Summer Night and Tarantulas

Last night I went outside and could still see a patch of dark red glowing in the west and it struck me as ominous, like the Sun was threatened to not go away for the night or showing just how soon it would be once rising in the east to rule the day. If winter is the Empire of Night, summer is the Kingdom of the Sun. That last enduring bit of luminosity was a reminder from the Sun that if Earth was just a little closer, or a little slower rotating, this planet would quickly become unlivable.  

The flip-side is that the night air never felt so safe. For the winter portion of the year that night is a taste of the space's void: cold, empty, dark and inimical to human life. Even the spring and fall nights might suddenly plunge into below zero territory. The dim survival part of the brain seem aware of this and there is a certain 'attention' that brain maintains when your outside at night. There is a warm summer night air that actually releases this primitive attention by telling the brain stem, "Even if you pass out naked the worst you'll suffer is bug bites." I almost feel a deep motherly presence in the hot nights. An association encouraged by all the mothers nursing young that can be seen right now. Predators may roam the summer nights but the environment itself is no longer predatory.

Hot nights are perfect for some 1950s Sci-Fi:

Tarantula (1955): More mad scientists isolating themselves in deserted areas to conduct queer experiment that inevitable end in quarrels, emergent diseases and monsters that endangering the townsfolk. This time it is a giant spider.



This movie was better than it should be with cool labs, a real spider (that was not abused on-screen), and some of that 'desert noir' as pioneered by Them! (1954's giant ants blockbustet) so we get long shots of the desert and occasionally faux existential-ish statements:

-What do you think about the desert?
-Oh, like something from another life... quiet, yet strangely evil as if it were hiding its secrets from man.
-You make it sound so creepy.
-The unknown always is.

The spider gets to do traditional things like quietly spy through a window at a woman and eating homeless people - but it also gets to have some nicely shot scenes of scaring horses and it gets to pose with a (non-nuclear) mushroom cloud.



It also get points for taking the time to explain the real tarantulas are cool tough animals that even Real Americans can respect (watch it drive a rattlesnake away from its hole) but are harmless to humans.

The weirdest part it that main actor has the uncomfortable energy of mafia enforcer (think Ray Liotia) which lends an inappropriate air of menace - you keep waiting for him to turn on the love interest with a snarl that lets her know that it is him not the spider she should be worried about.

The movie follows all the ritual steps: the monster eats cattle, leaves mysterious clues, is explained by a movie-within-the-movie and dies by military forces, this time it is naplam - still a popular weapon post-Korea but pre-Vietnam. The final shot of the relieved town-folk basking in the glow of a massive cremation is a disturbing yet classic Cold War shot.  The charred stick-like limbs of the burnt (model) spider jutting out of the petroleum inferno seem like those of a child or a concentration camp prisoner.





It will take much blood, suffering, and a Anti-war + Civil Rights movements to arrive at the ending of 1968's Night of the Living Dead where a montage of still shots of the main hero being prepared for cremation by meathooks and bonfire is done during the credits.  "That's one more for the bonfire," the sheriff says. The credits end just as the cremation pyre is about to be lit, we are denied the shots of cleansing fire.







By the late 60s the idea that governments can just cremate their way out of problems is being questioned by horror films. This is slow progress. If we remember that single largest murder of humans in a single day still belongs to the US's napalm-fueled incineration of 80,000 people in the fire-storms in Tokyo, we can understand why this progress is so slow.