Bug (1975) and the Very Mad Scientist

The horror of the cockroaches in Bug (1975) becomes amplified when Parmiter even more extensively anthropomorphizes the roaches by facilitating their reproduction. In a dark and deserted farmhouse setting, the now reclusive Parmiter breeds this new species of roach with what looks like an American cockroach specimen, a process that will transform a dying species into a menace. When Parmiter sees the roaches write “We Live” on the wall with their bodies, he knows he has created unbeatable human-like monsters and is helpless against their assault.

After their flames engulf him, we see him burning, but in an odd twist that emphasizes the parallels between the roaches and their creator, Parmiter, the offspring of the original breed drag him into the crevice left by a second earthquake. The fissure’s bottom looks like the bowels of hell, with fire and brimstone deep below, and the earth explodes and covers them, closing off the opening.

This sudden ending turns horror into camp but demonstrates negative associations with both science and anthropomorphized insects found in most bug features. It also serves as a not too subtle moral attack on science and the cockroach monsters it could create.

As Bill Gibron states, “Naturally, whenever you wander onto God’s domain, things get out of hand and more people die. And it takes an unexplainable divine intervention (a second earthquake and a noble individual sacrifice) to end the debacle.” Because the evolutionary transformation Parmiter attempts involves a cockroach pest, however, his violation of nature becomes even more monstrous.

Intellectual Anthropomorphism in Bug (1975)

Some studies of cockroaches highlight their physical and intellectual strengths by making explicit connections between cockroaches and humans illuminated in multiple ways in the movie Bug. According to Marion W. Copeland, “as in humans, female cockroaches have stronger immune responses than males and the very young and very old have weaker responses than mature adults” (131). 

As early as 1912, studies at Summer Teacher’s College in St. Louis showed that cockroaches could learn to “overcome their innate aversion to light” (135). They were also found capable of running a maze, even without their heads, a feat few animals could grasp (135).

The monstrous nature of cockroaches is shown in a variety of scenes before Parmiter decides to breed a new even more dangerous species that takes those intellectual strengths to extremes. His friend Mark’s (Alan Fudge) wife Sylvia (Patty McCormack) is killed by a roach attack, for example, and a roach also climbs in another woman’s ear (Jamie Smith Jackson) and destroys her. 

Although we do not see her killed on screen, Parmiter’s wife Carrie’s (Joanna Miles) death is gruesome. But as Mark explains, these new roaches live very short lives and cannot reproduce, at least without intervention, so the danger associated with them should be finite.

Bug (1975) and Anthropomorphism

Aided by the insect photography of Ken Middleham, who also filmed the documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971) and the science fiction thriller Phase IV (1974), Bug provides an authentic portrayal of the cockroaches, at least until breeding ignites their intelligence to such an extent that they can read and write. The prehistoric roaches that appear after the quake, for example, produce sparks not unlike the bioluminescence of the South American cockroach, called “pronatal headlights” in Bell et al’s Cockroaches. As critic Bill Gibron of PopMatters declares, close-up shots of these roaches’ mandibles also “make [] their actions seem almost plausible.”

Animal studies scholar Marion W. Copeland provides a context for this reaction in her “Voices of the Least Loved: Cockroaches in the Contemporary American Novel” in Insect Poetics, asserting, “The symbolic value of the cockroach to marginal literatures comes from the insect’s reputation as both survivor and victim” (155). Characteristics like these anthropomorphize the cockroach in relation to both positive and negative perspectives on humanity. In the horror genre, this symbolic value also sometimes leads to explorations of how that reputation may transform cockroaches into both monsters and saviors when humanity intervenes either deliberately or by accident. Marion Copeland and evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff emphasize the usefulness of anthropomorphizing, and entomological consultant James W. Mertins declares that “almost all of the well-treated movie arthropods are at least somewhat anthropomorphized. Yet in the cockroach horror film, representations of the cockroach highlight characteristics that Stephen R. Kellert suggests promote fear in humans while also drawing on the qualities shared by the most horrific versions of ourselves.

Copeland notes other positive associations with cockroaches in her book-length Cockroach, as well. Because “of its predilection for the dark” (81), Copeland suggests, the cockroach has become associated with “the unconscious and the power of the id” (81). In Thailand, Australia, South America, and French Guiana, cockroaches serve as food, medicine, and folk tale source. Copeland suggests that studies by anthropologists and explorers reveal that “rather than racking their brains for effective ways to destroy cockroaches, these cultures found the cockroach a useful neighbor, rich in protein and effective for many human diseases. They also seem to have recognized how useful they were to the environment” (81-2). Copeland also notes that cockroaches contribute to cancer research (131).

Bug (1975) and the Very Mad Scientist

Bug (1975) and the Very Mad Scientist

Although the "smart" bug movie Bug (1975) anthropomorphizes roaches so extensively they gain human intellect, neither the insect nor the scientists that transform them are well-treated. Based on the novel, The Hephaestus Plague, William Castle’s final film, Bug, highlights what happens when a scientist tampers with nature: roaches that belch flames remain vulnerable and easily destroyed until another entomologist, James Parmiter (Bradford Dillman), attempts to mate them with other roaches. 

The roaches become more like humans as they gain intelligence and grow deadly as they breed, producing carnivorous offspring. Eventually, these offspring also mate and kill, creating a flying burning insect that drags Parmiter and the science he represents to hell.

Despite the heightened anthropomorphism, in Bug, both cockroach and scientist are constructed as monstrous. Although the film’s scientist, Parmiter is a biology teacher who explains many things, he is also, as entomologist James W. Mertins explains of the scientist image, “shown … as detached from reality,” a “psychotic” (86). Parmiter tells his students, “Earth, soil, wind, temperature are all part of an exact pattern.” He mesmerizes a squirrel. He tells them about a Florida beetle that scalds its enemy. 

But when a farm boy shows him his dead cat, burned by the flaming cockroaches, the teacher is intrigued, so much so that he makes the roach his life work, even after the roaches kill his wife by crawling into her hair and lighting her up like a human torch.