Original subtitles

Can nature go crazy?

Can animal violence and madness create bloodthirsty killers?

Can nature take revenge?

The answers are yes.

Whether they're B-movies or elevated studio pictures--

There's something strange in the woods,

and I don't know what it is.

I feel like every animal out there is watching us.

--when the director's vision is firing on all cylinders,

you as the audience member are seated right there with

the character that you're watching

as they're experiencing this horror, and it's fucking great.

What the hell is that?

Elephants!

And they just don't seem to stop.

That's what makes these greatest moments or these greatest films

so special, so powerful.

An animal attack movie

is definitely a monster movie.

It's the dragon in the cave that we should just not have gone

to mess with or movies like Cujo,

where it's like your best friend,

and they become a monster.

We're drawn to animal attacks movies,

and we love movies about being the prey hunted

by a natural predator, because on some level,

we know it's true.

If you plop us in the woods or on the ocean,

and you put an apex predator in the picture, suddenly,

we look like what we are, which are vulnerable,

not very powerful little monkeys just waiting to be eaten.

What are the must-see animal attack movies?

The Birds, I remember the birds being

terrifying when I was a child.

The idea of taking day time and such mundane things

as just regular birds.

This killer is coming at you from every direction.

Yeah, it was scary.

Obviously, a bird can't really do that to you,

but at the time, it seemed believable.

Thing I love about the Birds is Tippi Hedren's

performance, which is unhinged.

I think you're the cause of all this.

I think you're evil, evil!

Just somebody who is clearly terrified,

and in fear for their life, and in legitimate danger.

It is such an iconic horror performance.

The lasting impact of Alfred Hitchcock's the Birds,

especially on animal attack movies,

is you can see in anything where the idea is the slowly mounting

number of animals, where there's inevitably going to be

that shot where someone's looking around

and you see all these animals that, on their own,

you would never be afraid of.

And it's the idea that if there's enough of any species

of animal, the sheer volume of them

becomes very either unnerving or inevitably terrifying.

You see a movie a hundred times, and then at one

point, you go, what?

We've got to get the children out of here.

They're in the school, and outside the school,

there's a bunch of birds.

So the teachers go, we got to get out of here!

No, you're right where you're supposed to be.

It's like Hooper, Brody, and Quint going,

maybe we should think about this, Quint.

Let's take a dip, and we'll talk about it in the water.

It is a gripping vision

of social breakdown in the face of an unexpected

and unexplained threat.

It's Jaws before there was jaws.

Willard, an animal attack movie

that came out before Jaws, ended up with its own imitators.

Maybe that was trying to go for a Birds vibe, but I think

it's a very original movie, looking back at it, of just--

it's almost like a drama that had this weird element

of the killer animals.

His dad died; and Ernest Borgnine

is running his dad's company, and doesn't respect him,

and seems to actually take pleasure in teasing

him and pranking him at work.

I carried your father on my back for years,

and now I'm carrying you.

Like a lot of children who grew up in the '70s I was

terrified of Ernest Borgnine.

What's the matter, Tiger?

Got a little nervous stomach?

So to see him attacked by rats was actually

something quite pleasant.

Tear him up!

No, wait.

No, no!

No, wait, wait, no!

No, no, no, wait, no, no, no!

No!

Let me out!

I loved Willard.

It was the perfect amount of rats.

It was creepy.

It was fun.

Willard felt like he could really have happened anywhere,

if you just pissed off a kid who was friends with a rat,

and the rat decided, you know, I got friends, too,

and we're going to get you.

Do something!

No, don't!

Don't leave me.

It was like a gang.

It was like the Crips but with rats.

Oh, god!

Emma, Emma, get something on his body.

It'll neutralize the venom.

These nature strikes back movies culturally caught

the wave of environmental awareness

in the late '60s or early '70s, where you got Willard,

Ben, Frogs.

And the underlying score was that mankind

has pushed nature around, and now

nature is going to push back.

And then it just became, what animal haven't we done?

Billions of dollars have been spent to make these

nuclear plants safe, fail-safe.

The odds against anything going wrong are astronomical, doctor.

