The celluloid safari: Why B-movies still can’t get enough of deadly creatures

Killer fish, killer bees, killer ants, killer bears, killer dogs, killer lions, killer elephants, killer birds, killer snakes, killer rats, killer pigs, killer whales, killer octopuses and killer sharks… look over genre filmmaking during the past 50 years and you’ll find humans dying at the paws, claws, talons, teeth, hooves, horns and stingers of all sorts of animals, insects and fish, both very big and very small. There has even been a cheap and cheerful German film about killer squirrels, Killereichhörnchen (2008).

Many of these “natural” horror movies (as they are styled) posit the idea that humans are in a permanent state of war against the creatures they share the planet with. Others blame the humans (arrogant, never pick up the litter) for making all these critters homicidal.

Joe Dante’s original version of Piranha (1978), recently re-released on VOD, is a perfect example of a killer B-movie that transcends its modest origins. Made for producer Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, this was a low-budget exploitation picture made in the shadow of both Jaws and the Vietnam War. It was a spoof and a political satire. The script was written by a youthful John Sayles, who would blossom forth a few years later as one of the key writer-directors in US independent cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Its supporting cast included Barbara Steele, the gimlet-eyed British star of Italian horror classics such as The Mask of Satan (1960) and The Long Hair of Death (1965), and Kevin McCarthy, star of the original version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The film was to feature a piranha attack every 15 minutes or so. Between times, Sayles was allowed to give free rein to his imagination. “You can come up with any story, any location, as long as you fulfil what was agreed upon: keep the fish in the country and keep it funny,” the writer later remembered his instructions.

It’s revealing to watch the opening scenes. In just a few minutes, the filmmakers shoehorn adventure, youthful romance, gratuitous nudity, horror and humour into their story. Two young hikers strip off for a moonlit swim in a pool at a deserted military base. As the man complains that his girlfriend is nibbling him, the Jaws-style music grows more sombre and intense. On cue, the water turns red and the young lovers are eaten alive. The next we see of them are the bleached bones of their skeletons after the pool is drained (and the piranha are inadvertently released into the adjoining river).

“The pic utilises a lot of red dye in the water, and an auditory effect for the gnawing that sounds like an air-conditioner on the fritz,” trade paper Variety noted in its review, but the tongue-in-cheek quality was part of the appeal. As director Dante later noted: “We ended up making a sort of spoof Jaws, although it plays kind of straight, but it is obviously a movie that knows that it is a parody of Jaws.”

The pleasure of Piranha lay not just in the movie itself but in the concept. This was the cinema equivalent of an underwater fairground ride. “Will put you off swimming for life” and “a deadly fish supper”, the reviewers wrote. Posters showed fish with razor-sharp teeth ready to munch on the legs of bikini-clad women. During screenings, whenever characters dangled their toes or trailed their fingers through the water, there would be a collective intake of breath. That would generally be the prelude to yet more frenzied bloodletting.

Piranha and its sequel, Piranha II: The Spawning (1982), may have ripped off Jaws in shameless fashion, but they kick-started the careers of Sayles, Dante and James Cameron and also spawned sequels and imitators of their own.

Steven Spielberg’s biographer Jospeh McBride writes of “the plethora of cheesy Jaws sequels and rip-offs that followed in its wake, such as Orca, Grizzly, Alligator, Day of the Animals, Eaten Alive, Tentacles, Great White, The Jaws of Death, Jaws of Satan and Piranha”. Corman timed the release of Piranha to coincide with the appearance of Jaws 2, thereby almost provoking a lawsuit from Universal, but Spielberg championed it as the best of the many Jaws imitators and went on to work with its director, Dante.

