But its success sparked a host of imitators. Even discounting the 1950s vogue for radiation-mutated monsters like the ants in Them (1954) and the King Kong (1933) genre of big things run amok, there had been animal attack movies since 1972’s Frogs at least. The superb 1975 movie version of Jaws wasn’t the first of the genre by far. In Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws the mayor of a Long Island tourist town is willing to sacrifice a few local children to the god of the deeps so long as he can keep the cash machine rolling over. For others, the creature was a symbol of human hubris. Most of it takes place in a suburban basement.įor some of these writers, the animal attacks were nature biting back - revenge for our encroachment on wild areas and our destruction of the natural world. Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man (1956), though it doesn’t belong to this genre, turned the tables on humanity’s dominance right where we live. Henry Kuttner’s ‘The Graveyard Rats’ (1936), Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ (1952), and Russell Braddon’s darkly comic The Year Of The Angry Rabbit (1964) made the rampaging creatures more visceral and urban: bands of large, intelligent, or merely feral animals meant as analogies of the darkness lurking just beyond the reach of our city lights.

Hundreds of these pulp tales were published, none of them worth reading.īut others tried to elevate the style.

The covers usually showed undressed hunks clubbing waves of the nipping attackers. In the 1950s, needing more thrills for barely literate readers, they shifted to fictional animal attacks with titles like ‘Chewed Alive And Screaming’ and ‘I Battled A Giant Otter.’ Every possible creature was used, even the most innocuous, but the plots were identical: a hero finds himself on foreign soil battling quasi-commie foes in animal guise. James, it was spiders that poured out of a disturbed nest in ‘The Ash-Tree’ (1904) that got the pulse racing.ĭuring the Second World War, the more lurid of the American men’s magazines peddled fake “I was there” stories concerning manly exploits against Nazis and the Japanese. Wells wrote a somber assessment of our species’ chances against a marauding wave of African soldier ants in 1905, ‘Empire Of The Ants.’ (They were not, unlike the Joan Collins movie in 1977, in any way mutant.) Ants remained a scourge of note in Carl Stephenson’s story ‘Leiningen Versus The Ants’ in 1938, which itself was an influence on the 1974 movie Phase IV.

There had been stories about rampaging animals since the turn of the century. For a while in the late seventies, British paperback imprints mined a market in short, gruesome novels about animal attacks that were targeted predominantly at schoolboys.

Locusts by Guy N. Smith