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

Ever since the success of ‘Jaws’ in 1975, cinema has looked to the animal kingdom for chills. From sharp-toothed sharks to killer bees, Geoffrey Macnab examines what it is that makes nature such a fearsome onscreen foe

Amity calamity: Robert Shaw in the Spielberg horror that spawned a thousand imitators (Universal Pictures)

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).