WHAT WENT WRONG - BUGS! A Primer

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Join Chris as he creeps and crawls through humanity's fear of some of its most helpful planetary cohabitants: bugs, and how they have evolved as on-screen foes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one. In advance of Monday's coverage of Starship Troopers, we've put together an exploration of bugs. How did these minuscule, indispensable workhorses of our ecosystems become such a font of fear on screen? And what do those fears reveal about ourselves? That and more coming up now with bugs. I loved bugs. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, in an older home, damp and inviting, there was no shortage of critters to capture and observe.

From spiders in the sink to potato bugs on the porch, I found our arthropod neighbors endlessly fascinating. Until I didn't. I can't pinpoint the exact moment it took place, but a metamorphosis occurred at some point between adolescents and adults. and from a cocoon of wonder birthed, entomophobia, an intense and irrational fear of insects. My case is mild. I'll happily ferry our homes, insectile invaders, back outside via covered glass. But it's not unique, at least not in the United States.

And it's hardly a generous reaction, given the heavy lifting said unwelcome guests do for our world. But were we always this way? It's estimated that bugs account for over 80% of all-known living. animal species. And the truth is, despite their diminutive stature, they could squash us. In 2012, scientists pegged the global human biomass at 287 million metric tons. In 2017, it was estimated that spiders 8,000 million and 800 million metric tons worth of prey each year. There are 8 billion people. There are 10 quintillion insects. And though they're small, the biggest species, like New Zealand's giant weta are no bigger than a mouse,

although that's big enough for me, they are the mighty movers of the earth. Dung burial, pest control, pollination, wildlife nutrition, they handle jobs that we are loath to or incapable of executing. Without us, they'd be fine. Without them, we'd be dead. There was a time when we seemed to recognize that fact. Although portrayed as flesh-eating piranha-esque predators

and Stephen Summers, the mummy, The scarab beetle was a highly significant symbolic creature in ancient Egypt, not of destruction, but of the eternal cycle of life. The ancient Egyptians believed that their god, Kepri, would roll the sun across the sky each day, just as some members of the scarabity family would use their disproportionate strength to roll dung into large balls. By the early Middle Kingdom, or approximately 2,000 BC, amulets in the form of scarab beetles proliferated widely across Jerusalem. jewelry jars and seals, and they weren't alone. Bees in Mino and Crete, jade cicadas in

Han Dynasty China, butterflies in the Aztec, fireflies as the souls of fallen warriors in Japan. Small bodies have always played cosmic roles. They still do in many cultures, and they weren't known as bugs until fairly recently. The word bug wasn't associated with insects until the early 1600s. It likely stems from Booga or Boogie, a middle English word roughly meaning a frightening specter or hobgoblin. So it makes sense that the quote, thing that frightens and bites in the night would come to be associated with a particular insect, the bed bug. By the mid-19th century, the term bug had crept into American English to encompass small creeping insects, hidden, troublesome things that always seemed to find a way inside.

But what if they weren't so diminutive? Edgar Allan Poe's short story, The Sphinx, published in 1864, imagined such a horror. The narrator, after retreating from the terrors of a cholera-infested New York, spots an impossibly large cryptid on a near hillside, a death's head hawk moth, bigger than the airplanes that would not grace the skies for nearly 100 years. It would also be over a century before such behemoth bugs would stride the silver screen through optical sleight of hand, which is precisely what Poe reveals his moth to be,

a trick of perspective. This trick elicited a combination of fear and disgust. The two ingredients, according to philosopher Noel Carroll, necessary to produce art horror, an emotion felt in response to a fictional monster that defies our scientific understanding of the world. Fear, the monster's power to harm the protagonist and by extension the viewer,

and disgust, the monster's violation of deeply held cultural categories, crossing the line between living and dead, human and animal, natural and supernatural, or even, inside and outside. As Poe was well aware, though we tend to avoid fear and disgust in our daily lives, many of us seek them out in the stories we consume.

Carol attributes this to our desire for narrative epistemic pleasure or narrative closure, the need to discover and explain our monsters. Matias Klassen identifies it as, recreational fear or a safe rehearsal of danger. And Dolph Zillman's excitation transference theory posits that the elimination of a threat and the resolution of suspense elicits a correlated euphoric response. Translation, the bigger the scare, the bigger the relief. As entomologist Jeff Lockwood wrote in the Atlantic in 2013, it's easy to see how insects map naturally onto

psychologist Paul Rosen's seven species have discussed. Animalism, death, sex, hygiene, food, bodily products, and bodily violations. Put more simply, bugs are unpredictable. They thrive in decomposition. They multiply rapidly and publicly. They, on occasion, bite, sting, and carry a disease, they look utterly alien, and, perhaps most importantly, they can literally get under our skin. Insects do not respect our borders. They also fly in the face of the human individualism we so worship. That being said, the first bugs on film were remarkably human. In 1912, pioneering Polish-Russian animator Vladislav Stavich released The Camer Man's Revenge, an overtly Freudian, 13-minute short film starring an anthropomorphized rhinoceros beetle.

