Another favorite genre of mine are the Exploitation films of the 1960s and ‘70s, particularly the European Horrors of the Italian, Spanish, and French cinema. Though they were technically inferior to American films of the same period in many ways, creatively they were in a class of their own. Amando De Ossorio’s Blind Dead films; the sexual horrors of Jean Rollin; the movies of Jesus Franco, an outgrowth of his rebellion against his strict Catholic upbringing—these were the staple diet of Drive-Ins and Grindhouses. The best of these were the Italian Gialli, the most groundbreaking of the European imports, and the forerunners of the Slasher films of the following decade.

    Without a doubt however, the day I look forward to the most throughout the month of October is the one devoted to the Giant Bug “Creature Features” of the 1950s. The thrill of watching a parade of monstrous ants, spiders, scorpions and other assorted arthropods rampaging across scale representations of well-known landmarks fills me with a joy that can be traced back, as with most aspects of my love of Horror, to my earliest memories of childhood. Then, I was impressed by the images of soldiers battling giant ants beneath the streets of Los Angeles, or an enormous praying mantis scaling the Washington Monument. In the days before Star Wars, much less Computer Generated Imagery, it wasn’t quite so difficult to impress audiences with less-than-special Special Effects. Especially if that impression was being made upon a six-year-old boy fed a steady diet of Star Trek, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Batman episodes.

    Now, of course, I find the effects far less impressive (though I challenge anyone to show me better creature effects from 1957 than those of The Deadly Mantis) than I did in 1970, I still have the same sense of exhilaration wash over me when I sit down with a stack of my favorite giant bug movies, only now it’s for a far different reason. For the 2020 version of the Unimonster, it’s the incredible sense of nostalgia that these movies trigger that fuels my love of them. Nostalgia for a faraway childhood where my parents handled the big issues; my biggest concern was whether to use my dollar-a-week allowance to buy the latest issue of Famous Monsters magazine or the newest Monogram P-40 Warhawk model kit at the local Pic n’ Save. And nostalgia for a different time, an era that was gone by the time I was born—if it had ever truly existed.

    The desire for a long-lost childhood is easy to understand for those of us who find ourselves closer to sixty than we are to fifty. There are many wonderful things about being the age that I am at present. Wisdom, maturity, experience, and a wonderful sense of “I’m just too old to give a damn,” all are benefits of growing older. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of entries on the debit side of the ledger, however. Hypertension and arthritis, heartbreak and divorce, those were the tolls paid for that wisdom and experience. It’s little wonder that a joyful hour or so spent watching grasshoppers scramble over a stock photo of the Chicago skyline can transport me back to a time when these maladies of middle age were vague, abstract concepts, if that much.

    More than the desire to revisit the happier times of my childhood, however, is the sense of utopia conveyed by these films. It was an American utopia; not one of true peace, tranquility, and fraternity, but one where, if there were enemies about, at least they were a known quantity, one against whom the American people stood together in unity. These films represented an idealized view of the United States during the Eisenhower years, with giant spiders taking the place of Soviet and Chinese Communists. Governmental authorities were trusted by the people; scientists had all the answers; and the military was ready at a moment’s notice to take on any challenge, including four-hundred-foot insects.

    Of course, nothing was exactly as it was depicted in the movies, not even in the 1950s. Though people then had far more faith in their government than they do today, it is highly unlikely that a doctor would have gone along with the indefinite psychiatric detention of a perfectly sane individual on the unwritten orders of a mysterious FBI agent, with a vague promise that he’d be notified when the witness was once again “well” as was depicted in Them! (1954). Frankly, every time I view that scene, the thought of my eventual freedom being dependent upon the bureaucratic efficiency of the federal government sends shivers up my spine. I can’t keep the image of an elderly Fess Parker, still sitting in a mental institution in Texas, waiting for a release that would never come, from springing to mind.

    And while I have an unyielding respect and admiration of our military, the notion that, upon a telephone call from a state trooper to the nearest Air Force base complaining of a giant tarantula stomping across the New Mexico landscape, some credulous young officer would launch a squadron of fighters to napalm it into ashes, is a bit too much to be believed.

    It’s easy to deride these movies as hopelessly corny, a clichéd relic of a bygone era, and in some ways, such criticisms are accurate. For younger viewers, it’s understandable how archaic these films might appear. However, for those of us who grew up with them, either when they played across the big screen, or in darkened rooms with the flickering light of our television sets, our sense of nostalgia outweighs our recognition of their hackneyed nature. Nostalgia for an America that was gone before many of us were born; an America that was never quite like the movies led us to believe. But an America we can’t help wishing was, at least in part, our America.