Horror is supposed to be pretend

[urbpan]

Last night I watched Food of the Gods, a 1976 movie based on a fragment of an H.G. Wells story. Some folks on a remote farm discover a mysterious substance that, when fed to animals, causes them to grow to giant size. Rats and wasps get into the stuff and begin killing people.

This could have been a pretty enjoyable B movie experience, but it lost me about halfway through. Let me explain: the special effects to make the giant rats were charmingly rudimentary and anachronistic, consisting of some big rat-head puppets, and real rats crawling around on scale models of the sets.

The rats on the model house and cars were natural colored (brown) but were clearly tame domestics. They had calm body postures and were placidly exploring the toys they were placed on, while the sound of angry screeching rodents was foleyed in.

The heroes of the film are trapped in the farm house with giant rats all over it, and begin picking the rats off with shotguns. To my great surprise, the special effect used to show rats being shot was actual rats being actually shot. The film is slowed down a bit to make the shots look bigger, but the rats are clearly taking real hits from a pellet gun or small caliber bullet. Flesh pops open and the animals twist in pain and fall away.

I had to track my own feelings watching this. Was it hypocritical of me to be horrified? I have killed innumerable rats. Mostly I gently send them to unconsciousness in a gas chamber, but I also lay deadly traps in their path, and even give them poison--arguably a crueler fate than being shot.

But the rats I have killed were either expressly bred to be food animals, or were destructive non-native pests that we should all feel an obligation to destroy. I have nothing against individual rats: I have owned them as pets, and they are far and away the most intelligent and affectionate small mammal pet available.

The rats killed in Food of the Gods were actors. Filming them as they crawl over a doll house then blowing holes into them with a gun is monstrous. These were tame animals that were bred for entertainment, and in this case the entertainment was to display a real, honest-to-badness painful death.

How the animal handlers working on the film allowed this to happen is inconceivable to me. No one working in the field of animal care could possibly defend it. Then again, it's easy to breed rats, and I can only hope these were bred by an unethical hobbyist, not a professional animal keeper.

I'm sure at some point the filmmakers discussed how they were going to make it look like the rats were being shot. "We'll just shoot them and film it, for crying out loud! They're only rats!" But they are YOUR rats, and by bringing them into the world you are agreeing to treat them with some level of dignity, and protect them from undue suffering. Now I understand why most films end with a block of legalese assuring the viewer that the animals used in the film were not mistreated. It hadn't occurred to me before that such mistreatment was likely to happen in a mainstream movie.

I'm also surprised that the fact of the animal cruelty isn't mentioned on either the wikipedia page or imdb page for the movie. Googling "food of the gods" + "animal cruelty" produces a number of websites with similarly appalled reviews.

Edited to add: Here's a good essay on the indefensibility of really killing animals in a movie (including the gray area of filming a killing that was going to happen whether or not the camera was going to be there).

Comments

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the warning. I like watching cheesy old horrors and this would have really upset me if I saw it.

[urb-banal.livejournal.com]

I have a friend who has a couple of rats for pets. He really loves them and goes on about how smart they are. I know he could not bare to have them suffer like that.

I think you are right, the people who trained them were seriously sick. That said, there is a capacity in humans to divorce themselves from their emotions so as to be able to commit terrible acts.

History proves it. It is not just "animals" who have suffered. Yes, birds, fish and insects too. F**king humans!

[elainetyger.livejournal.com]

I get what you mean about what did you breed them for. These were actors so it was sort of a smut film.

I have a couple of friends who otherwise seem sane but who go overboard saving cats or dogs that they found that might be in horrendous shape. They put all kinds of energy into saving these animals and trying to guilt people into adopting them. Meanwhile for each cat or dog that gets saved, how many chickens-cattle-etc get slaughtered to feed them in the following years?

I take care of my pets because I adopted them into my home and took responsibility for them. Thus their lives are more important to me than those of the animals they and I eat. However, I cannot get all worked up over other cats or dogs, and have no problem with their deaths, as quick and humane as possible.

It's morally icky to take responsibility for the rats and then shoot them. It's not that much better than pulling wings off of flies or setting cats on fire for shits and giggles.

But I have no problem with watching animals kill other animals in the normal course of their day, like on the old TV show "Wild America."

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I think you mean "snuff film" which was a phrase I almost used in this piece. I certainly don't agonize over every animal death--I agree that many of those sad pet cases should be resolved with a speedy dose of euthanasia solution.

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

dude. what the fuck.

[roaming.livejournal.com]

"destructive non-native pests that we should all feel an obligation to destroy"

Yeh, let's get rid of all those immigrants who don't belong here because they weren't here *first.*

[weofodthignen]

Oh ewww.

I picked up a book in a bookstore once, or maybe it was a mailer trying to get money - a guy writing about how he trained cats to appear in a movie and the director filmed them being terrified and running off into the desert - without telling the trainer of course, because he would never have agreed to this. And how this is illegal now but he is still brokenhearted about it and has never trained animals for a movie again. That may have been what happened here :-(

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

We fail to do so at the expense of native North American species. They aren't immigrants, they're unintended stowaways--not their fault, but why should the native species suffer extinction for our mistakes? Do we want to live in a world where the only songbirds are sparrows and starlings?

[roaming.livejournal.com]

Aaarrrggghhh! No matter what we do, something gets killed! Nature is too cruel.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, it's true. :(
Ever since the first predatory microbe evolved it's been true. We are cursed with knowing and feeling about it.