Animal Attack
Idris Elba fighting a lion might sound like the most beautiful accident, but a long history of animal attack films precedes Beast – and is almost certain to outlive it. Here’s Josh Hobson with the warning signs.
As far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, all manner of creatures have terrorised human protagonists. Sharks get top billing of course. But let’s not forget spiders, alligators, dogs, orcas, snakes, bears, wolves, piranhas and slugs. With Idris Elba’s new thriller Beast, we can add lions to the list.
The appetite for tales of man vs beast keeps growing. The deeper significance behind the antagonistic beasts of animal-attack films can be overstated of course; can’t a giant man-eating crocodile just be a giant man-eating crocodile? After all, Lake Placid really doesn’t penetrate the human condition. A giant croc lives in the lake. It eats people. The end.
Still, the genre-defining Jaws, a film with more depth in its opening sequence than the entirety of Lake Placid, is ripe for analysis. Upon release, Jaws had been held up as everything from an allegory for issues as broad as the Watergate scandal, to a mediation on the role of class structures in American society, to a treatise on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
While these may all be valid interpretations, the way society thought about our stewardship of the planet was very different in 1974. The idea of climate change was not the mainstream concept of today. But Jaws made one thing clear: when we seek to exploit the natural world for profit, nature strikes back. And in Jaws, it’s not the crooked mayor of Amity Island who gets chomped on, but the innocent kids, teenagers, and fisherman, who were trying to get on with their normal lives.
Jurassic Park, another Spielberg film, illustrates the criticism of capitalist societies neatly, as well as the way in which our understanding of animal attacks has changed. In Jurassic Park scientists successfully bring back dinosaurs from extinction, an idea that begins as a noble journey into scientific progress and discovery, but which is later corrupted by corporate greed. When a T-rex is accidentally unleashed on San Diego in the sequel, the consequent destruction of everyday lives grows while the heads of large corporations prioritise profits over the safeguarding of the natural world.
In Anaconda, what begins as a journey into the Amazon to make a documentary about an uncontacted tribe is derailed when Jon Voight’s snake bounty-hunter takes over the protagonists boat and sets them on course to hunt down the titular Boa. In Deep Blue Sea, researchers are looking for a cure for Alzheimer’s in the brains of sharks before getting carried away and artificially enlarging the fish’s brains to make super-genius killer Makos.
Fast forward to today and a pattern plays out: a select group of people making terrible decisions that drastically impact the planet for short-term financial gain.
In eco-horror today, animal attacks endure. There’s a primal thrill, a portal into a world to reconnect with our primitive roots – and the appeal has been growing for thousands of years. Hercules was slaying the Nemean Lion long before Idris Elba’s Dr Nate Samuels stepped foot on safari.
These films can speak to our place in the pecking order, where humans find themselves not merely part of the food chain, but with a sense of belonging in nature. But most importantly, the creature feature provides the possibility of conquest. As much as these animals represent humanity’s guilt and fear over the natural world, they also exist as something concrete that can be defeated.
As the real natural disasters become increasingly alarming, a threat not just to individual lives or discrete societies but to the survival of our species, the microcosm of this fear as represented by the cinematic ‘monstrous’ animal serves as a manageable problem. From the throes of danger and excitement emerges comfort in the possibility of redemption, of using human cunning and ingenuity to overcome nature and save ourselves from the disaster of our own making.
Beast nestles perfectly into this narrative, following the story of a man-eating lion seeking revenge on humankind after being wounded by poachers. While the lion spends most of the film trying to eat the main characters, there’s no doubt that the poachers are the real villains of the piece. In part, because it’s much harder to turn the audience against a majestic lion compared to a dead-behind-the-eyes shark or snake, but also because the illegal trade in lion bones by one of the film’s heroes plays a major part.
Charting the growing public awareness of man-made impact on the environment, the ecological warnings of Beast are crystal clear. As the ecological crisis worsens, there’s no longer time to hide or confuse pro-environmentalist messages on screens. There’s certainly no possibility that Beast could be interpreted as a Watergate analogy. And at this rate, it won’t be long before the animal attacking the heroes of the next creature feature blockbuster is a rabid corporate executive from Shell or BP.
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