The Swarm (Novel)

The Sunday “Bad” Movies is an outlet for me to write about the bad movies that I watch. Not all of them, mind you. There are bad movies that I’ve seen that haven’t been included in the blog. But the whole purpose of this adventure is for me to watch bad movies, write about them, and hopefully learn something useful. That something could be a filmmaking tip. There have been enough bad movies featured to show how important lighting is to making night scenes watchable. That something could be a trend. I’ve seen a bunch of slasher style movies and found a trend of serial killers being resurrected as normally inanimate objects. Snowmen, gingerbread men, dolls, and other objects have housed their spirits. That something could also be a wider knowledge of a specific movie and how it ended up being made.

That last category is what brought around this post. A few years ago, I reviewed The Swarm for a horror site that I no longer write for. My school schedule resulted in my not being able to keep up with their deadlines, so I eventually stopped asking for movies to review. After seeing it, I knew that The Swarm had potential to be included in the Sunday “Bad” Movies. It got suggested for the blog a little while later, I scheduled it for week 253, and then rewatched and wrote about it. That seemed like it would be the end of my time with the bee movie. Guess what? It wasn’t.

The Swarm was based on a book of the same name by Arthur Herzog. He also wrote the novel Orca, which was turned into a movie featured in week 144. I found the novel at a local second-hand book shop some time ago and picked it up with the full intention of someday writing this post. I would read the book, write about it, and possibly compare it to the movie. Back in August, I decided it was time. I cracked open the novel, which had a cover filled with pictures of the film’s cast, and started reading. Now I’m finished with the novel, and I can say that it is almost completely different from the movie.

Let’s start with what was the same. The African bees were invading the USA. That basic story was the same in both the novel and the film. John Wood was also the main character in both. He was a scientist leading the charge to stop the bees. Other scientists were there as well. Walter Krim, for example, was a scientist character in both stories. Oh, and the town of Maryville played an important part in each interpretation. These are just general details, though. Most of the story beats in the novel were different than what happened on screen.

To understand the differences, you need to understand one of the major film trends at the time. Throughout the late 1960s and well into the 1970s, ensemble disaster movies were all the rage. Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, and The Towering Inferno had each found massive success with their large, star-studded casts. Most of the disaster movies were produced by a man named Irwin Allen. After he released The Towering Inferno, he was looking for another disaster story. He found it in the African bees of The Swarm. He had seen the book and decided to use it as the basis for his next movie.

Thus, The Swarm became a giant, spectacle-filled disaster movie with a bunch of well-known stars. The town of Maryville became the location of one of the biggest bee attacks ever. The bees caused a train to derail and fall off a cliff, killing every person on board. A nuclear reactor had a meltdown because of the bees. In the end, the only way to get rid of the African bee menace was to send them out to sea where some explosives would kill the entire swarm. Everything was blown up to extreme proportions to exploit the destructive spectacle of the situation. What could have made for an interesting horror story was relegated to big scenes of people and places being ravaged.

The book was much more lowkey about the attacks. The vast majority of the pages were devoted to scientists investigating the attacks, the bees, and their connection to a rising death rate among farmers. The entire middle section was a team of scientists devising a method to try and prevent the bees from swarming upon large cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. There were spurts of imagery about what the bees were doing to people in small towns, but that wasn’t about glorifying the attacks. Those bits of horror were about motivating the scientists to work harder on their solutions.

The novel ended up feeling like a blend of Stephen King and Michael Crichton. The science was technical and became a major part of the storytelling. That was much like what Michael Crichton was doing throughout his career in novels like Congo, Timeline, and Jurassic Park. Then there were small vignette moments that showed how the general population was reacting to the bee menace. That was reminiscent of Stephen King’s storytelling in novels like Salem’s Lot, The Stand, and Under the Dome, where he would give a broad overview of the events by visiting many characters for small moments as they were affected. The Swarm managed to blend these two together in a way that strengthened the story to make it feel more whole. It gave the point of view of people experiencing the crisis as well as the point of view of the scientists working out a way to stop the crisis.

What really helped with the storytelling in the novel was how easy it was to become invested in the characters. The scientists each had their own unique personalities. There was the one that worked so hard that he started cutting corners and it resulted in his death. One of the scientists was driven insane while trying to find a solution. Another felt that he needed to skip steps in a testing process because they didn’t have time and he ended up testing an antidote on himself. There was even one skeptical scientist who quit the project to get his family to safety because he saw the bees getting to the big cities sooner rather than later. The investment in the characters and their struggle to overcome the bees drove the narrative forward, making for a compelling story.

Reading the novel was a wholly different experience than watching the movie. Instead of the spectacle of explosions, crashes, and giant bees haunting the people who had been stung, the novel focused on the scientists and their efforts to stop bee attacks. It wasn’t about how many people could be thrown into the story. There was a team of a few scientists and that was all the main characters that were needed. The novel, though dealing with a catastrophic event, was much more reigned in than the movie.

Irwin Allen took the basic idea of The Swarm and blew it up into another ensemble cast, event disaster movie. But to completely understand where the idea came from, the novel needed to be discussed. Elements were used. The scene where a scientist tested an antidote on himself that was taken directly from the novel. The differences are interesting to look at as well because film and writing are different mediums. There will need to be changes in how the story is told between the two forms. And this one was vastly different.

What was learned from seeing the movie and reading the novel? Sometimes what works on the page doesn’t translate well to the screen. Sometimes the person doing the adaptation will add new elements that take away the impact. Turning the story into a spectacle disaster movie took away the character work that the novel was able to do. The whole ending was changed because the end of the novel wasn’t cinematic enough. More action was put into the movie to make things exciting. The adaptation changed a lot.

Every once in a while, I’ll check out some of the material related to a movie watched for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’ll read novels that the movies were based on. I’ll read novelizations of the movies. I’ll watch documentaries about the movies or watch television shows that the movies were based on. There are so many possibilities. There are so many ways to broaden your horizons about the things you watch and come to a better understanding of how they exist. This post did just that, in a way. And that’s how I like it.