I’d love to tell you that Arthur Machen’s horror classic, The Terror (1917) was responsible for all those “Killer” movies of the 1970s. I’d love to explain that after World War I, Machen, the Welsh Stephen King of 1895, took the idea of all the angst and hatred of the war collecting inside animals, driving them to kill, making them the first “Killer Animals” of fiction. I’d love to tell you all that. Except it would be a lie. Triply so.
Three Big Lies
First off, because H. G. Wells got into the killer animal business much earlier. “In the Avu Observatory” had killer bats (Pall Mall Budget, August 09, 1894). Killer squid in “The Sea Raiders” (The Weekly Sun Literary Supplement Dec 6, 1896). Killer spiders in “The Valley of the Spiders” (Pearson’s Magazine March 1903). Killer rats and chickens in The Food of the Gods (Pearson’s Magazine, December 1903-June 1904). Killer ants in “The Empire of the Ants” (The Strand Magazine, December 1905). So it is fair to say, Machen wasn’t inventing anything new.
But none of that matters because of the second lie. Nobody cared about Machen and Wells. The whole thing started because of a bestseller made into a hit film with an animatronic shark. Jaws (1975) by Steven Spielberg got the ball rolling. In the wake of Star Wars it is easy to forget just how big and influential Jaws was. (Remember Freddy Mercury sang about both in “Bicycle”: “Jaws was never my scene. And I don’t like Star Wars.”) In a Hollywood that pumps out horror films faster than a speeding bullet, it was Jaws that mattered.
And finally, that’s not even that is true because Jaws was only the third wave.
First Wave
So let’s get everything straightened out, shall we? The first wave of killer animals were the giant animals of the 1950s. Fears about atomic radiation formed in the public conscience as ridiculously large insects and such. Classics of this time period included Them (1954), Tarantula (1955), The Bugs (1957), The Giant Gila Monster (1959), etc. H. G. Wells warned us but we didn’t listen.
Second Wave
The second wave brought in a subtler breed of killer animal. The best of these was Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) based on Daphne Du Maurier’s story. Schlockier films followed. By the 1970s, just about any household critter could be a swarm of killer beasts. It was all about many small creatures swarming around victims and killing them.
Naturally that worked well with bees. Deadly Bees (1966), Killer Bees (1974). etc. I’ve written about these critters in their own piece here.
Rats proved popular in Willard (1971) and its sequel Ben (1972). With Michael Jackson singing the theme song, what could go wrong? Sticking with rodents Night of the Lepus (1972) was probably the hardest sell with killer bunnies. Frogs (1972) couldn’t do the same for amphibians but it was Sam Elliott’s big break.
Third Wave
Then Jaws struck about the time the whole thing should have gone away. Worse yet, sequelitis became a thing with Jaws 2, Jaws 3D, etc. Grizzly (1976) was called a “land-locked Jaws” and pretty much is what you think.
The Day of the Animals (1976) is the closest film to Arthur Machen’s novel. Leslie Nielsen, funny man from Airplane, plays a really good bad guy in this. He is an alpha male who goes feral while the animals pick off the others. Nielsen was born in Saskatchewan so this might not be that hard to picture…
It was inevitable that someone would want to steal H. G. Wells’ thunder, well, his titles anyway. Food of the Gods (1976) and later Empire of the Ants (1977) use the titles but not much else. The ants in Empire are giant, which they should not be. The Giant Spider Invasion (1976) was another of this type, harkening back to the 1950s.
High on the remake of King Kong (1976), Dino Delaurentis inflicted Orca (1977) on us and then just to make sure we were tired on the whole animal thing, The White Buffalo (1977). (With skills like this, a producer should go after real meat, say a film version of Conan or Dune?)
We got more crawlies with Squirm (1976), Tentacles (1977) and another Canadian he-man, William Shatner in Kingdom of the Spiders (1977). Low-budget/high profit films like Piranha (1978), The Swarm (1978) (which actually lost $4 million) , The Bees (1978) all came and went, offering nothing really new. Viewers wanted to see a high body count and not much more. The Prophecy (1979) and Nightwing (1979) tried a little harder with an eco-friendly message but it was still “killer nature”.
More Waves
The 1980s continued the trend with Alligator (1980), Cujo (1983) and other films that we won’t chase. This piece is supposed to be about the 1970s. One of the trends in the 1980s was the closing of drive-in theaters, a staple of the cheap horror film. Horror was moving on to Elm Street and Halloween anyway… Despite that, the killer animal film does resurface every so often. Arachnaphobia (1990), Deep Blue Sea (1999), Eight Legged Freaks (2002), and most recently, back in the water for The Meg (2018). All this show that the 1970s had no monopoly on nature horror.
Will we ever get a superb film like The Birds again? (Perhaps an actual version of Arthur Machen?) No doubt, we will. And it will be really popular, spawning another batch of killer hamsters or chihuahuas. It is as inevitable as global warming….
