Green Daily

As with any good idea, Them! had many imitators, notably Beginning of the End (1957), which featured giant grasshoppers and The Wasp Woman (1959), in which a woman is transformed after using cosmetics that were made with wasp jelly. This subgenre mutated out of nuclear horror and into eco-horror in the 1970's with movies like Bug (1975), which features giant, fire-starting cockroaches; Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), which is pretty obvious; and Frogs (1972), which features evil frogs that are trying to kill a young Sam Elliott.

At the same time, other films that were less explicit in their atomic linkage, but no less cautionary. For example, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) featured giant foaming watermelon "pods" that replaced people with perfect, unemotional copies. While the monsters were an alien force, it's notable that the pods grew in fields, where they often transformed their victims. Most of the pundits of the day noted that the film was a thinly-veiled attack on McCarthyism, but it's hard to miss the distrust of nature that underlies much of the movie. Considering the fact that this period marks the real beginning of suburban tract housing, it's easy to imagine a nascent eco-consciousness creeping around in the psyches of the producers!

Of course, as the only victims of an actual atomic attack, Japan got into the act as well. Movies like Godzilla (1954), Mothra (1961), and Rodan (1956) certainly demonstrated a fear of the mutating power of nuclear radiation, but the contemplative, elegiac Attack of the Mushroom People (1963) offers a more powerful lesson. Basically an updated version of Homer's Lotus Eaters, the movie features a group of pleasure boaters who end up shipwrecked on a deserted island. As they begin to starve, one after another of them starts eating a strange mushroom that grows on the island. This, of course, has terrible effects. While this film has been relegated to late-night television and creature-feature style programs, it resounds with a very powerful environmentalist message.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King explores the way that cultural fears leach their way out through horror films. Sometimes this process is deliberate, but it usually is more subtle and accidental. While many people would argue that ecological consciousness is a post 1970's phenomenon, atomic-age horror films seem to demonstrate that, on some level, the moviegoers of the 1950's and 1960's realized that mankind's abuse of the planet was bound to have terrible consequences!