I appreciate that, doctor, but let me ask you--

in all your fail-safe techniques,

is there any provision against an attack by killer bees?

The Swarm should have worked, but

people aren't afraid of bees.

Every sort of animal was running amok

at some point over the '70s.

Squirm is another movie where it's

not about mutated, over-sized whatever.

It's basically taking a creature that people are grossed out

by anyway and saying, well, what if there were

lots, and lots, and lots of them,

and they all turned on humanity?

Very few things in horror movies that disturbed me.

Squirm is one of them.

Directed by the great Jeff Lieberman,

and I believe he had the idea for the story when

lightning struck the ground in his backyard,

and all the worms came up.

But he witnessed this as a kid, and it stuck with him.

There's an homage to Psycho, which

is insanely disturbing, albeit so ridiculous, it's funny.

He had Rick Baker doing his effects.

It's an early Rick Baker film.

The whole worm face thing where you see them burrowing

into the guy's flesh, there's lots

of great kind of icky, scary, gross moments in that film.

So these movies were well-intentioned and all about

the consequence of treating the environment poorly,

And then comes Jaws.

And Jaws becomes not only the most important and influential

animal attack movie of all time, but potentially the biggest

game-changer in Hollywood history

in terms of the trajectory of movies

moving forward from 1975 on.

As far as, what is the greatest animal

attacks film of all time?

This one, there's not a lot of suspense.

It's pretty clear the greatest animal attacks film of all time

is Jaws.

I think everyone in my generation,

when you ask them about their favorite movie,

they go for Jaws, because that film is absolutely perfect.

It's like, what did he do there?

It's insane.

It's like he took a B-monster movie

and changed cinema forever.

What is so brilliant about Jaws

is obviously Spielberg at the beginning of his career.

And we've all heard the story, and the shark

named Bruce didn't work, and all that stuff.

It is a perfect example of how mistakes and failures

are often the doorways to gold.

The solution is what becomes iconic.

The terror of Jaws is the confidence

that this genius director had in just

showing as the camera comes in.

Roy Scheider sitting on that beach looking like,

that is the horror.

--the office and a garbage truck next to the office.

It's like, you can build the coolest robot

shark of all time, but they don't strike fear

into my heart the way that those really excellently

executed ones can do.

I can go slow ahead.

Come on down and chum some of this shit.

I think I saw Jaws when I was about 10--

You're going to need a bigger boat.

--and I was sitting next to my cousin.

You have that scene where they go out to the little boat,

and he sees the big shark tooth, which already had me.

And I was like, get out of that water.

And then when the head comes rolling through that open spot,

I was so jarred, I jumped out of my seat into my cousin's lap.

So Jaws holds for me some of the biggest scares

I ever had as a horror fan.

It's the sound of it that's so awful.

It's just like that first grab down, and she goes, ..

You go, oh god, you know.

And as a kid, you're believing, well, she

can grab on that buoy, and she's going to be OK.

No, she's not going to be OK.

God, please, no!

Nobody wanted to go to the beach.

Nobody wanted to get in the water.

It was just like, everyone was convinced

that a gigantic shark could come up in water this deep

and just bite your legs off.

It caused such a weird psychological crater

in America in particular.

People just got it in their heads

that beaches weren't safe unless we made them shark-free.

And it became popular for people to just

go out and kill as many sharks as possible on trips.

Some scientists say that only now are certain shark species

recovering from the over-harvesting and excessive

hunting in the wake of Jaws.

For Christ's sake, tomorrow's the 4th of July,

and we will be open for business.

The movie holds up after so many years.

I had a couple of friends who had

never seen it, which you always go, who hasn't seen Jaws?

And we had three people with us that had never seen Jaws,

and they were just horrified.

So I was just like, oh wow, OK, so you can

still scare people with this.

Have they pushed him too far?

Clovis.

My favorite animal attack

movie is Joe Dante's Piranha.

It had come out shortly after Jaws,

and they knew exactly what they were doing with this movie.

The water is filled with carnivorous fish, piranha.

And they had a movie that, essentially, it was

just Jaws with a thousand jaws.

The craziest thing about Piranha

is that it was written by the great American screenwriter

and novelist John Sayles.

