Ravenous and Wendigo, continued

In Antonia Bird's Ravenous, Colqhoun’s (Robert Carlyle) cannibal story prompts George to recount the Wendigo myth, highlighting Colqhoun’s literal cannibalism as well as the imperial repercussions his journey westward represents. As Danette DiMarco articulates so well in her “Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous,” the film “is an appropriative text that invokes the Wendigo myth and evaluates cannibalistic discourse more broadly in order to critique Western cultural crisis” (134). 

Through the figure of the Wendigo, the film elucidates a direct relationship between literal cannibalism and figurative consumption of the American frontier Jack D. Forbes calls this figure the wetiko disease, “the disease of exploitation” (xix). According to Forbes, wetiko is a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which refers to a cannibal or, more specifically, to an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts, including cannibalism” (24). 

For Forbes, “imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and, in fact, are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil” (24). Jennifer Brown reinforces this connection between imperialism and cannibalism in Ravenous, asserting “Rather than the colonial use of cannibalism as tag of the savage, it is the white man who is barbaric and the Native American who is calm, intelligent, and reminds us that ‘whites eat the body of Christ.’” (226).

In Ravenous, Colqhoun and Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) of Fort Spencer illustrate conflicting responses to both the frontier myth and Wendigo. To save the land and its people, Wendigo/colonizer must die. 

Ravenous Wendigo Analysis 1

In cannibal horror films like Ravenous, gendered bodies and the volatile agents of the material world they inhabit may become violently intertwined. At Fort Spencer, Boyd joins a group of misfits with little to do on this empty range: Hart, the commanding officer; Toffler (Jeremy Davies), the company chaplain; Knox (Stephen Spinella), the drunken doctor; Reich (Neal McDonough), the only real soldier of the group; Cleaves (David Arquette), the heavily medicated camp cook; and George and his sister Martha (Sheila Tousey), the troops’ Indian guides. 

The dull life they maintain in this wilderness fort is shattered, however, when Colqhoun/Colonel Ives arrives and introduces cannibalism and the Wendigo myth into the plot. Colqhoun also gives a name to the cravings Boyd so wishes to end and amplifies the impact of gender on its manifestation. Although an emasculated Boyd resists Wendigo, and Martha escapes its effects, Colqhoun embraces it. 

Frostbitten and famished, Colqhoun provides the narrative that transforms Ravenous from Western to horror. Colquhoun’s Westward movement story first connects him with the Manifest Destiny of both the Mexican-American War and the westward movement. According to Colqhoun,

We left in April. Six of us in all. Mr. MacCready and his wife, from Ireland. Mr. Janus, from Virginia, I believe … with his servant, Jones. Myself - I'm from Scotland. And our guide … a military man, coincidently. Colonel Ives. A Detestable man … and a most disastrous guide. He professed to know a new, shorter route through the Nevada's. Quite a route that was. Longer than the known one … and impossible to travel. We worked … very, very hard. By the time of the first snowfall we were still a hundred miles from this place. That was November.

When the journey from Virginia to California is disrupted by the horrific winter conditions of the Sierra Madres, however, their pioneering spirit transforms to the Wendigo to which it is compared:

Preceding in the snow was futile. We took shelter in a cave. Decided to wait until the storm had passed. But the storm did not pass. The trails soon became impassable, and we had run out of food. …We remained famished. The day that Jones died I was out collecting wood. He had expired from malnourishment. And when I returned, the others were cooking his legs for dinner. Would I have stopped it had I been there? I don't know. But I must say, when I stepped inside that cave … the smell of meat cooking … I thanked the Lord. I thanked the Lord. And then things got out of hand. I ate sparingly. Others did not. The meat did not last us a week and we were soon hungry again only, this time our hunger was different. More severe, savage.

Colqhoun embodies and embraces Wendigo--both literally as cannibal and figuratively as colonizer in frontier America. 

Ravenous and the Frontier Myth

In a pivotal scene in Antonia Bird’s cannibal Western, Ravenous (1999), F. W. Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle), a stranger suffering from frostbite and seeking solace in the California fort at the center of the film admits he survived a lost wagon train journey from Virginia by feeding on the travelers who “expired from malnourishment.” Instead of offering sympathy, however, the fort’s American Indian guide, George (Joseph Runningfox), grows anxious and calls him Wendigo, showing the fort’s commander, Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones) a Wendigo Ojibwa myth illustrated on a blanket. According to the myth, when a man eats another’s flesh, usually an enemy, he steals his strength, his essence, his spirit, so that his hunger becomes craven and insatiable. The more he eats, the more he wants, and the stronger he becomes. For George, when men become cannibals, they become Wendigo, superhuman monsters with insatiable appetites. In the context of the westward movement Colqhoun embodies, Wendigo may also coincide with the white man’s voracious hunger for land.

Set in 1847, immediately after the Mexican-American War and right before the California gold rush, Ravenous explicitly addresses the Wendigo cannibal myth. In Ravenous Wendigo is both reality and metaphor for Manifest Destiny and the environmental and human exploitation that accompanies it. Inspired by the Donner party incident of the same year and the trial of 1870s cannibal prospector Alfred G.Packer, the film follows Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) to Fort Spencer, a desolate military outpost in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He has been banished because he is viewed as a coward; yet he is also honored as a hero because he bravely defeated a Mexican fort after ingesting the blood of his peers. His commander General Slauson (John Spencer) belittles this bravery, however. After watching Boyd’s inability to consume a large steak at a victory dinner, he declares, “You’re no hero. I want you as far from my company as possible.”

In cannibal horror films like Ravenous, gendered bodies and the volatile agents of the material world they inhabit may become violently intertwined. At Fort Spencer, Boyd joins a group of misfits with little to do on this empty range: Hart, the commanding officer; Toffler (Jeremy Davies), the company chaplain; Knox (Stephen Spinella), the drunken doctor; Reich (Neal McDonough), the only real soldier of the group; Cleaves (David Arquette), the heavily medicated camp cook; and George and his sister Martha (Sheila Tousey), the troops’ Indian guides. The dull life they maintain in this wilderness fort is shattered, however, when Colqhoun/Colonel Ives arrives and introduces cannibalism and the Wendigo myth into the plot. Colqhoun also gives a name to the cravings Boyd so wishes to end and amplifies the impact of gender on its manifestation. Although an emasculated Boyd resists Wendigo, and Martha escapes its effects, Colqhoun embraces it. 

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.