrelentingly gruesome. One of the film’s claims to fame is it stars a decidedly young Seth Green.
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)
Before Franck Marshall’s Arachnophobia became the go-to spider shocker, Kingdom of the Spiders had the honor of being considered the best. Yes, it’s a B-movie, but it’s actually pretty great (especially if you’re scared of spiders).
In the film is about a veterinarian, played by William Shatner, who is sent to investigate a rash of farm animal deaths in a rural community. It soon becomes apparent that millions of tarantulas are swarming the desert town and humans are their next target. Like many of the 70s nature shock films, Kingdom of the Spiders was influenced by the success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and reflected the concerns regarding the destruction of the environment at the time.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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