Nice night, huh?

And finding out that John Sayles wrote the script

for Piranha is a little bit like learning that John Steinbeck

wrote the script for Porky's.

There's a huge cognitive dissonance there.

One of the things I love so much about Piranha

is that it's so shameless in what it does.

The movie literally starts with a character

playing a Jaws video game.

And it never lets up throughout the entire thing.

This is early Joe Dante, pre-Gremlins,

when he is just going nuts.

Joe Dante does what Steven Spielberg would

never dream of doing, and he actually

has POV shots of the piranha.

We actually follow the piranha as they

skimmer, skimmer, skimmer right up to people's butts,

right up to their boobs.

It's pretty crass, but it's silly, wonderful 1970s crass

that everyone is having a good time with.

I think I saw the movie for the first time

when I was very little, and I didn't ever

think about piranhas biting my butt before when

I was in an inner tube.

But I thought about it every day since then

because of this film.

Help me!

The other thing about Piranha is

it's the second best animal attacks movie written by John

Sayles, and he only wrote two.

Alligator, which is another John Sayles bad animal movie,

in the '70s and '80s, you could buy baby crocodiles,

and bring them home, and keep them in your aquarium.

But then when they started to get too big,

people would flush them down the toilet.

And so this imagined a alligator getting flushed down

the toilet in the 1970s, and encountering some kind

of toxic slime, and eventually becoming massive, feeding off

derelicts and stray children.

Alligator is brilliant.

It's treated as a very serious crisis,

but of course, you have a cop that no one believes,

and then until it starts to go wrong.

An when it starts to go wrong, that's really where it becomes

really fun.

And it has, I think, one of the all-time great animal

attack moments, especially, you see it at a young age,

and it just fries in your mind, which

is a kid at a birthday party.

They're dressed up as pirates, and they're

making him innocently walk the plank,

which is the diving board of his swimming pool.

And they turn on the lights, and the alligator's in there.

It took a lot of inspiration from Jaws.

Our city needs us in this moment.

We've got to not let anybody know that there's this problem

right under the surface.

And if we can keep it a secret and we can hire some yahoos

with shotguns to take care of this for us,

we're going to be OK.

I've flown in Colonel Brock to take charge of the operation.

Take charge?

Yeah, well, he's hunted big game

animals all over the world.

It's about power, money, greedy, gross people that

don't want to utilize science or education as a way

of helping let people know what's going on

and taking care of a problem.

Bring in the big guns, and guess what?

They get fucked.

Sometimes, I love a film that makes

it real hard to watch a character suffer or be killed.

But sometimes, that's really fun when this person's a real piece

of shit, and you get to watch them

get chomped by an alligator.

Animal attack movies push all sorts of buttons.

It's the classic storytelling structure.

For man versus man, man versus nature,

you either have an animal that's pushed too far because of man's

abuse, or you have animals that are

lashing out due to environmental changes,

like Day of the Animals.

That movie is literally about the ozone layer being depleted.

The ozone layer is of profound importance

because it protects us from the harmful effects

of the sun's radiation.

And the animals lose their minds.

You have pretty much every kind

of animal imaginable that's local to that area

going after the characters.

It's like they all got together, and it's like, OK,

the wildcats are going after these guys,

and the eagles and hawks will take this girl out, and so on.

One thing for sure, a lot of well-fed

animals running around.

Girdler gets these great shots that--

pre-CG compositing is really amazing.

He does a great job of doing these shots where they'll just

have a bear walk by in the background and an eagle land

all in the same shot.

And just imagining what they were doing behind the scenes,

I think now, that you wouldn't think twice because you're just

like, none of those animals were in the same frame

at the same time.

Oh god, no!

No!

In the story, they just keep getting attacked by animals,

and as happens with any of these movies,

they start to turn on each other.

You lily-livered punk, I'm running this camping trip!

That one is also memorable because it

features Leslie Nielsen who, at the time, was a dramatic actor.

This was three years before Airplane.

But it's one of the great comedic performances

of his career.

Shut up, you little cockroach, or I'll

shove you off the cliff!

