A Bloody Good Time 2.04.10: Nature Runs Amok!

Posted by Joseph Lee on 02.04.2010

From Killer Sharks and Domesticated Animals to Killer Spiders and even Mother Nature herself, 411’s Joseph Lee looks at some of the things in nature that can kill you in a horror film!

Logo courtesy of Benjamin J. Colón (Soul Exodus)

Welcome to A Bloody Good Time. Last week we finished up Stephen King month with a look at the best horror films based on his work. Some people had some problems with the choices, others didn't read the rules, it was a usual day. Let's look at the feedback.

cbizzle asks: no green mile? no shawshank redemption? what a load!

hydra815 can add to this with: I like the list and its well thought out but the rule about only allowing horror movies onto it is ridiculous. Stephen King's best work has been non-horror and omitting that is just pointless. Its like making a five best Scorcese films list "but only if they have De Niro in them".

This isn't the first edition of A Bloody Good Time, folks. You should know by now that this is a horror-related column. Why would a horror related column discuss The Shawshank Redemption?

411's Ben Piper replies: There are five stories in Creepshow. You're forgetting about The Crate.

I didn't forget, I just wasn't mentioning all of the stories. I don't consider the wraparound a legitimate story so that's why I said four and a wraparound. The clip I included was from The Crate, actually. Thanks for trying to help, though.

4390 says: Salems' Lot should be on this list. Even though it was a mini series, it was one of his best.

Every time I've tried to watch Salem's Lot it put me to sleep. So I've never finished it and can't say either way how good it is.

Twitch gives a reply: Great list! Spot on about the actor who played Henry Bowers. I also read that he apologized to the actor who played Mike Hanlon everytime he had to call him the N-word. That's pretty classy in my book!

Indeed. I'm sure that even if it's a movie character, most people would feel uncomfortable using racial slurs towards someone.

lilwayne1 replied: Good list. The Shining is a masterpiece of cinema and should be shown in film classes everywhere. And big ups to Creepshow, a really underrated gem. One of my guilty pleasures and some suprisingly strong acting and morality tales. I do have to question 1408 being so high on the list. An okay movie but it felt kinda by-the-numbers at times. I also felt it didn't really match up to the story, which worked better with getting into the writer's mental state.

I think the main reason I had 1408 on the list is because of John Cusack's one man show. He was essentially acting in response to special effects and nothing else.

JLAJRC chimes in: I've really enjoyed your Stephen King columns. But I want to point out three kinda obscure tv works that were adapted from his work I didn't see mentioned in any of the columns. A few years ago TNT did an anthology miniseries called "Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes." Just like any anthology there were some great ones (the one with Henry Thomas) and some clunkers (that dumb "Rock and Roll Heaven" or whatever the one with the a couple trapped in a town populated by the likes of Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, etc who were dead). He had a story called "Gramma" that was adapted into a REALLY creepy episode of the 80s Twilight Zone. He did a story called "The Moving Finger" that was made into a great episode of an obscure show called "Monsters" from the late 80s. He also did a couple episodes of "Tales of the Darkside." One was called "Word Processor of the Gods." about a guy who types things that seem to come true. But the real gem was "Sorry, Right Number." about a married woman who receives a strange phone call.

I've read all of these stories but have only seen the Nightmares and Dreamscapes and "Gramma" adaptations. Nightmares had a brilliant adaptation of "Umney's Last Case" in addition to "The End of the Whole Mess". I didn't even enjoy "You Know, They've Got A Hell of a Band" as a story so I didn't care for that episode either.

Steve307 says: The Stand not being on this list makes it a fail. Sorry.

Thank goodness you were around to have the ultimate say on the value of my opinion.

Okay, with all of that out of the way, let's get into this week's topic.

While it only has a limited release right now, there will be some lucky people who will be able to check out Adam Green's Frozen, which is about three young people who get stuck on a ski lift after the park closes down. There's nothing but snow and cold in every direction and somehow they have to survive. It's been promoted as a horror film and it looks like one. So this got me to think about how often horror uses the theme of "man vs nature" in order to portray scary stories. Nature takes different forms, of course, but there's a lot of films out there that use this. Due to the sheer number I'm obviously not going to mention them all, this is just a general discussion on the different types of these movies and some prominent examples.