Las L'Losepsi perfectly sums up. the plot in his 2017 paper, embracing the insect representations in American horror cinema. Quote, The cameraman's revenge chronicles the daily life of Mr. Beetle, living a quiet middle-class life with a boring marriage. He cannot resist the tempting city vices in the seduction of alluring dragonfly girls. End quote. It's a bug's life for adults, so I guess it's basically ants.

In fact, if you'd like to really see how far ahead of the curve, Vladislav was, check out his 1913 short film, The Grasshopper and the Ant, which dramatized De Sops' fable for the screen nearly a century before Pixar would. The heroes of Vladislav Stadavich's films were, as was the case in the cameraman's revenge, often dead animals and or insects puppeteered in stop motion. In fact, he had created one of the first puppeteered films in film history, when, after his camera light, caused two stag beetles he was attempting to film fighting to seize up, he decided to separate their legs from their bodies and animate them himself.

Ethical concerns aside, the movements of the insects in his films were so realistic one audience member asked if they'd been trained to act, and a nickname was born, the bug trainer. Throughout the early 20th century, bugs on film represented a variety of societal fears. Disease and bodily violation by way of Windsor McKay's animated how a mosquito operates, Imperial guilt come home to roost in Alexander Butler's lost film, The Beetle, and moral contagion, among others. But by the 1950s, American fears had crystallized into something far more modern and far more pressing. The Atomic Bomb. Hollywood saw an opportunity to exploit said fear, and thus the atomic monster was born,

by way of the independently produced and Warner Brothers distributed The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. On June 13, 1953, audiences around the country watched in terror as on screen, an ancient dinosaur was shaken from its Arctic slumber by atomic testing. Lonely and cranky, the dinosaur headed for its ancestral breeding grounds, New York City. Chaos ensued. The beast from 20,000 fathoms was hardly the first outsized animal to attack a major metropolis. King Kong had terrorized New York back in 1933, and a brontosaurus had sauntered destructively through London in 1925 by way of the Lost World.

But the Beast was unique for two reasons. First, it marked the first solo effort of FX maestro Ray Harryhausen, whose fictional Rita Soros was brought to life by way of Harryhausen's pioneering dynamation technique, a combination of rear projection, stop-motion model work, and masking, to sandwich the live-action model between foreground and background plates. Second, the beast proved that atomic monsters were profitable. Made for $200,000, it brought in $5 million. George Worthing Yates, who would become as synonymous with the giant monster genre as anyone

over the following decade, had written a story about giant ants attacking commuters on the New York City subway system. Warner Brothers bought the story and commissioned a screenplay from Ted Sheridan and Russell Hughes. The location was moved to the more affordable California Desert, with the added benefit of justifying the irradiation by way of New Mexico's recent history of nuclear testing. Gordon Douglas jumped on to direct and James Whitmore, perhaps best known to modern audiences as Brooks Hatlin and the Shashank Redemption, took on the lead role of New Mexico Police Sergeant Ben Peterson. Them! exclamation point, as the film was titled, was initially meant to be a 3D film shot in Warner Color.

But the studio was so unsatisfied with the test footage and perhaps, the proposed budget, that it was released in black and white widescreen instead. It didn't matter. Them made just over $2 million, a number dwarfed by the beasts' haul from the prior year, but enough to keep the giant bug train on time. In 1955, Universal set loose a 100-foot-tall tarantula on an Arizona desert town in, you guessed it, tarantula! exclamation point. 1957's attack of the crab monsters brought the horror to Bikini Atoll, and yes,

crabs are arthropods, black scorpion, deadly mantis, Earth versus the spider, things even got straight up biblical with the beginning of the end, in which Chicago is thrown into chaos by irradiated 40-foot locusts. Japan-based Toho Studios entered the fray with Mothra in 1961, and the Big Bug subgenre became a niche overwhelmed by the Kaiju-sized success of Godzilla. Nuclear anxieties began to wane and cost-cutting led to extensive use of stock footage and optical lifts from older films. The genre arguably bottomed out with 1978's The Swarm,

starring Michael Cain, Catherine Ross, Olivia de Havilland, Lee Grant, Slim Pickens, Henry Fonda, and Moore. The film, directed by Master of Disaster Irwin Allen, follows a scientist, doctor, and military outfit trying to prevent the invasion of Texas by a swarm of killer bees. It's also deadly serious, which proved seriously deadly at the box office. It was a major financial flop and is considered by many to be one of the worst films of all time. Smashing Bugs was no longer a sure-fire shortcut to smashing success, or perhaps audiences were hip to the fact that a swarm of bees pales in comparison to the arthropotic horrors

H.R. Geiger had concocted for Ridley Scott's Alien released the following year. The xenomorph defied definition. It consumed us both from within and without. It was yonic and phallic and lacked conscience, remorse, or morality, making it, in the eyes of ash, the film's android, the perfect organism. Or perhaps, more specifically, the perfect soldier. On August 22nd, 1958, the United States declared its willingness in order to facilitate negotiations for the suspension of nuclear weapons tests

and establishment of an international control system to withhold testing of atomic and hydrogen weapons for a period of one year from the beginning of these negotiations on October 31st. That was a direct quote from the office of then President Eisenhower, who was attempting to cool the nuclear arms race that was proliferating between the United States and the Soviet Union. It's also a message that science fiction pioneer Robert Heinlein did not appreciate.