He plays this alpha male-type who,

when things start going crazy, starts going a little

nuts himself and starts leching after

this young girl in the group.

He has this memorable line where he says--

I take what I want, and I give you what I want to give you.

And right now, I want that.

And then, he eventually, in the middle of the night,

in a raging thunderstorm, strips off his shirt

and wrestles a bear.

And it's one of the great camp moments

in horror cinema of the '70s.

There's one that I would love to mention,

and it's tricky, talking about some

of these Italian animal attack movies,

because there was suspected animal abuse

or just mishandling of animals.

Yeah, that's the way.

But there is this film called Wild Beasts

from the '80s that is basically what happens if PCP gets

into the water supply of a bunch of zoo animals

and they go crazy.

Tommy!

There was one scene I remember,

it was like a big cat, and it was chasing this cab

through the streets of Italy.

And I just like, what is going on?

It's so beautifully shot, the way

this animal is chasing this convertible down the street.

And the music, and the way it all comes together,

and where all the planets came into alignment to make what

is a perfect cinematic chase scene.

It's definitely the greatest "animal chasing after a car"

chase scene in cinema history.

Hey, look at that.

She's not crazy.

She's being chased by a cheetah.

Don't shoot him!

Cujo, what's the matter?

Cujo!

It seems like cats are the worst horror pets,

but that's only because of our prejudice towards cats

and our favoritism towards dogs.

Dogs are wonderful in horror movies

because they'll often be helpful.

But what about Cujo?

That's a bad dog.

He's a very bad dog.

There is nothing wrong with Cujo.

Cujo was a good boy.

He just got pushed into a cave chasing a rabbit,

and he got bit by a bat.

He was never bad.

He was just a victim of this circumstance.

And that movie is heartbreaking to watch, as well.

Killer dog movies, I think, they're

always unnerving because they're supposed to be our friends,

and people love getting big dogs because they're so cuddly.

But every now and then, you got to think,

could I take my own dog in a fight if it came to it?

And I think if you own a Saint Bernard,

the answer is always no.

The reason that Cujo is so intense,

somewhat unusually for an animal attack film,

is that it's so claustrophobic.

Dee Wallace and her son are trapped

in this car on a sweltering day, and there's nowhere to go.

And Cujo is just so scary, and drooling,

and vicious, and relentless, you really

feel the dog's merciless rage.

And that, combined with how trapped they are in the car,

is-- it's very hard to watch.

I want to go home.

It's not a monster.

It's just a doggy.

The thing about Cujo is that it

has this towering performance by Dee Wallace in it,

where she explores about a thousand shades of grief,

and pain, and resilience.

Please, God, get me out of here.

The fact that it was never recognized with any award

nominations or serious critical notice

is a reminder that horror films can't get no respect.

A similar performance in a straight drama, I would think,

would have instantly put her into the conversation

for Best Actress for that year.

Well, come on, then!

If Cujo has lasted, it's because of that Dee

Wallace performance.

Supper's ready.

Come and get it.

I love Arachnophobia.

It's really scary--

Rock and roll.

--and really funny.

It's bad luck to kill a spider in a new house.

Just made that up, didn't you, dear?

Those

Are not easy to do in tandem.

There are four or five ways to do it right

and 400 or 500 ways to do it wrong.

Arachnophobia takes place in Spielbergia, you know,

where Poltergeist took place and where ET took place.

Come on, we live in the country now.

It's time to work through this irrational, paralyzing terror.

It's not irrational.

But the people behave in a way that's

normal as opposed to in a stylized acceptance of a horror

movie.

And that's why it's funny.

Chris, I'm scared to death.

Yeah, we all are, but our brains

secrete a neurotransmitter that enables us to deal with them.

I don't think I have that particular neurotransmitter.

It is a classic product from the years when the Steven

Spielberg machine could produce fun, funny, scary family

entertainment that included a spider crawling

out of a corpse's nose.

I took my sister and my cousin to see Arachnophobia,

and they were very little.

And I drove, and what a mistake.

We could not even get back on the highway.

They were freaking out like there

were spiders and eight-legged crawlies coming

from every corner, screaming.

