Insect Fear Film Festival celebrates 40 years of entertaining, educating about insects
For the past 40 years bug lovers at the University of Illinois have been working to ameliorate some of the negativity associated with insects by hosting the annual Insect Fear Film Festival (IFFF).
This year’s event, with a theme of living fossils, will take place on Saturday, March 4, in Foellinger Auditorium, with doors opening at 6 p.m. Held every spring, the festival, now run by the Entomology Graduate Student Association (ESGA), creates an opportunity for the community to interact with and learn more about various insects, in hopes that by the end of the event people will be more aware—and perhaps less afraid—of the creatures.
The event, which changes themes every year, includes more than just films. It will feature an art exhibition by local K-12 students and a question-and-answer session with a film director prior to the film screenings. Guests can expect to view a number of living fossil related films, including the 2021 horror/comedy “Crabs!” and the 1957 film “The Monster that Challenged the World,” which depicts what seems to be a giant velvet worm.
It’s the first in-person IFFF since 2020. The festival is free and open to the public. Film screenings are expected to begin around 7:30 p.m., after discussions and a variety of exhibits.
In a history of the film festival on the EGSA website, May Berenbaum, head of the Department of Entomology and founder of the festival, 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.
“Frankly, I never expected the Insect Fear Film Festival to last 40 years. We’re pretty durable, as well,” said Berenbaum.
Edward Hseih, a graduate student in entomology, said they will display the department’s insect collection and provide more information about this year’s theme. The outreach at IFFF, Hsieh added, has in the past ranged anywhere from t-shirts to edible insects.
“It is often a good way to connect with the community," said Hsieh.
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.”
Of the 1957 movie “The Monster That Challenged the World,” Berenbaum noted that 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,” she said.
One of the other features will be, “Joe’s Apartment,” a musical from 1996 that portrays musical cockroaches. Comedian Godfrey Danchimah, Jr., known professionally as Godfrey and a formerly enrolled student at U of I, voices one of the cockroaches in the film.
“Cockroaches are the archetypal survivors,” Berenbaum said.
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.
An insect petting zoo is also scheduled. Hsieh said that people will have the opportunity to touch real, live horseshoe crabs and cockroaches alongside a number of other insects.
“Personally I find it very rewarding to show off living insects in the insect petting zoo,” Hsieh said. “It is very cool to see people hold a tarantula for the first time without dropping it… I am looking forward to handling those [crabs] myself.”
The IFFF will also feature insect-related crafts and a Bugscope, a scanning electron microscope at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, which will show magnified images of fossils. For graduate student Jonathan Rice, he sees the IFFF as a way to “bring insects a little more into the public’s mind.”
“Obviously we think that they are pretty important,” Rice said, adding that the IFFF has the potential to dispel fear when it comes to insects.
The Funk ACES Library will also be hosting a display of 40 years of festival memorabilia, including posters, t-shirts, and other artifacts from previous Insect Fear Film Festivals.
