- Wasps, locus, spiders, ants.

These insects and the almost 900,000 others like them make up 80% of the world's species.

Seen or unseen, the creepy crawlies, flying insects, and burrowing creatures are necessary to our ecosystems and can contribute positively to our everyday lives, but they can be devastating menaces, spreading disease and causing famine.

Despite my own misgivings, when our friends at Deep Look invited me to get up close and personal with these destructive insects, I couldn't let you all down and say no.

I'm going to drop it.

I'm going to drop it.

I'm not going to drop it.

I'm gonna be fine.

It's going to be fine.

Oh, it's warm, it's warm!

I'm, like, shaking.

(Emily screams) There's perhaps no more infamous insect swarm than the locust.

Appearing in mass since at least the days of ancient Egypt, the migrating insects will tear through crops in their hunger.

Tales of destructive locust plagues go back thousands of years, prominent in the Bible and the Quran.

Unsurprisingly, these real-life anxieties have been the subjects of science fiction and horror narratives for hundreds of years, taking on monstrous form.

In Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold Bug", the main character is driven to madness after being bitten by a mysterious gold beetle.

H. G. Wells' story, "The Empire of the Ants", features an intelligent, aggressive Amazonian ant swarm, one that will purposefully attack humans, but bugs became visibly monstrous on screen in the 1950s, when the big bug subgenre of science fiction and horror was hatched, but why did this decade in particular latch on to the idea of freakishly monstrous bugs?

(dramatic music) I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, and this is "Monstrum".

The 1950s' monstrous insect renaissance peaked most notably with 1954's "Them".

While not the first of these bugs-gone-rogue kind of films, it was certainly the most influential.

"Them" was a commercial and critical success, and was Warner Brothers' highest grossing film of 1954.

In the movie, the FBI, police, government officials, and scientists discover a nest of giant ants at a nuclear testing site.

- [Narrator] Well, born in that swirling inferno of radioactive dust were things so horrible, so terrifying, so hideous, there is no word to describe them!

(intense music) (woman screams) - They try to hide the discovery using cyanide bombs, but two queens survive.

They and their offspring are driven from the desert to the city of Los Angeles, where they are eventually killed with flame throwers.

By today's standards, the special effects and even the plot seem underwhelming, but at the time, viewers and film critics found the story believable.

One review from the New York Times described the film as "tense, absorbing, and surprisingly enough, somewhat convincing."

Another from the Saturday review wrote that the film was "as persuasively realistic a horror story as one could possibly imagine."

Why so convincing and realistic?

The nuclear test site origins of the giant ants make this movie a commentary on the impact of atomic energy and nuclear weapons.

While Japanese Kaiju films emerged following World War II as a response to the horrors of the destruction of nuclear bombs, the American-made "Them" is more about the unknown lingering effects of nuclear testing, and arguably the guilt felt for developing and using nuclear weapons.

Many of the big bug films that followed "Them" incorporated nuclear weapons or radiation, like 1957's "Beginning Of The End", which features massive locusts who grew to a freakish size after eating giant vegetables grown with radioactive fertilizer, fertilizer produced by the US government's experimental farm.

As the locusts continue to feed on the products of other radioactive experiments, their size continues to increase.

After they've torn through all vegetable life, they turn to humans.

Moving from the countryside into Chicago, they destroy all in their path before finally being lured to Lake Michigan and killed.

The lingering effects of atomic energy and nuclear weapons weren't the only cultural commentary present in these films.

Between 1940 and 1970, as part of The Great Migration, over 4 million Black Americans moved from the South to cities in the Northeast and West, like Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles.

The height of this migration, the 1950s, was marked by a period of what is commonly referred to as white flight, the increased movement of millions of white Americans away from inner cities to newly constructed suburbs.

These movies mirror the anxieties of white audiences who viewed The Great Migration as a type of invasion, a theory supported by the very real violence white urbanites inflicted on minority residents, and some science fiction films seem to intentionally support this racist viewpoint.

Driven in part by federal policy and economic processes, the socioeconomic divide between white and non-white citizens was reinforced and broadened by the physical movement of both populations.

This movement is mirrored in the onscreen insects' journey from a more rural landscape to suburbs or cities.

The post-war movement's outline of racial segregation also seems significant.

The Brown V. Board of Education ruling was in 1954, the same year "Them" became a box office success.

These big bug movies have also been read as a response to growing fears of communism from the Cold War, with the insects standing in as a metaphor for perceived foreign predators secretly embedded in society, invading quietly before rising in mass to destroy Americans.

Some of these films suggest this more explicitly, like in "The Deadly Mantis", where the titular bugs' movements from the Arctic Circle are detected on radar meant to monitor the Russian military.