I'm like, you're going to make me crash the car.

In the last decade, there has been

some really interesting writing about why we love horror films.

One of the reasons we are drawn to them

is because they give us an evolutionary advantage.

We are able to experience stressful, frightening

situations in the safe playground of our imagination.

We can explore terrifying scenarios without actually

having to live through them because we can

live through them in a story.

There are some primal, ancient dangers to your life

and to mine--

snakes, sharks, spiders.

So Arachnophobia plays to those fears

that are deeply ingrained.

And when you ask yourself, why would

we want to face that fear?

We face it so if we ever were confronted

with a big, hairy, poisonous spider in real life,

we would know how to act.

We wouldn't just be paralyzed with terror, because we've

already faced that spider a few times already

in films and in stories.

Nature run amok movies can go through cycles.

The '70s, obviously, very serious-minded.

What in hell are you?

And the '80s, went a little more crazier.

Keep moving up through the '90s, you've got Lake Placid.

That was a little bit more zany, because at that point, when

you're dealing with nature run amok movies,

the audience is just straight up expecting some sort of tongue

to be planted firmly in cheek.

Come and get it.

Ugh.

I like the writing.

I like the relationships.

Well, your husband, Bernie, you didn't by any chance

lead him to the lake blindfolded?

If I had a dick, this is where I'd tell you to suck it.

Felt like the kind of whip smart humor--

Crocodiles can't swim in saltwater.

Yeah, well, that'll be your little secret.

You got Brendan Gleason playing this snarky sheriff.

Oh, god!

Oh! Are there two?

I think there's two.

There's two. - I can see that.

- You all right? - He bit me!

- You OK? - He bit me.

There's two. There's two.

I can count.

Back to one.

And so by the time you get to Cocaine Bear

and Elizabeth Banks directing, that pairing--

you can't be serious.

I am a city person.

When I go in the woods, when I go hiking,

one of my biggest fears is bears.

So Cocaine Bear, it's a bear and her cubs,

but the bear is on cocaine, which makes it way more

scary than just a typical bear.

A bear did cocaine, dad.

Fuck this!

And I did not know until I watched this movie

that bears can climb trees.

Bears can't climb trees.

Of course, they can!

Then why are you up here?

Is that even real?

I don't know, but a bear on cocaine

seems like it'd be able to climb a tree.

Oh, no, no, no, oh, no!

No!

I didn't know that it was going to be as gory as it was.

It's like, I knew it was going to be

about a bear that takes cocaine, and then the bear

goes crazy and chases people.

I figured some people will die.

But I didn't realize that the deaths

were going to be so funny, and good, and over the top.

They do not hold back at all with the deaths.

I think we went in like, OK, let's go see this,

because we see everything.

And wow, what a surprise.

Did it use cocaine?

It was so wacky and really fun.

I think the campiness of the bear really added

to the effect of the film.

If it was too realistic, it probably

wouldn't have been as funny.

It might not be the best animal attacks film ever made,

but it certainly is the best movie ever

made about a bear on cocaine.

That's a fucking bear.

One problem, I guess, morally, you could say,

with animal attack movies is I know a lot of people

are sensitive about the mistreatment

of animals on screen, even with our best intentions.

And so it is nice that special effects have gotten

to the point where they maybe didn't need

a real bear in Cocaine Bear.

But I'd be lying if I said that I don't miss seeing a really

good animal performance, because when it's really good,

it's so much scarier and more impressive,

because you're just like, how did they

get this animal to do that?

And a perfect example to me is the movie,

the Edge, starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin.

The whole middle section of that movie

is just them being stalked by and eventually

realizing they need to kill this bear, played

by one of the great animal actors of all time,

Bart the Bear--

The bear is going to chase me.

--who I grew up with knowing

as the Bald-Headed Bear from John

Hughes's the Great Outdoors.

He's the bear that they get to bounce up and down

on supposedly John Candy, but it was his trainer, who also plays

Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in the Edge anytime

he has to fight with Bart.

He does real acting.

If you watch the movie, the first time Anthony Hopkins

and the bear see each other, they just get this shot of Bart

where he makes the most menacing, angry face.

