10 Bug Movies That Make Us Itchy – What Crawled Up YOUR Ass?!
It’s cicada season here in Ohio. Once every 17 years or so, an army of these little bastards rises from deep within the soil, where they’ve lived off nothing but roots since birth, and they cling to any tree available before molting their skin and freeing the winged beast within. As beautiful and interesting as the process is, you can’t walk out your front door without stepping on a pile of creepy bug exoskeletons or hearing their ever-present mating song, which gets annoying pretty quickly.
Much like the cicadas outside my door, there are more bug-centric scenes in the horror genre than I can possibly count. But to celebrate the arrival of these creepy creatures (or to mourn it, depending on your fear of enormous winged insects), here’s a list of our Top 10 movies with memorable bugs.
1) Sick Girl (2006)
Thanks a lot, director Lucky Mckee, for obliterating Erin Brown from the spank bank! Seeing Brown (aka Misty Mundae) turn into a freaky human-bug hybrid is just as unsettling as it is sexually confusing. You won’t look at her body (of work) the same way ever again… or, at least, for a month or so.
2) Bite (2015)
How many times have you dismissed a bug bite as “nothing”? This movie will have you squirming at each and every mosquito bite from here on out, as you watch a young woman go from blushing bride-to-be to a living brood incubator for millions of insect eggs, all while confronting her overbearing mother-in-law and baby-crazed fiancé. Stella gets her groove back… but it ain’t pretty.
3) Eight Legged Freaks (2002)
Although this horror-comedy romp wasn’t really meant to be scary, you’ve gotta admit David Arquette being chased by spiders the size of pickup trucks is a good enough hook to keep you watching.
4) Honey, I Shrunk the Kids! (1989)
Don’t roll your eyes just yet—this relic of my childhood may not be scary, but it features a fight between a giant friggin’ ant and a giant friggin’ scorpion! The special effects might not have aged too well, but how many 90s kids honestly didn’t jump once or twice the first time they saw this?
5) Bug (2006)
I think we all have an identical routine before getting into a hotel bed—check for stains, check for bedbugs. But as William Friedkin, who’d previously directed The Exorcist, demonstrates: What’s left to the imagination is far more disturbing than visuals, and the inkling of invisible bugs hiding in your hotel sheets ousts even the messiest black light tests.
6) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
In a scene which may well be a precursor to “Fear Factor,” Jones’ annoying blonde companion is tasked with reaching into a bug-infested hole to pull a lever, which will save Jones and Short Round from a booby-trapped room of collapsing ceiling spikes. If the tunnel filled with creepy crawlies (all of which were real, by the way) doesn’t make you shudder, the witty near-death banter in this scene will.
7) A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Master (1988)
Gym rats? No—gym roaches! In addition to being the lord of nightmares, Freddy Krueger’s apparently also a total dick at spotting weightlifters, as evidenced by the way he snaps an entomophobe’s arms with a barbell before turning her into a cockroach and crushing her in a roach trap. Nasty insect legs emerging from open wounds is sick enough on its own, but the worst part is this would’ve been the perfect excuse for skipping leg day. Timing, Freddy, timing!
8) Arachnophobia (1990)
There are pros and cons to giving up the big city life and moving your family out to a rural area. Pro: Your kids are 90% less likely to grow up to be jaded crack whores. Con: A deadly and aggressive new species of spider might set up mating grounds in your barn and begin a human-specific killing spree.
Far be it from me to refuse the loving, eight-legged embrace of nature’s most misunderstood creature, but when they’re turning your neighbors into Slurpees, you call in Delbert McClintock (John Goodman) to kill them with fire!
9) The Fly (1986)
David Cronenberg is the undisputed master of body horror, and the quintessential example of his gift is this famed remake of a 1958 gem. Jeff Goldblum plays a brilliant scientist on the verge of perfecting teleportation, but when romantic jealousy provokes drunken hubris, he tests the teleporter on himself, unaware a housefly has flown into the machine with him and will absorb into his DNA.
This movie’s a bit hard to watch if you’re squeamish, but it’s a work of true genius and the special effects have aged well enough to make even a genre buff’s skin crawl. Be afraid; be very afraid!
10) Creepshow: They’re Creeping Up on You (1982)
Not only is this the sickest entry in the Creepshow anthology, but it also features possibly the sickest use of bugs out of any horror anthology I’ve seen. A power shortage allows hundreds of cockroaches to invade the hermetically sealed apartment of an old man who tramples over people as if they were bugs. The man has such a fear of germs that he drops dead of a heart attack, and suddenly the roaches are gone—whew!
No, wait… they’re not gone! In the entry’s finale it’s revealed the entire swarm of roaches have crawled inside the man’s corpse, and they explode from his mouth!
Although many of these roaches in the wide shots were only dried fruit and nuts, courtesy of effects wizard Tom Savini, the roaches covering the old man (played by E.G. Marshall) were real!
