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Creature Features | Attack of the insect fear films

THIS FEBRUARY IN URBANA, ILLINOIS, ON the last Saturday of the month, hundreds of University of Illinois students will make a pilgrimage to celebrate pests. They will forego typical weekend party plans and brave the wintry weather to hear an entomologist instruct them in the finer points of insect anatomy—and watch the movies that have long served as the main feature.

Kingdom of the Spiders.
Invasion of the Bee Girls.
Return of the Fly.

This is the annual Insect Fear Film Festival, an event so broadly intriguing that it has been celebrated in everything from the Chronicle of Higher Education to Twilight Zone Magazine. The notion has been copied on other campuses (the Insect Horror Film Festival at Iowa State, for instance, and the Insect Cinema Cult Classic at Washington State). But the twenty-year-old show in Champaign-Urbana is the granddaddy of them all—even though the concept was nearly squashed a quarter-century ago in Ithaca, when founder May Berenbaum was working toward her PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell.

In 1978, two years before earning her doctorate, Berenbaum noticed a poster advertising a Godzilla film festival sponsored by Cornell’s Asian-American Society. She figured a similar event featuring insect films—and entomological critiques of each—would be a fine means of presenting scientific information in an entertaining context. To her chagrin, the chair of Cornell’s Department of Entomology at the time quickly vetoed the idea.“He thought it would be too undignified,” she recalls. “He said we could show documentaries about insects.” A few years later, as an assistant professor at Illinois, she pitched the idea again. This time, it was enthusiastically embraced. Berenbaum is a serious academic. As head of Illinois’s Department of Entomology since 1992, she has become internationally known for her contributions to the field of chemical ecology and has been honored by both the Ecological Society of America and its entomological counterpart. She met her husband, a film professor at Illinois, while planning the first Insect Fear Film Festival in 1984. During their honeymoon in Vancouver six years later, she gave three lectures at the International Congress of Entomology.

But Berenbaum knows entertainment can be a useful tool in education. Indeed, the New York Times has called her “arguably the most relentlessly creative insect advocate in the world.” So along with publishing studies such as “Cytochrome P450 monooxygenases in oligophagous Lepidoptera,” she has written books like Ninety-Nine Gnats, Nits, and Nibblers, and she never turns down an invitation to banter about bugs—be it to a Cub Scout troop, a garden club, or the residents of a nursing home. As a longtime humor columnist for the American Entomologist professional journal, Berenbaum has investigated the taxonomic pedigree of comic book superheroes like Spider-Man and Firefly. Fans of television’s “The X-Files” might recall the appearance of a gorgeous entomologist in one episode. Her name: Bambi Berenbaum.

With such a history, it comes as no surprise that she has long understood the benefit of joining students in an insect analysis of, for instance, Men in Black. “You catch more flies with honey,” she says, “to use an entomological metaphor.”

A couple hundred curiosity seekers showed up for the first Insect Fear Film Festival. Nowadays, it routinely draws crowds of a thousand or more. Berenbaum presents two or three feature-length films (everything from Mothra and Arachnophobia to Brain Eaters and Blood Beast Terror), interspersed with animated shorts with titles like An Itch in Time and Of Thee I Sting.

Usually, there is a theme to the event—non-insect arthropods, for instance, or social insects, or spiders. For last year’s twentieth anniversary event, Berenbaum’s special guest was film director Bert I. Gordon—Hollywood’s Mr. B.I.G. himself, so named for his initials and the oversized creepy-crawlers in such low-budget classics as Empire of the Ants and Earth vs. The Spider.

The crowd also has the chance to handle live specimens, such as hissing cockroaches and tobacco hornworms, and every year graduate students design a new T-shirt for the festival. Berenbaum’s favorite commemorated an all-beetles program. “It was basically the cover of Abbey Road,” she says, “but instead of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, it was four beetles.” One year, Berenbaum offered insect treats for the courageous (deep-fried waxworms, anyone?). Another, a mosquito-themed program, was held in conjunction with—what else?—a blood drive.

Admission is free, and so is the postfilm analysis. Berenbaum’s most famous —or infamous—critique occurred during a festival devoted to Orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets, cockroaches). After showing an animated short featuring Jiminy Cricket, she picked apart the beloved cartoon icon’s anatomical incorrectness and concluded that crickets are essentially “garbage-eating cannibals.” The observation earned her a mention in a supermarket tabloid, which took her to task for disrespecting Disney’s darling.

Berenbaum observes that Hollywood shows no inclination to stop producing insect films of questionable caliber. The special effects may be getting better, she says, but the bug biology is not. “Every one of them has some tiny element that’s pretty much correct. But there’s never a shortage of things to talk about. Like in Empire of the Ants, the queen ant uses pheromones to influence the behavior of workers—but she’s using them on human slaves.”

— Brad Herzog ’90

On the Waterfront | Group revitalizes lake access

Who wants to play king of the mulch mound?” shouts Trevor Fontes ’07. Perched on the pile’s summit, he shovels wood chips into a wheelbarrow. On this Indian summer Sunday, Fontes and five classmates collect litter, rake leaves, and haul brush. The group is beautifying a section of the Waterfront Trail in Cass Park where the newly paved path skirts Cayuga Lake. They are part of the Cayuga Waterfront Trail Initiative (CWTI), an effort to revitalize Ithaca’s downtown shoreline.

Credit for the concept goes to Rick Manning, MLA ’87, a visiting fellow in landscape architecture. In 2000, Manning, a veteran trail designer, teamed up with Jean McPheeters ’72, president of the local Chamber of Commerce. They enlisted help from the City of Ithaca, Cornell, Ithaca College, and local businesses to build a six-mile path for pedestrians, joggers, bicyclists, and in-line skaters.

When completed, the trail system will connect public land on the eastern and western shores of Cayuga Lake from Stewart Park to Allan H. Treman Marine State Park, linking the Farmer’s Market, the Cornell boathouse, and Cornell’s biological field station. Phase one—rehabbing the Cass Park trail and expanding it into a two-mile loop—was finished this fall. When completed, the footpath will run through the favorite haunts of Lab of Ornithology founders Arthur Allen and Louis Agassiz Fuertes and Paleontological Research Institute founder Gilbert Harris, who brought students to Cayuga’s shores for lessons on natural history, geology, and ecology.

Manning hopes the initiative will rekindle that tradition. Already student community service groups have contributed their labor. In addition, Manning’s graduate design students used the initiative to gain practical experience. CWTI also aims to improve and restore the natural landscape. “The waterfront was the heart and soul of the community back in the old days,” says Manning. “Connecting these different waterfront places—parks, natural areas, commercial areas, the Farmer’s Market—brings together a whole mosaic of landscapes.”

— Lauren McSherry ’02

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