Insects: Swarming Horror

Despite being (generally) harmless, insects are a cornerstone of many horror stories — whether towering monstrosities or swarming harbingers of pestilence, there is no end to their horrific depictions. In fact, so much of the horror genre centres around insects that such tales may be deemed as their very own subgenre. It would be nigh impossible to cover all that the myths, literature, artworks, and films that they appear within, but there is undeniably a cultural infatuation with reviled creepy-crawlies: something about their mere existence proves to be profoundly unsettling.

In some cases, insects are an omen, foretelling great death and despair. In Edgar Allen Poe’s 1846 short story The Sphinx, the protagonist, during the throes of a cholera pandemic, observes a supposedly gigantic variant of a death’s-head hawkmoth. Rather bathetically, the insect is merely exaggerated by an optical illusion; however, the psychological association between insects and death remains a very real, foreboding force. In Algernon Blackwood’s 1915 story An Egyptian Hornet, particular attention is paid to anthropomorphising the titular hornet. It is conscious and cunning, rather uncannily similar to a malevolent human, though with an alien insectoid form. Even the word hornet is described by Blackwood as “an angry, malignant sound that brings the idea of attack vividly into the mind”, and the hornet is compared to artillery. Perhaps, then, a parallel may be drawn between us and insects — despite all our differences, they remind us of our violent desires; just as the atrocities of the First World War were bringing about destruction and demise, so too can insects inflict the same devastation.

Cinema is no refuge from the swarm of fictional insectoid horror. Images of insects are rife both within films and as part of their marketing material; the aforementioned death’s-head hawkmoth is an icon of horror films, having been featured prominently within the promotional material of The Silence of the Lambs as a particularly eye-catching way to evoke death and change. Personally, I vividly remember the flesh-eating scarabs in The Mummy and their bloodthirsty, relentless pursuit of flesh. For those with more high-brow tastes, Salvador Dali’s surreal Un Chien Andalou may spring to mind, wherein ants swarm out of a man’s hand. Clearly then, insects are no stranger to both literature and film — they are as pervasive in fiction as they are in real life.

The reasons for this pervasion are innumerable. Some I’ve touched upon briefly, such as their roles in prophecy and omens, or their swarming infestations that chew through flesh and sinew — the latter horror manifesting itself in some as delusional parasitosis, the perception of vermin and parasites crawling inside their bodies. I propose that, most significantly, entomophobia is the root cause of all this horror; for the majority of people, insects are utterly reviled as disgusting. After all, many insects wallow about in grime and filth, with both their thoughts and bodies completely at odds with what we would deem familiar (such as other mammals). We perceive them as if they are not normal, with six legs, bulging compound eyes, and chitin exoskeletons. For quite a literal alien comparison, the xenomorph from the Alien franchise exhibits a similar lifecycle to parasitoid wasps, which lay eggs within other creatures only for them to be eaten alive, inside-out, by larvae. Gruesome, to say the least.

Such parasitism and body horror are further contributors to our collective disgust of insects — for them to be within our bodies is sickening. The transformation of doctor to half-human, half-fly hybrid in The Fly springs to mind when thinking of why we find the appearance of insects so weird; frankly, the creature is nothing but an abomination to behold. This body horror isn’t just limited to pop culture, either. Myths of earwigs burrowing into brains and devouring them seemed very real to my childhood self. However, we should maintain some empathy for our insectoid friends. They are, after all, vital parts of our ecosystem. Without them, the food chain risks being upended — we should find their recent population declines as equally horrific as we find them. We ought not to shriek when we see insects, but to try to sympathise with them as we do with Gregor Samsa.

Image from Wikimedia Commons