Bug Movies Plague Hollywood

Blame it on the millennium. Blame it on fears about cloning. Blame it on an overload of studio alien films or just plain creative exhaustion among executives and screenwriters.

But bugs - teeny ones and monsters, happy little critters who sing and fearsome ones who kill - are overrunning Hollywood studios.

At least a half-dozen scripts involving insects are in various stages of development and production, turning the creatures into formidable screen competitors of dinosaurs and aliens.

The last wave of insect films took place in the post-atomic age, exemplified by “Them!,” the 1954 classic about giant ants running wild in the Southwest after an atomic test.

“There was an undercurrent of fear after the atomic bomb, like what have we wrought, how have we upset the balance of nature and is this nature’s revenge on us,” said David Vogel, president of Walt Disney Pictures, which recently paid a writer, Ron Kasdan, $850,000 for the rights and screenplay adaptation for his new novel, “Instinct.” It’s about a toxic chemical spill in Mexico that unleashes a swarm of killer bugs headed for Texas.

“Right now we’re in a similar time,” said Vogel, who was echoing the views of several other executives and producers. “Every week we seem to be reading about cloning and biological engineering and new discoveries of water on planets. Science is altering our sense of the familiar. And these movies are tapping into that.”

Among the bug movies looming are Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers,” about a war between humans and giant alien ants, to be released by Tri-Star on Nov. 7; “Antz,” an animated film (with the voice of Woody Allen as the lead bug) to be made by Dreamworks; “Dust,” a Warner Bros. movie based on a novel by Charles Pellegrino about the extinction of insects potentially dooming the planet, and a Pixar film for Disney called “A Bug’s Life.”

In another bug film, “Mimic,” to be released in July by Miramax, Mira Sorvino is menaced by a cockroach hybrid, a combination praying mantis and termite. The film’s director, Guillermo del Toro, who made “Cronos,” the 1993 award-winning terror film, has obviously spent a lot of time thinking about bugs, and spoke almost mystically about them.

“What’s appealing for filmmakers is that these things are real,” he said during a telephone interview from Los Angeles. “They share the same planet. You don’t have to make them up. We see them every day. Yet bugs are creatures with a nightmarish perfection. We have little in common with them. They have six legs, multiple eyes, no heart, no lungs and are unstoppable. Mammals are soft, fleshy, vulnerable, while bugs are covered by an armored plate. They can be single-minded and ruthless. They are grotesque. They are God’s nightmare.”

Similarly, Wes Craven, another top horror filmmaker, says bugs are far more frightening than aliens. “We don’t like them,” he said. “They’re symbols of corruption and filth. They share our space, and we know that they can really hurt us. They stand for an element of nature that’s voracious and ultimately sees us as food. And they’re probably right.”

Of course, studio executives and agents view bugs as part of Hollywood’s never-ending quest for newer and scarier villains. “We’ve had viruses, slugs, tornadoes, volcanoes and now bugs,” said Mike De Luca, president of production at New Line. “It’s all very biblical.”

Beyond this, and on a purely practical level, studios are finding that the uses of increasingly sophisticated computer techniques make insects far easier to animate than aliens or dinosaurs. “Bugs are relatively easy to animate because they have sharp lines and hard surfaces and a uniform color, and don’t have the facial expressions and recognizable human qualities that you need in dinosaurs or aliens,” said Mike Simpson, co-head of the motion picture department at the William Morris talent agency. “Besides, there’s the natural fear and hatred we all have for them.”

Horror films have to some degree often reflected the fears and paranoia of popular culture. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the Frankenstein films and their imitators tapped into fear about crazed scientists. “Horror and sci-fi films have almost always been anti-science or very skeptical of it,” said Welch Everman, author of “Cult Horror Films” (1993) and “Cult Science Fiction Films” (1995), both published by Citadel Press.

“In earlier horror films,” said Everman, an associate dean at the University of Maine, “this was personified by mad scientists. In the 1950s, this was changed to a skepticism about science itself: science had won the war but people were also frightened of the atomic bomb and radioactive pollution.”

Those fears inspired films in the 1950s like “Them!,” which was a major success for Warner Brothers, as well as “Beginning of the End,” in which giant locusts attack Chicago; “Black Scorpion,” in which giant scorpions attack Mexico, and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” in which the squishy monsters are unleashed by radioactivity after a space launching.

“Since Vietnam, and more recently with news of potential ecological disasters and concerns about cloning, we view science as operating almost without limits, and these new films reflect that,” Everman said. “We have a more negative view of science than in the 1950s.”

What serves as an undercurrent for the new wave of terror movies, say directors and screenwriters, is the approach of the millennium. “It’s millennia paranoia: people are very nervous about what’ll happen,” said Chris Brancato, who has written for “The X-Files” television show and written the screenplay for a new film, “Species II,” now in production.

Craven, director of “Scream” and other successful horror films, said: “We’re not only coming to the end of the century but the end of the millennium. There are strange things afoot. Psychologically, we feel we are moving toward the precipice and nature will take revenge.”

Other masters of the horror film are not so sure. John Carpenter, whose films include “Escape From L.A.,” observed that studios inevitably recycle old ideas, and the recycling is now veering toward bug films of the 1950s. “Everyone wants to mine the mother lode for a hit,” Carpenter said. “And perhaps we’re aliened-out at this point.”

Was he surprised by the swarm of bug films? “Nothing about Hollywood surprises me,” Carpenter said.