Damnation Alley, Part 1

Based on a novel by science fiction writer Roger Zelazny, Damnation Alley (1977) shows us an Earth that is tilted off its axis after a Third World War, covered in radioactive dust, and surrounded by bizarre red clouds and spasmodic flames. Like the iconic Big Bug movie Them! (1954), one of the new realities is monstrously transformed insect life. According to the film’s narrator, the climate has gone insane. Once the radiation settles down, all that is left for the few humans that remain is a struggle for survival and dominance, the film tells us, a struggle nearly thwarted by the monstrous insects created by nuclear war.

The first set of insect monsters in the film are giant blue scorpions that surround a compound where ex-military personnel now live. The scorpions attempt to attack a motorcycle rider, Tanner (Jan-Michael Vincent), who is returning from town with a stuffed life-size female doll. His roommate, Keegan (Paul Winfield) first believes Tanner has sacrificed a woman to the scorpions, but when he looks through his binoculars, he realizes it is a department store mannequin.

This comic scene in some ways separates Damnation Alley from earlier insect horror films with primarily serious tones. In an essay suggesting that these big bug movies were responding to “growing misgivings about the safety and effectiveness of modern insecticides,” historian William M. Tsutsui argues, “Critics and historians have invariably interpreted these cinematic big bugs as symbolic manifestations of Cold War era anxieties, including nuclear fear, concern over communist infiltration, ambivalence about science and technocratic authority, and repressed Freudian impulses” (1). Despite the comic effect, however, these scorpions are portrayed as monsters that must be avoided and destroyed, even though humanity’s addiction to war produced them.