CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - After three decades of hosting the popular Insect Fear Film Festival at the University of Illinois, entomology professor May Berenbaum has decided to flip the script. This year, instead of showing movies about bugs that scare people, Berenbaum has selected films featuring pesticides - the poisons that people use to kill bugs.
The films aren't depressing documentaries. They will faithfully embody the festival's motto, "Scaring the general public with horrific films and horrific filmmaking since 1984." In fact, these movies about popular poisons might be even more horrifying than films about killer cockroaches the size of Volkswagens. The free festival opens at 6 p.m. Feb. 22 (Saturday) at Foellinger Auditorium.
One full-length feature, the 1949 film "Riders of the Whistling Pines," stars cowboy singer Gene Autry riding his horse, playing his guitar and extolling the virtues of DDT - an insecticide that has been banned for agricultural use since 1972. The other feature, "Locusts: The 8th Plague," stars Dan Cortese as an environmental entomologist advocating reliance on "organic insecticides" to battle giant, genetically engineered flesh-eating locusts that have escaped from a military science lab. It was produced by UFO Film for Syfy in 2005.
Two Disney animated shorts will be shown: "Mickey's Garden," in which the world's favorite mouse loses consciousness while spraying his garden with poison; and "Pink Pest Control," in which one tiny termite destroys the Pink Panther's log cabin.
Berenbaum, the head of the U. of I. entomology department, chose this lineup to encourage people to learn more about pesticides by demonstrating how dramatically attitudes have shifted during the last 50 years.
"People don't realize that when DDT was first marketed, it was regarded as a miracle substance," Berenbaum said. Previous pesticides were either derived from plants (an expensive process) or made from acutely toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead or copper. As the first modern synthetic insecticide, DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) seemed to be such a good alternative to its predecessors that Paul Hermann Müller, the Swiss chemist who discovered its insecticidal properties, received a 1949 Nobel Prize.
"The problem with synthetic organic insecticides was not so much with the chemicals themselves, but how they were used," Berenbaum said. "DDT was dirt cheap, and its immediate effects on vertebrates aren't very pronounced, compared to the organophosphates of that era, which arose out of Nazi experiments looking for nerve poisons. So people saw no downside to using it, and it was grotesquely abused."
In her office, she has a collection of insecticide containers dating back to the 1920s - a palm-sized puffer labeled "El Vampiro," a bottle of arsenic-based ant paste with a "rattle cap" intended to identify it as poison (or amuse a toddler) and a hand-pump sprayer with pictures of Mickey Mouse. Some of these items will be displayed at the festival.
"Would you advertise an insecticide sprayer with a happy, smiling Mickey Mouse? That's how much things have changed," Berenbaum said.
In "Riders of the Whistling Pines," Autry advocates spraying DDT over 100,000 acres of forest to tackle an infestation of tussock moths. His 30-day plan draws the ire of a lumber magnate, who wants to let the larvae do their work so that his company can take the dead trees to market. As Autry begins the spraying operation, the lumber company surreptitiously sprays another toxin to kill livestock to rally public opinion against DDT. As the conflict intensifies, the lumber company honchos resort to desperate measures, including setting a truck full of DDT on fire. The fire results in what Berenbaum described in a recent journal article as "an action-filled but confusing series of events," in which "multiple fistfights ensue, many people gallop across the landscape on horseback, there's a plane crash that dispatches the bad guys, and I think Autry gets the girl."
While that's typical cowboy hero fare, Berenbaum said the plot seems surreal, given 70 years of hindsight.
"It's amazing to me to be rooting for the bad guys, who are making the claim that DDT poses risks to non-target organisms, which it absolutely does," Berenbaum said. "But not according to Gene Autry! So it's very funny."
DDT is now rarely used (mainly to address outbreaks of malaria in developing countries), but the lack of awareness about pesticides continues to pose risks to the environment, Berenbaum said. These days, it's not chemicals sprayed from airplanes so much as seeds pre-treated with neonicotinoids (synthetic variants of nicotine). These pre-treated seeds provide a form of protection called "systemic," because the neonicotinoids enter the vascular systems of plants in anticipation of a possible pest problem.
"As we know from 150 years of applying chemicals to crops, you should never treat a problem that isn't there, because that's a mechanism that raises the possibility that pests will develop resistance. Just like using antibiotics to treat nonexistent bacterial infections, you end up selecting for resistance," Berenbaum said. "We've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. There are lessons we have not yet learned."
The Insect Fear Film Festival will begin with activities for children, including face painting, a bug scope and petting zoo. Screenings will begin at 7 p.m.