This Saturday, the U of I Department of Entomology will once again host the Insect Fear Film Festival (IFFF), now in its 33rd year.
The festival is the brainchild of Professor May Berenbaum, who thought up the idea as a graduate student at Cornell University. According to Todd Johnson, an organizer of IFFF and an entomology graduate student at U of I, Cornell thought that the idea of a film festival featuring scary insects wasn’t “serious enough.” But U of I was happy to embrace the festival, which seeks to showcase how insects appear in popular culture and to educate the public about what filmmakers get right and what they get wrong.
“Our goal is to give attendees more context about what we see,” said Johnson. “The purpose of public universities, and land grant universities in particular, is to not only do innovative research that will benefit society as whole, but also to educate the citizens of their home states. Our department values our role as not only researchers, but also as educators. It’s important for universities to have relationships with the community and to communicate the things we do with people. IFFF is one way we do that.”
This year’s IFFF features three films on the theme of “exploding arthropods,” which Johnson said the organizers chose to accommodate the fact that one film features spiders.
Doors open at 6 p.m., when attendees can visit an insect petting zoo, view art created by local students, and get their faces painted. At 7:30 p.m., the film screenings start.
Palm Rot (7.5 minutes)
Special guest and animator Ryan Gillis will introduce his short film.
Bug (99 minutes)
After an earthquake releases strange cockroaches from the bowels of the earth that spontaneously burst into flame, Prof. James Parmiter brings them into his laboratory and hybridizes them with domestic cockroaches, inadvertently creating a strain of intelligent combustible “super-roaches.”
Lavalantula (81 minutes)
After volcanic eruptions occur in Los Angeles, giant, lava-spewing tarantulas appear and begin to wreak havoc throughout the city.
The sheer number of films about insect fear suggests that people have wanted to keep insects at arms length for a long time. Johnson suspects that humans began fearing insects because they are often associated with disease, harm, or unsanitary conditions. According to Johnson, even within the Entomology Department at U of I, some people fear certain insects (or arthropods).
“I’m not a huge fan of spiders,” said Johnson. “I don’t handle tarantulas. We have one in our department. I’m not fearful of it; I just don’t like to pick it up. Some people in my department let the tarantula crawl all over, on their heads and things. I just don’t have it in me.”
He says fear makes it hard for people to recognize that insects perform what entomologists call “ecosystem services.”
“Things like pollination, or even the behavior of predators, are important for the ecosystem,” said Johnson.
In his own work, Johnson spends his time researching the complexities of ecosystems and insect life.
“Broadly speaking, in the lab I work in, we study long-horned beetles, which have a unique system of communication. Because it’s difficult for them to find each other in the forest, they emit pheromones to find each other so they can mate and lay eggs. My area of that research is what we call ‘natural enemies’—things like predators that eat the beetles. Of natural enemies, I study parasitoids. Unlike predators, parasitoids lay eggs in or on something and eventually kill their hosts. They cannot complete their development unless they’re on something. There are all different types of parasitoids, but I study parasitic wasps that lay their eggs within the eggs of long-horned beetles. It is amazing how tiny they are. To me, it’s actually beautiful to see these strange little things you would never know are in the environment under the microscope.”
Getting people excited about the strange, sometimes terrifying, and sometimes beautiful world of insect (and arthropod) life is the main goal of IFFF, said Johnson.
“To adults, like ourselves, understanding the work of scientists helps us to see why it is important work, and why it benefits our state and our society as a whole. To younger generations, seeing what scientists do helps them develop a sense of wonderment for the world. They can see that insects are actually really cool. Or if not insects, plants, or chemistry, or something else. IFFF shows people things they might not encounter otherwise, or ever. It helps them imagine potential careers. It helps all of us bridge that gap between technical knowledge and what’s important for people and the world.”
The 33rd Annual Insect Fear Film Festival takes place this Saturday, February 27th, in Foellinger Auditorium at the Krannert Center on the Main Quad. The event is free and open to the public.