First, a question must be asked before you get into discussing the films. How do you tell if a nature-oriented film is going to be a horror film or a disaster movie (something like Volcano or 2012)?

While there are some who would find the events in a disaster movie to be frightening (any sane person would find themselves scared if the world was ending), they're not promoted as horror and generally are not scary. Almost always, they're made and marketed as adventures with some human drama thrown in. Disaster films usually are on a grand scale, showing nature destroying either an entire city or a portion of the world. They are on this grand of scale because it's not likely that the events would happen to that degree so it lessens the fear and focuses on special effects. I'm not trashing disaster films, as they have their own place.

If it's a horror film with an element of nature killing people then the setting is usually more intimate. There will be characters you get to know and this helps increase the horror. Rather than occur on an epic level they instead are contained to one area: a small town, a place in the woods, a small patch of ocean. Sometimes gore is added and the film is made with the intent to scare, not amaze with the effects. The human drama remains, but the sense of adventure is gone. Another difference is that usually (but not always), these horror films are usually set up that the situation could actually happen. This is my personal opinion on the difference between a nature-themed horror film and a disaster movie. Feel free to disagree or form your own definition.

At any rate, we discuss horror on this column so there will be no need for big-budget disaster epics here.

When Animals Attack

One of the biggest categories in the "Man vs Nature" type horror subgenre is the killer animals. You can guarantee that if an animal exists, there is a movie about that animal killing people somewhere in the world. I've seen movies out there with the obvious choices (sharks, dogs, snakes), the less obvious (spiders, birds) and the absurd (slugs, frogs). There are just a ton of different movies out there with some type of animal killing people, probably more than other common types of horror.

Killer Sharks: Obviously the big choice here is Jaws, which made people afraid to go in the water and set up the idea of a summer blockbuster at the same time. With that comes the sequels and then the rip-offs. While some films copied the style but changed the animal(Orca anyone?), others blatantly stole from the film. There's Great White(1980), Deep Blood(1989) and Bruno Mattei's Cruel Jaws (1995, sometimes called Jaws 5). All of these came from Italy, by the way. But there are also shark films which do not rip off Jaws (although I imagine they may have been influenced by it). There's also Deep Blue Sea which dealt with genetically enhanced sharks (putting it somewhat in the realm of fantasy) and the Shark Attack series, which managed to get worse with each entry. This culminated in the hilariously bad Shark Attack 3: Megolodon which features really bad special effects and an even worse script.



There are also other types of films about different water-dwelling animals: piranhas, squids, octopi, crocodiles and alligators.

Killer Snakes: Usually reserved for direct-to-DVD or Syfy channel fare, the killer snake movies are usually not very good. The exceptions are rare. Obviously the big snake movie that everyone knows is Anaconda. It's like Jaws only not very good. It did have three sequels though, each worse than the last. The killer snakes usually don't include smaller threats (unless you count Snakes on a Plane, which I don't), and the trend these days is for the snakes to be gigantic or mutated somehow. Or in the case of Sssssss(1973) a man is turned into a King Cobra. Notable examples of the giant snake movies include such "classic" fare like Boa(1990), King Cobra(1999), Python(2000), and of course, Boa vs Python(2004).



Killer Spiders: The best example I can think of off the top of my head is Arachnophobia, which was a really fun horror-comedy from the 90's about an African spider with deadly venom. Oddly enough, it did for spiders (to me anyway) what Jaws did for sharks. It was as scary as it was funny (one of my early moments in horror saw me terrified of the scene with the spider hiding inside the man's toilet bowl). Other spider movies included things like the giant monster movies Tarantula and Eight Legged Freaks as well as other films like Kiss of the Tarantula(1976), and Blue Monkey(1987) which actually has nothing to do with monkeys.

