The Science of Ordinary Fear: The Nest (1980)

Kat Albrecht

Despite a recent resurgence of nostalgia, pulp fiction horror books of the 1970s and 1980s are often pigeonholed as ‘cheap thrills’ or low-brow fiction.[i] This treatment mirrors some criticisms of horror films from the 1980s that get slotted into a category of creature features panned for showy special effects in scripts devoid of substance (Wyrick 122-26). I take aim at both of these assessments, however, by revealing nuances in both the substance and form of one such ‘pulp’ horror, The Nest, in both its written (1980) and filmic (1988) versions. I do this by centering the relationship between the media and its audience and by building on work by Sapolsky et al. (28-38) in considering whether presumptions about 1980s audiences correlate with the treatment of science and morality themes in The Nest. Ultimately, I argue that The Nest would be improperly reduced to a ‘cheap thrills paperback’ because of 1) the way it creates and understands science, and 2) the way it goes about the project of building what I term ‘ordinary fear.’ Similarly, I propose that the film, though it differs in its intentions from the novel, centers larger questions of blame and human interference than it gets credit for.

Both versions of The Nest are set on the island of Yarkie, which is overrun by a plague of murderous cockroaches. A team of gutsy locals, led by our heroine Elizabeth, team up with scientist(s) in an effort to save the island from cockroach-damnation. Other than this central shared plot, however, there are actually quite a few differences between the novelization and the film.

In particular, Gregory A. Douglas’s novel is both substantially gorier and more scientific. The first of these revelations is perhaps not surprising, given the reputation of 70s and 80s horror paperbacks.[ii] Throughout the novel, the antics of the cockroaches are described in gruesome detail, putting the horror in sharp focus for the reader. In one such passage, Douglas writes about the demise of Tony Carlucci:

Then Tony Carlucci could swear some feathery thing touched his lips, almost like tiny kisses. For a moment it was pleasant, but then there were sharp pins stabbing his mouth, and he could feel bugs crawling between his lips. The man gagged and clamped his teeth against them, until the pain of flesh being eaten from his bones made him cry out. In that instant, his open mouth was crammed with hissing insects. In another instant, his throat was invaded with a vibrating mass of huge, evil-smelling bugs he could not make out. The man gulped reflexively, swallowed against his will, and spewed out, all at once, it seemed. He felt hot blood spilling from his throat, pouring through his lips which were being away to the bone of his jaws. (26)

This lurid description ratchets up the discomfort of Tony’s physical experience as far as possible, to the point where it becomes larger than life and almost a parody of itself while maintaining a serious tone. Never is there the thrill of a possible escape or a glimmer of hope. His reality is grim, his death is certain, and what the reader has to look forward to is a series of new takes on a coordinated death by a thousand roaches. It is perhaps unsurprising that these passages, which are numerous, would stand out to fans and detractors alike. However, a substantial amount of space in Douglas’s tale is also dedicated to making an ordinary fear a plausible one.

There are two elements at play in constructing horror in the novelization of The Nest: first, providing sufficient scientific explanation to make the phenomenon seem possible, and, second, convincing the audience to buy into the fear object despite its generally ordinary status. Douglas tackles this first task throughout the book, but most notably for the entirety of chapter 5 (pages 79-97). In this chapter titled “Alert,” the reader and the characters are treated to an extended science lesson by two Harvard scientists who have come to aid the besieged residents of Yarkie.

Douglas motivates this passage by using the ignorance of the island townspeople as reason to explain comparable genetic phenomena and then uses the foil of Elizabeth Carr to indicate that a reasonably clever person would believe the science. Woven into these descriptions are definitions of biological concepts and terminology sufficiently recognizable to ease the burden of proof for the reader. For example, when describing the dissection of the Yarkie cockroaches, Douglas writes,

Wanda Lindstrom contributed, “Peter, they ought to know that we did find an unusual and advanced nervous development in the specimen we dissected. Ordinarily, given the size of this roach, the brain should be no bigger than a small pea, sitting just behind the juncture of the antennae with the head. But in our specimen, the brain was at least twice as large. Also the ganglia, which normally are only slight swellings in the insect’s ventral nerve – that’s a primitive chord that runs along the ventral side the way the vertebrate spine runs up the back – these Ganglia are double the normal number and they form more distinct nerve centers than I have ever seen in any insect species.” (85)

Comparisons to traditional biological structures, parenthetical definitions of science concepts, and scientific jargon that stretches across the entire chapter and is also woven through the larger narrative all belie traditional expectations of the genre. But The Nest takes a necessary step further, knowing that the biological plausibility of a mutant cockroach is still leagues away from the super cockroaches terrorizing Yarkie.