And I'm sure in real life, his trainer just

said something to him, and put his ears down, and then

gave him an apple after.

Come on, son of a--

That has, I think, the best man-versus-bear fight

ever put to film.

It is very smartly done, and it's

big, wide, anamorphic lenses, huge, huge budget.

And yeah, there's a bear fight in it where it's 95% real bear.

I don't think there's any CG in it

and stuff that isn't real bears, close-ups of animatronics,

but it looks phenomenal.

Bart the Bear just looks so giant,

and he's getting up on his hind legs and hitting the book,

and it's awesome.

If you compare that with any CG bear,

I don't know how you couldn't agree that Bart

has that something special.

Same reason you don't want to replace

humans with too much CG.

There's a natural quality in there.

Come on!

Oh, god.

I've had it with these motherfucking snakes

on this motherfucking plane!

So one of the rules of Maitua is

that you have only one chance to complain

about the heat and the flies.

Rogue is the crazy crocodile movie by Greg McLean, who

is an Australian director, who I don't think

gets enough credit for his contributions

to the horror world.

We're on Bush time now, so should have

us back around 5:00 or 6:00.

Radha Mitchell plays the really beautiful

Australian Outback tour guide, because of course,

she could have been a supermodel or an Australian tour guide.

She chose Australian tour guide.

Northern Territory is home to the biggest

population of saltwater crocodiles in the world.

It's like Night of the Living Dead

or Gilligan's Island, where you've just

got all the different personalities crammed

onto this little space together.

Please don't film me.

And mid-journey, they are suddenly slammed by this

unseen force under the water.

And they are stranded on this little tiny inlet island.

This, this is a bloody tidal river.

What? What does that mean?

Well, see that bunch of trees up there?

Well, that's how high the tide will be when it comes in.

Yeah, the whole bloody place will be underwater.

The first couple of kills, you don't

even see the way that the beast is interacting with its prey.

Sometimes, all you see is bubbles of water.

You turn around, and someone's gone.

That, to me, is scary as all F.

Oh, my god.

There's something about watching a woman who

looks to the water and realizes that her husband has just been

swallowed up by a crocodile and losing her mind as the camera

comes in on her face.

Somebody do something!

Everett!

- Stand back. - No!

All right, they'll back. Move away from the water.

You get the fuck away from me!

Come back, they'll come back!

All of you, stay away from the water!

believe the importance

of reaction shots in animal attack movies,

in chamber piece dramas, in any piece of cinema are everything.

What's wrong with the boat?

The humans are scared.

They're frightened.

They're anxious.

They're letting their interpersonal histories

get in the way of survival.

I'm not going to let my daughter die.

And the crocodile is patient.

He's watching, he's waiting, and he knows he's going to get

them, because they're fools.

It's utilizing an actual, real thing about crocodiles

and alligators, which is, whereas most animals just

eat when they're hungry, crocodiles and alligators will

attack something whenever they get the option,

and they'll store the food so they can eat it

later next time they're hungry.

They tag you as a food supply.

They don't stop.

It's like a vicious dog.

Then, they take you back to the place

where it stores its kills, and--

Which I think they're using as a bit of a loophole

to explain why this crocodile, even after eating someone five

minutes later, is coming back and just

taking them out one by one.

Every kill is so painful, and so sad, and so terrifying,

until finally, our hero is deep in the bowels of this cave

in Australia, and it's just the classic story of a hero

having to face themself and face their fear,

going into the heart of darkness.

I like the Shallows because it's girl versus shark.

And it stars Blake Lively, who is a really likable actress.

Is this the one?

Let's see.

She's a surfer, and she goes off by herself

because she's very adventurous.

She's in this area that's dangerous.

She's all by herself.

She does have a cell phone which she uses to communicate

the premise to her family.

Oh, my god, no way.

Mom's beach, right?

Just as beautiful as she said it was.

And she goes to this isolated cove,

and she gets trapped.

So there's a shark, and then there's the shore,

and then there's this island, and she doesn't

have her phone with her.

She cannot get to the shore because there's a shark.

It's going to kill her if she gets in the water.

And that seems like, well, where do you go from there?