These films also play on the fear of the crowd.

The concept of the crowd only solidified at the turn of the 20th century, when industrialization and urbanization contributed to the collective anxiety of the masses of being a cog in the machine.

On screen, these masses became invading aliens and swarms of insects.

In "The Naked Jungle", the ants aren't abnormally sized or mutated.

There are just a lot of them, a massive 40 square mile sized swarm.

The giant wasp swarm created from cosmic rays in "The Monster From Green Hell" is another example.

While many big bug films featured singular monstrous arthropods, like "The Black Scorpion", "Tarantula", and "Earth Vs.

The Spider", those creatures' real-life counterparts are poisonous to humans.

It is the smaller bugs that swarm in these films.

It is the masses that are more difficult to defeat.

Another interpretation that focuses on the arthropods at the heart of these movies is the cultural conversation surrounding the pesticide industry.

In an era of literal movement from rural to city, or city to suburb, where the domestic space was prioritized, people were freaked out about regulating bug populations.

The 1950s marked a boom in pest control, with entomologists, agricultural associations, and government organizations, not to mention chemical executives, promoting the destructive potential of insects.

Even small, seemingly harmless populations of bugs that live quietly below ground, largely out of sight of humans, could become a physical threat as their populations literally grew.

Increased populations of locusts, Japanese beetles, boll weevils, fire ants, and gypsy moths were all targeted in the United States during the 50s.

The desire to eradicate these creatures was even referred to as the war on insects.

When DDT was developed as a synthetic insecticide in the 1940s, it was literally promoted as the atomic bomb of insecticides, but by the time the big bug films emerged, it was already becoming apparent that not only did these chemicals have a negative effect on all life, they also weren't as effective as previously believed.

Some of the big bug films even incorporated this revelation, showing large dosing of insecticides to have little effect on the creatures.

- Tell him we need DDT.

- No good.

That stuff just stunned it.

- [Emily] To put it simply, insects were everywhere and we wanted them dead.

The defeat of giant insects on the silver screen was a welcome image.

The role of the military in these films is also interesting.

While plot details often include government coverups or secret experiments, in the same films, the military ends up killing the insects and saving the day.

Science is portrayed similarly.

While a mad scientist is behind the helm of the insects' mutations, other scientists are responsible for coming up with the solutions to eliminate them.

1953's "Mesa Of Lost Women" features mutant spider women and giant spiders created by a scientist's pituitary experiments.

- She has human beauty and intelligence, but still possesses the capacities and instincts of the giant spider.

- "Tarantula"'s scientist possessed altruistic motives.

His experiments aimed at combating world hunger and increasing lifespan.

Likewise, "Beginning Of The End"'s scientist also wanted to solve world hunger with radiation.

The big bug films also presented audiences with a basic fear.

These were creatures that they could encounter in their own backyards.

While giant rampaging lizards, aliens, and deep sea creatures were scary, they also maintained a greater sense of escapism.

Insects, on the other hand, are a part of daily life.

While insects aren't going to hunt down humans to eat them alive, they do pose a threat.

Besides the obvious poisonous ones and their harmful bites, swarms of insects can also damage human lives and livelihoods.

While honeybees, gnats, and termites are all among the species that swarm, one of the most damaging and notorious species is fire ants.

Fire ants swarm as part of their reproductive cycle, forming strange floating masses.

Their powerful bites and painful stings make them a threat to humans and animals, and they can decimate crops.

Originally from South America, following World War I, fire ants traveled to the United States, but it wasn't until, you guessed it, the 1950s when the invasion gained attention.

In 1957, the federal government targeted fire ants with their own bug-killing propaganda films.

So, what about stories featuring our beloved locusts?

Locusts are actually a variety of grasshopper species that undergo dramatic transformation when environmental circumstances are just right, and locust swarms can number into the billions.

So, I went to a lab to learn about locusts and ended up holding one.

Hi!

I may or may not have screamed when it unexpectedly jumped on me.

(Emily screams) I could feel its little claw tips.

I hated it.

I feel like your heart is beating just as fast as mine, little friend.

After 1957's "Beginning Of The End", locusts interestingly faded away from science fiction narratives until the 21st century.

As global warming causes locust swarms to increase, we have again found them on our screen, but it's not just these monstrous flying creatures that endure.

Following their golden era in the 1950s, big bug horror continuously plagues horror narratives.

From "The Mist" to "Eight-legged Freaks", "The Swarm" to "Arachnophobia", it doesn't seem like we will be squashing these monsters anytime soon, but after all, it's hard to dismiss something that infiltrates our lives every day.

Seen or unseen, we live in a bug-eat-bug world.