Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Insect Fear Film Festival celebrates 40 years of entertaining, educating about insects

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The Insect Fear Film Festival celebrates 40 years of entertaining and educating people about insects and their close relatives at this year’s March 4 event at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It will be the first in-person festival since 2020.

The theme for the 40th annual festival is living fossils – organisms that appear to have not changed in 400 million years. It is an appropriate theme for celebrating the longevity of the film festival, said May Berenbaum, the founder of the festival and the head of the entomology department.

“Frankly, I never expected the Insect Fear Film Festival to last 40 years. We’re pretty durable, as well,” Berenbaum said.

In a history of the film festival on the Entomology Graduate Student Association website, Berenbaum wrote that she came up with the idea while a graduate student at Cornell University, but the department head at Cornell thought the type of films she had in mind would be too undignified. After coming to Illinois as an assistant professor, she pitched the idea again and then-department head Stanley Friedman enthusiastically agreed.

Many of the films shown are campy science fiction and horror films featuring insects – the festival’s tagline is “scaring the general public with horrific films and horrific filmmaking.” They offer Berenbaum the opportunity to point out what the filmmakers get wrong about insects and to provide accurate information. Since the first film festival in 1984, the event has shown at least 80 feature films and 90 short films and attracted more than 12,000 people, Berenbaum said. 

“Insects remain the one familiar and conspicuous group which is politically correct to hate. Probably for this reason, Hollywood has shown no inclination to stop producing bad insect science fiction films either. While the effects certainly are getting better, the biology is not. As long as they keep disseminating disinformation about the most misunderstood taxon on the planet, we have an obligation to counter with the truth about insects,” she wrote in the festival history.

Photo of a horseshoe crab on the sand with the ocean behind it.

Horseshoe crabs are not really crabs, but ancient relatives of spiders, says May Berenbaum, the head of the entomology department and the founder of the Insect Fear Film Festival.

The living fossils that are the subject of this year’s festival include cockroaches and dragonflies, which are insects, and horseshoe crabs and velvet worms, which are not. Horseshoe crabs are not really crabs either, but ancient relatives of spiders, Berenbaum said. They and the other creatures look identical to fossils dating from 350 million to 450 million years ago. They likely have evolved in some ways but their appearance remains the same, she said.

“All these weird and remarkable creatures have been around for a very long time but keeping a low profile. Velvet worms are ancient, but nobody’s heard of them except invertebrate biologists,” Berenbaum said. “They’re arthropod-adjacent. Even many entomologists have never heard of them.”

One of the feature films is the 1957 movie “The Monster That Challenged the World,” with what appears to be a giant velvet worm that terrifies California residents.

“The scientists in the movie call it a mollusk, and it is not. Mollusks do not have legs. The movie scientists do not know what they are talking about,” Berenbaum said.

The other feature, “Joe’s Apartment,” is a 1996 musical with singing, dancing cockroaches that perform an opening number with the lyrics: “Welcome to Joe’s apartment. It’s our apartment too. We’ve been around 100 million years, and we’ll be here long after you.”

Photo of a cockroach

Cockroaches – which Berenbaum calls the “archetypal survivors” – are the subject of the film “Joe’s Apartment.”

“Cockroaches are the archetypal survivors,” Berenbaum said.

The movie has an Illinois connection. The comedian Godfrey, who voices one of the cockroaches, is a U. of I. alum who majored in psychology and played football.

Prior to the feature films, the festival will show several episodes of “Pike’s Lagoon,” an animated series with a fish and a horseshoe crab as the main characters. Jacob Lenard, the show’s creator, writer and director, will be at the festival for a question-and-answer session at 6 p.m.

The shorts will be trailers for movies featuring living fossil creatures, including “Monster on the Campus,” a 1958 movie in which a prehistoric fish thought to be extinct is discovered and brought to a campus lab. Contact with the fish’s blood causes any living creature to revert to its prehistoric stage, turning a scientist into a bloodthirsty Neanderthal and a passing dragonfly into Meganeura, a prehistoric ancestor with a two-foot wingspan. The 1957 “Black Scorpion” trailer features giant scorpions freed from the earth by a volcano that terrorize the Mexican countryside.

Hosted by the Entomology Graduate Student Association, the festival also will include:

  • An insect petting zoo, with a variety of creatures including cockroaches and horseshoe crabs.
  • Bugscope, a scanning electron microscope at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, which will show magnified images of fossils.
  • Tommy McElrath, the insect collection curator for the Illinois Natural History Survey, who will show specimens from the collection.
  • A gallery of the annual art contest featuring insect-themed artwork by local K-12 students.
  • Insect crafts.
  • A video message from ventriloquist Hannah Leskosky – Berenbaum’s daughter – and her horseshoe crab puppet, who will talk about being one of Earth’s most ancient survivors.
  • Recognition of longtime festival attendees, including Nathan Schiff, a U. of I. alum who brings specimens from his extensive insect collection to the festival.

The festival is free and open to the public. Activities begin at 5 p.m. at Foellinger Auditorium, 709 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana. The film screenings begin at 7:30 p.m.

In conjunction with the festival, the Funk ACES Library is hosting a display of 40 years of festival memorabilia, including posters, T-shirts and other artifacts.

Editor’s notes: To contact May Berenbaum, email maybe@illinois.edu. More information about the Insect Fear Film Festival is available online.

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