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.