The Wasp Woman (1959) and Horror Movies with Multiple Fears

Every person, no matter who they are, is filled with fear. There’s something that they are afraid of. It could be something obvious, something that everyone knows they are afraid of. Or it could be something below the surface, something that only they know. That layering of fears is what makes people who they are. That is why I am different from you and you are different from the person next door. We are complex beings with emotions that we show and those that we don’t.

Horror movies are similarly complex. The difference is that everything is on screen. You just need to know where to find it. Filmmakers analyze and find meaning in their fears by putting them into their work. Audiences like to watch their fears play out on screen, rather than face them in reality. It’s a cathartic experience for both the creator and the viewer. There could be the obvious monster, killer, ghost, or animal that terrorizes the characters. Or there could be some deeper horrifying fear trickling through the cracks of that surface story.

The Wasp Woman was one of those movies with layers of horror. Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) was the face of a pharmaceutical company who had aged out of her prime modeling days. She hired Dr. Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark), a man working on a de-aging serum derived from wasps, to help her regain her youthful looks. They hadn’t worked out the kinks in the formula, though, and Janice began to transform into something else. She turned into a wasp.

The face value horror of The Wasp Woman would be Janice Starlin turning into a wasp and killing people. The other main characters had to band together to stop her from killing. It was a basic monster movie where the monster happened to be someone the characters knew. The characters were afraid because she was a hybrid of a human and a wasp. Wasps wanted nothing more than to harm people and the Janice wasp was no different. They wanted to survive her wrath and put an end to it.

The other way that the story could be seen was as a loss of humanity. From Janice’s perspective, she was literally becoming less human as the wasp serum took over. Civilization helped to build people into intelligent, self-aware beings, capable of stifling their base instincts. A loss of humanity would push those instincts to the front. It would make someone more comparable to an animal. Janice was literally becoming an animal that succumbed to its base instincts. She was losing her humanity by taking the serum.

One final deeper horror to the whole story was the theme of agism. Janice took the serum because she had lost her youthful looks. She aged out of being the face of the company. Without her looks, she could no longer be the face. People trusted her youthful face. Sales were dropping now that a new woman was the face of the company. She needed her looks, her youth, back in order for her company to be taken seriously again. If the company was taken seriously, she would be taken seriously again. That pushed her into using the serum. People treated her and her company like less of a human because her young looks had gone. Trying to get them back would literally make her less human.

This is not to say that the deeper fears in The Wasp Woman were intentional. The movie was made one year after The Fly as a quick cash-in. The thought that went into it was probably the monster aspects and nothing else. These other fears only exist if you think about the movie and project a sense of empathy for Janice Starlin. The movie never put you in her mindset. It never gave insight into her fears that would have come through the deeper meanings. It only showed the monster stuff. That was all the people behind The Wasp Woman cared about.

Many other horror movies have had multiple fears woven into them. Having more than one fear in a horror movie can add depth to the characters. Multiple things to be afraid of can make the experience of watching a horror flick much more effective. The movie will stick in the audience’s mind better. Would you be more scared if it were a simple monster flick, or are you more scared when there’s a monster and you’re thinking about losing your humanity? Probably that second one. That option has more things to potentially scare you. It also adds more dread to what a character experiences, allowing you to better connect with them.

Take, for example, the first Sleepaway Camp movie. Two cousins were sent away to summer camp to enjoy the summer with other children near their age. Things weren’t all sunshine and rainbows, however, as people turned up dead. People began suspecting the cousins of having some sort of role in the murders, leading to accusations being thrown around until a final confrontation on the beach. The ending was one of the most iconic in slasher history.

That might seem straight-forward upon first glance. It was a summer camp slasher, coming on the heels of Friday the 13^th. But there was more to it than a bunch of kids and employees being killed at a summer camp. Much of the story hinged upon bullying. Angela, the main character, was being bullied by her bunkmate and her counselor. Other kids also began to relentlessly mock and tease her because she was an introvert. Angela’s experiences at the camp showed the true horror of childhood bullying and the extreme effects that it could have upon the victim.

Another example of a horror film having layers of fear came in the form of Jaws: The Revenge. It was the fourth and final film in the Jaws franchise, regardless of what Back to the Future: Part II predicted. Ellen Brody took a trip to the Bahamas to visit one of her sons after the other son was killed in a shark attack during the Christmas season. Things weren’t peaceful, however, when that same shark started attacking people in the Bahamas.

Like the other Jaws movies, the primary focus of Jaws: The Revenge was the series of shark attacks occurring around the main characters. This installment pulled in a whole other kind of horror, though. It brought the idea of post-traumatic stress disorder into the story. Ellen Brody had experienced shark attacks through the events of Jaws and Jaws 2. Her son was killed in the jaws of a shark at the beginning of this film. Having gone through so much trauma with sharks, she was going to have trouble when a shark began attacking people in the Bahamas. She thought it had a vendetta against the entire Brody family. She was having nightmares about shark attacks and there were shark attacks when she was awake. There was so much PTSD and current traumatic stress happening to her all at once. It was horrific.

Three movies, each with multiple layers of horror. They layer things up so that the horror can resonate deeper in a person than the surface. It’s all fine and dandy to see some monsters or things attacking people. However, if a filmmaker wants to connect the audience with the characters, they need to go deeper. There needs to be a more emotional element. There needs to be a deeper fear. That way, the audience will vicariously live through what they watch. They will feel closer to the events and the people within them. The audience will be better scared.

Fear is one of the few emotions that can drastically shape the world. People do things they otherwise wouldn’t do out of fear of what would happen if they didn’t. Wars are waged over fear. People die over fear. People love because of fear. People lie because of fear. Fear can lead to a multitude of different events. Filmmakers have tapped into the innate fear that every person has so that they could make people feel things. Films could change a person’s emotions. They could be a cathartic release for people whose fears overwhelm them.

Here are a few notes to finish things off:

• Sleepaway Camp (week 150) and Jaws: The Revenge (week 240) were brought up in this post.
• The Wasp Woman featured Bruno VeSota, who was also featured in The Million Dollar Duck (week 119).
• Lynn Cartwright was in The Wasp Woman and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (week 345).
• Have you seen The Wasp Woman? Did you enjoy it? Do you find the deeper fears in horror movies? Was this kind of an obvious topic? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• You can also use Twitter and the comments to tell me about movies that you think I should be checking out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. Hit me up.
• You should also give a peek to the Sunday “Bad” Movies account on Instagram. I’m always trying to post stuff there related to the movies that have been covered.
• Next week is one of those franchise weeks! We’re there again. I’ll be checking out two television movies based on a classic animated television show. Have you figured it out yet? The movies will be Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins and Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster. Come back in a week’s time to see what I have to say about those two flicks.