For all its phenomenal success, Jaws wasn’t entirely original itself. Its debt to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is self-evident. Moreover, long before Spielberg’s great white shark terrorised audiences, filmmakers had been making movies about gigantic preying mantises, reptiles, apes and mutated ants and flies. The difference, though, between Jaws and such predecessors as King Kong (1933), The Deadly Mantis (1957) and The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955) was that Spielberg’s movie had a proper budget and it wasn’t sci-fi. His story had nothing to do with post-war fears about animals being turned radioactive by nuclear experiments or creatures woken from prehistoric slumbers after massive atomic explosions or extra-terrestrial invasion. The great white shark disrupting tourism in the Long Island town of Amity was inspired by a real-life prototype. Novelist Peter Benchley had based his story on newspaper articles about a Long Island shark fisherman called Frank Mundus who, in 1964, had harpooned a shark almost 18ft long and weighing 4,500lb.

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You expect grizzly bears, alligators or great white sharks to eat humans but in many other “natural” horror films, the antagonists are creatures either too small or too timid to be considered remotely threatening in normal circumstances.

A decade before Jaws, in 1963, Alfred Hitchcock adapted Daphne du Maurier’s story The Birds for the screen. He was making a psychological horror film, full of symbolism and with ingenious special effects and editing, but later said: “The basic appeal to me is that it had to do with ordinary, everyday birds.”

There is one New Zealand comedy-horror film in which sheep target the humans. “Turning a notoriously docile, none-too-intelligent species into a source of menace is an impressive, if improbable, feat of filmmaking,” The New York Times wrote admiringly of the “woolly menace” presented in Black Sheep (2006).

Bees were the villains in 1978 horror movie The Swarm but, as the film’s star Michael Caine later wrote, the film didn’t give the “thrill-hungry public” the expected “buzz”. The actors were more scared than the film’s eventual audience: The Swarm was made with real bees that “were all supposed to have been destung but the destingers had missed quite a few,” Caine recalled.

In Empire of the Ants (1977), very loosely adapted from an HG Wells story, a cheesy voice-over warns viewers to treat the ant with respect, “for it may very well be the dominant life form of our planet.” Sadly, the special effects were so crude and silly that any sense of threat soon dissipated. The film’s star Joan Collins was so dispirited by her experience with the little gnats that she went off to star in sex films such as The Stud (1978) instead.

In many of the “natural” horror films, the filmmakers’ interest in which particular animals are terrorising the humans is non-existent. Whether it’s a grizzly bear, a shark or a rat is immaterial. You could swap one for the other without affecting the overall impact. The aim is to induce terror both in the humans on screen – and in those watching in cinemas.

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Budgets don’t need to be high. In movies made about killer creatures in the wake of Jaws, the creatures themselves were often barely seen on screen. You just needed to sense they were there. The filmmakers relied on pounding music, lots of close-ups of panicked-looking human faces, sequences showing the bloody aftermath of the latest attack, and one or two blink-and-you’ll-miss-them images of the predators.

For all their predictability and often woefully low-grade production values, movies about killer critters continue to appeal to audiences. They tap on our primal, deep-rooted fears of mutilation, body invasion and extinction. They also make us laugh. Sometimes, tittering at the supposedly creaky effects and silly, artificial monster costumes is a way for spectators to avoid feeling too scared.

These horror films also depend on energetic and ingenious marketing. Dutch genre director Dick Maas’s recent B-movie Prey (2016), in which a raging lion escapes onto the streets of Amsterdam, wasn’t much hyped and flopped as a result. However, when the film, billed as “Jaws meets Paws,” was later released in China amid much fanfare and on over 4,000 screens, it made a fortune.

As the Chinese success of Prey shows, the appetite that Jaws helped create 45 years ago is still there. Filmgoers retain their morbid fascination with stories of humans terrorised on land and sea by all manner of creatures, great and small. As long as the films are done with enough humour and imagination, no one will complain too much if the effects creak, the joints show and those killer squirrels really don’t look that ferocious after all.

‘Piranha’ is available on the MGM Channel on Amazon Prime. ‘Prey’ is also available on Amazon Prime