Laughing at the Environment in Eight-Legged Freaks

Deep in Eight Legged Freaks, an ecological comedy from 2002, images from the 1954 film Them! appear briefly on a television screen, reinforcing the mutation of bug-like creatures that serves as the catalyst for the action in both films—ants in the earlier Them! and spiders in Eight Legged Freaks. The homage is direct and loving, but it is 2002, and mutation is now a source of comedy as well as fear. This juxtaposition of the 1950s film footage from Them! with its more recent version, Eight Legged Freaks, also points out the mutation of an older genre—the science fiction warning film—to its comic and, perhaps, less heroic form, from the late1980s until today.

Eco-disaster films have come of age, so their themes are now played for laughs, but this shift from serious to comic explorations of environmental issues also changes expected genre conventions. Eight Legged Freaks is an example of this shift, where allusions are made to serious eco-disaster films from Them! to Skeeter (1992), but a toxic waste disaster is played for laughs here, with giant spiders even personified as dirt bike racers in sun glasses. Ultimately spiders are defeated, and the desert town in which the battle is set grows rich on gold garnered from the mine that once stored toxic waste—one eco-disaster, then, is replaced by an eco-tragedy, pit mining, in an ironic twist that parodies resolutions sought in serious eco-disaster films. This shift from serious disaster films to parody aligns with the shift we see made in eco-disaster films from the 1950s to the present, a shift that moves eco-disaster films into the comic realm and (as we read it) away from a “nature attacks” vision to one in which humans attack the natural world.

Eight Legged Freaks serves as an eco-disaster comedy that illustrates both of these shifts. Ecological disaster—in the form of toxic waste dumping and its consequences—and a comic plot and characters meld well in the film and serve as a call to dispose of toxic waste in environmentally safe ways. Geoff King explains how satire is comedy with a “political edge” (18). Parody, on the other hand, shifts comic motivation from “the social-political arena to that of film forms and conventions, although this distinction is far from always entirely clear” (King 18). Eight Legged Freaks as comedy includes elements grounded in both satire and parody, since it couches a political message in comedy, while also responding to particular film forms and conventions.

Eight Legged Freaks responds to the heroic motifs of tragedy by comically constructing the characters of drama to serve both a comic purpose and a satirical premise and plot. In an eco-comedy, heroes with more than one tragic flaw are fore-grounded, according to Joseph W. Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival. Heroes in comedies tend to bumble and require a community of allies to succeed, as they do in Eight Legged Freaks, demonstrating the move from tragedy to comedy in an eco-disaster film.   Eight Legged Freaks, then, makes us laugh at the environment because it not only fits comic theories about humor; it also intertwines genres in which we expect serious issues to be tackled. Even though the film’s director argues that toxic waste dumping in the film serves only as a plot device, the film leaves spectators with the impression that the success of humanity depends on interdependence with the natural world and stewardship toward nature in a communal environment. But more than anything, Eight Legged Freaks provides a space in which we can laugh at eco-disasters, look at environmental catastrophe with a sense of humor and, perhaps, make changes that will serve both humans and the natural world best.