But they go all kinds of places from there.

It's literally like one actor in the middle of an open plain,

360 around her with a shark, and the shark CG.

And they do it really smart in that movie

where it's very much just little things that you see.

You see fins.

You see it knocking stuff over.

So there's very few actual shark shots

so that when they are there, they're fucking awesome,

because they put all the resources into doing

those specific shots.

It all hinges on Blake Lively, and it all

hinges on how good the shark's going to look,

and it all hinges on how it's going to be shot and executed,

because literally, the plot is as simple as a girl

sitting on a rock by herself for 90

minutes with a shark circling around,

and it's fucking tense as hell.

There are two ways to tell a story.

A woman is trapped on a rock.

There is a shark.

But the other way to tell that story

is the Shallows, and that's the art.

That's the art of filmmaking, and that's

the art of storytelling, is that you

take a beautiful, clean concept, and then from that soil,

you grow something, and you have to follow it.

And that's why it can be successful or unsuccessful,

or someone likes it or somebody doesn't, because art

isn't about just point, to point,

to point, to point, to point.

That would be narrative.

I think it's unfair to any shark movie.

It's after Jaws.

But the Shallows, I think it's a great shark movie.

It's just that the bar is so high that, even when

you have a good one, the bar is so high

that you can't even see it.

But it's great.

It's great.

I'm not complaining.

The Shallows is great.

Fuck you.

I love movies when there's already something really

intense going on, and then there's some kind

of monster that shows up.

In Crawl, there's already a really

intense hurricane happening.

And then there's an alligator that shows up in the basement.

Shit!

And our main character has to navigate

dealing with this alligator.

Her dad is there, too, and they have to watch each other

almost get eaten several times.

You look good.

You look like shit.

That one's more of a contained thriller

because it's mostly in a house with very tight quarters

and everything's closed off.

I can't see what's going on.

I can't see where things are.

I can't see around me, and it's almost

like an escape room of trying to get out

of fucking giant crocodiles.

Not only are they trapped in the space

with the two alligators, but the water level

is rising the entire time.

And so there's this ticking clock of,

are we going to be able to get out of here

before we drown to death?

This movie is relentless.

It never stops, and it's perfect screenwriting.

The level of danger just keeps ratcheting up higher and higher

to the point to where you're like, how the fuck are

they going to get out of this?

The opening of Nope with that chimpanzee

is one of the scariest first five minutes

I've seen in a very long time.

It's very disturbing and highly unsettling.

And also, kudos to the editor when the chimpanzee looks up

at the camera and then it cuts.

It's both horrifying because you're questioning,

what just happened?

How bad is it?

And then at the same time, in the back of my brain,

at least, I was like, that's really sad.

Especially when every once in a while,

there will be a terrible animal attack.

And you read about it in the news,

whether it's a poor woman who had her face bitten off

by a chimpanzee or some other unfortunate incident,

and he basically showed us the aftermath of that.

And it's horrifying.

They had a suit performer who worked

on planet of the Apes playing Gordy,

which I think is really cool.

I almost like when you can tell an animal in a movie

is fake, because then, I don't have to think about how

they got an animal to do certain things

while I'm watching a movie.

Nope is about trying to play God.

In this case, it's filmmakers and artists

trying to manipulate animals for their own benefit for screen.

The use of animals in movies and TV,

ever since the medium was created,

you read so many horror stories about the treatment

of the animals.

And beyond that, the way that the exploitation of animals

and the exploitation of maybe people who can't stand up

for themselves behind the scenes, like children in films,

it's a really seedy side to the art form that we all love.

Lost River Lake, pure horror fibs.

Film in 11.

We are going to beat these pea-brained lizard shits.

Just what the world needs, more bugs.

I want to go home.

It's not a monster.

It's just a doggy.

Shark! Shark!

Here's to swimming with bow-legged women.

Horror and romance

have a long-standing relationship with one another.

It's been there since the beginning...

...the intersection of horror,

sex, sexuality, romance.

Going on a date

is one of the most vulnerable things you can do.

You'll remember tonight forever.

Did we finally beat them, or is

this just a temporary victory?