Killer Insects: Killer insects are everywhere in horror, even if the film isn't about them. Bugs are just creepy to some people and people who make horror films know it. There's been a ton of horror films featuring maggots on dead bodies for example (remember Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives?). What insect hasn't been featured in it's own horror film? Maybe the ladybug, I don't know. Ants, bees, ticks, slugs, worms, flies. You name it, it's killed people in a low-budget horror film. Quite a few of these have been giant too, like scorpions (which I know are arachnids) and ants (from the classic Them!. I remember when the Africanized honey bee scare hit America in the 90's and there were plenty of TV movies to take advantage of that. TV movies used to take any topic and exploit it for entertainment value.



Domesticated Death: Of course, these aren't limited to animals in the wild. Any animal that you think is cute or have as a pet is especially ready to be turned into the next Hollywood monster. Who knew that Beethoven would actually restore the credibility of the St. Bernard after Stephen King gave the world Cujo? Dee Wallace and her son are trapped in a car for most of the movie while a rabid St. Bernard threatens to eat them alive. Another killer dog movie I enjoyed was Man's Best Friend starring Lance Henriksen and featuring a genetically altered Tibetan Mastiff. Dogs aren't the only animals that get treated this way. There are also cats (Uninvited, 1988), birds of all kinds (famously used in Hitchcock's The Birds, but also things like Kaw), mice (or rats, as in the case of Willard or Stephen King's Graveyard Shift) and even monkeys both big (King Kong, of course) and small (Monkey Shines).

I've probably left out some animals. I know Bats is another good example, even if that movie wasn't all that great. As far as the movies go I know I've left out a ton. But if I listed every movie about every animal that kills someone in a horror film this column would never end.

Man Against The Elements

The second half of this week's topic actually focuses on what Frozen will be about: man against nature itself. Snow itself plays a role in many films that wish to isolate the town from all help as a foreign threat invades (such as 30 Days of Night, Storm of the Century or more famously in The Thing. Putting people within that type of weather in a horror setting is rare, unless the people involved become cannibals (which I can't imagine the people in Frozen doing, given they are only supposed to be stranded for a week). Blizzards and snowstorms usually set up the horrific event, they don't become the horrific event. This is usually saved for action or adventure films about mountain climbing (for the record, I really enjoyed Vertical Limit as an example of this).



There's a reason I didn't include Open Water in the shark mention (for those about to complain that I forgot it) and that's because I thought while there are sharks in it, and they post a threat, it has more in common with Frozen than it does with Jaws. A couple is stranded in the middle of the ocean with no food, proper water and the danger of threat looming in the distance. I've never seen the sequel but it abandons the shark aspect entirely, putting the people right next to their boat but unable to climb up into it. On top of that, a small child is trapped on board. Maybe it's me, but I find the idea of being trapped in the water with no way to get to anyone far scarier than being trapped there with sharks. At least with the sharks you know you're going to die quickly.

There's also movies where nature itself goes berserk. Usually the natural disaster films are saved for the movies discussed above, but there are occasionally films with killer plants can make it into horror. The most recent example is The Ruins, based on the book by Scott Smith. The plants themselves are carnivorous and a local tribe makes sure the people who visit the area never get back and let the plants take them. I thought the film featured some good gore and not much else, but I heard there are people who actually like it.

Honestly, there aren't as many horror films about people trapped in an isolated area fending for themselves. Horror likes to add other aspects or have some other threat against them. Frozen looks to buck that trend as I think it's focusing on the horror aspect and not so much the survival. We'll see when it opens. I have faith in Adam Green. He has a lot of respect for the genre and my own personal opinion of Hatchet aside, he seems to get it. Frozen opens on Friday, and you can check out where it's playing at it's official website.

If you want some alternatives to that and need some horror now, there's always Daybreakers or the After Dark Horrorfest, which features Clive Barker's Dread (check out my review here) among others. Have fun watching some horror this weekend!

Next week one of my most anticipated releases finally hits as The Wolf Man will finally be here! So I'm going to celebrate with a countdown of the best werewolf movies ever made. I did count down the best werewolves previously, but I'm talking about the movies themselves this time. If you have any disagreements about this column or films that you feel must be mentioned, then feel free to post about it. Otherwise, I'll see you next week.