Heinlein was an aeronautical engineer, and alongside his perhaps more commonly celebrated peers, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark, often considered one of the big three of American science fiction authors. After President Eisenhower's announcement, Heinlein, who believed in the importance of American nuclear supremacy with hawkish vehemence and the Soviet Union's tendency towards breaking promises, set aside what would become the novel Stranger in a Strange Land

and wrote Starship Troopers in a matter of weeks. Being two adult for Scribner, who had published his Heinzsche, for Juvenile's series for the prior decade, the novel ended up at Putnam. In the novel, Heinlein imagines a humanity united under the Terran Federation against an interstellar alien foe, known as arachnids or bugs. Heinlein casts communism and its threats to American individualism as swarms of insects and highlights their ability to coordinate and sacrifice with a superhuman sophistication. As we watch Juan Johnny Rico come of age and learn the value of militarism, which was certain

a strongly held belief of Heinlein's. H.G. Wells had imagined a similar enemy in 1905's The Empire of the Ants, in which he asked readers to consider a new species of ant in possession of both lethal poison and collective intelligence. What if another species could accelerate its evolution as humans had? What power did rifles and steam technology have against a swarm that could rewrite the rules of organized warfare? Heinlein's solution was controversial.

Compared to the film it would inspire, Starship Troopers is a relatively chaste and bloodless book. In fact, it's been described as a book of ideas, a philosophical text. And the book's core idea is that citizenship, thus the right to vote, must be earned through federal service. It's easy to point out the irony of Heinlein calling for a system that effectively imitates the foe he feared, and perhaps he was more focused on railing against the moral decay of a post-World War II American landscape than in a intellectual consistency, but what seems more likely is a belief that choice and the ability to opt in to something greater is exactly what differentiates humans from their more alien enemies, or communists.

Heinlein's work was forged through his service in the U.S. Navy, and perhaps his nostalgia had gotten the better of him as he aged into a more conservative position. But there were unexpected flourishes of progressivism in the notion of citizenship through service. Heinlein presented a world of gender egalitarianism. As author M. G. Lord wrote in 2015, quote, Unlike the female characters and other science fiction of the time, such as the stories of Arthur C. Clark, Heinlein's women were not invisible or grossly subservient to men,

nor were they less technologically competent. The hero of Starship Troopers follows a woman he admires into the military. But because she is sharper than he, she gains admission to the prestigious pilot corps, and he winds up stuck in the infantry. Although he doesn't get all the way there, Heinlein nearly imagined something akin to a more insectile matriarchy. Rico's grunt is a mere aunt who follows his winged queen in the hopes of something greater. James Cameron took that somewhat feminist baton and ran with it, giving us

the mother-of-all-showdowns in 1986's aliens, with Sigourney Weaver's Ripley taking on the xenomorph Queen, and Cronenberg, that same year, snagged the insect as body horror crown with the fly. Said exceptions notwithstanding, most bug films of the 80s and 90s were low-budget outings, closer to Corman than Cameron, and Heinlein's novel had been largely sidelined within popular culture by Orson Scott Cards, Ender's Game, which used an almost identical setup not to explore the positive ideas of militarism, but instead the power of empathy. As such, it must have been quite surprising for bug film aficionados when 1997 featured not one, not two, but three such films, and big budget bouts to boot.

Men in Black, Mimic, and Starship Troopers all explored the idea of bugs among us in distinct ways, hidden inside our skin, twisting themselves into anthropomorphic camouflage beneath our streets, or hurling spores across the galaxy seemingly inviting invading invasions. There's no singular explanation for this rapid proliferation. The CGI revolution sparked by Jurassic Park, the remarkable success of Independence Day, and the box office mayhem slashed up by Scream, which proved the audience for horror, R-rated horror, was alive and well. All seemed to have played a part. In each film, the threat to humanity presented by the bugs seems existential.

They threaten to infest our world and make it their own. Or do they? The man-sized roaches of Mimic were a consequence of an ill-advised war on infection. In Starship Troopers, the inciting incident of the bug war was, it suggested, an errant asteroid. But the more alien the threat, the more predictable humanity's reaction. And what use is individualism at the end of the day, if it can be stoked into hysterical collectivism so easily? bugs remain a violating presence in pop culture. They get in, they contaminate, they infect.

They invade and they prove that our borders, to our nations, to our homes, and to our bodies, are far more porous than we'd like to believe. They put our individuality and its supposed benefits under the proverbial microscope. And even though they may be among the tiniest creatures, it takes a mere tweak in perspective, to see that they are the most mighty.

Until Monday and Starship Troopers, I'd encourage you to remember, it's their world. We're just living in it. This episode was researched, written, and read by Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. Tune in on Monday for our episode on Starship Troopers.