I propose that the key element to moving beyond a plausible science and into the successful fear-scape in The Nest is the satisfactory creation of ordinary fear. I define ‘ordinary fear’ as a fear in which something ordinary becomes something terrifying not just by virtue of people dying (as quite a few of them do in The Nest) but by the intentional reconstruction of the characters’ perception of the phenomenon.

This concept of ordinary fear is distinctly different but not fully divorced from other analyses of the mundane in horror film. Byron Bixler, for instance, describes how fear becomes more useful than other representations of mundane-ness in horror film by grounding fear in the character stories and their subjective perspectives as narrators. This is somewhat similar to how the characters in The Nest articulate their perspective, but ordinary fear differs in that it relies not only on the internal world of the film, but also in transforming our cultural understanding of the fear object in the world outside the film – specifically (in the case of The Nest), how we already think about cockroaches.

Writer Gregory A. Douglas uses his surprisingly plausible science to change the fundamental way his characters in The Nest think about cockroaches, transforming them from a bunch of reasonably kill-able bugs into a larger monster. Confronted by the findings of the scientists, Elizabeth Carr asks a very important question:

Elizabeth was no biologist, no scientist of any kind, but the awful logic of what Peter Hubbard had said must lead to another question, insane as it might sound. “Peter, what you and Wanda are describing – doesn’t that take a kind of, er, brains? I mean all the insects working together in such an organized way…?” (84)

Here, Douglas directly acknowledges and confronts the problem that cockroaches in real life are simply not that scary and are not capable of effecting the events in the book. The scientists’ answer to Elizabeth’s question serve to differentiate the current cockroaches from the usual household nuisance by proposing a connected brain or control center that amplifies their potential destruction. This allows for the cumulative force of the cockroaches to be the fear epicenter rather than making the harder sell that the individual roaches themselves should be feared.

Douglas doesn’t force his reader to be immediately satisfied with this explanation and buy-in all at once. Instead, he writes this plausibility problem and the reality of ordinary fear into the story itself. Scientist Wanda Lindstrom serves as a stand-in for the reader:

She knew that these people were being sledgehammered by a horror they could not come to terms with. “Cockroaches” sounded so minor an annoyance, it was hard to accept that they might destroy an island like Yarkie. (90)

It is through this chain of events: a plausible science, a differentiation of the expected or known fear object to the current devil, and an explicit acknowledgement of its ‘ordinariness’ that solidifies the successful ‘ordinary fear’ of cockroaches in The Nest.

In contrast, the 1988 film version does none of these things. Perhaps the most obvious difference between the novel and film adaptation is the cockroaches themselves. For the most part, the cockroaches in the film look like, well, cockroaches. We are not treated to the rich descriptions of Douglas’s gory horror; instead, we must rely on what our eyes can see. And in many shots in the film, we can’t see a lot. The roaches stay roach-sized, appear to act like regular roaches, and the constraints of practical effects often leave us with cutaways from the horror rather than the high-definition written crystallizations of its original source material.

We do not see the cockroaches grind bone into powder, rather we see them crawling around as roaches generally do, although sometimes in numbers that are viscerally upsetting. This leaves the film with the problem of a rather unimpressive animal villain, a problem it solves by taking the opposite approach to the book.

Instead of crafting a plausible science of natural mutations, the film hands us a much more human villain. In the book the scientists were co-heroes, but the film instead casts Morgan Hubbard as a greedy scientist meddling with the laws of nature for profit. This substantially changes the stakes and the dynamics of the film. A focus on assigning blame gives the movie an out, allowing it to avoid having to dedicate the equivalent of many chapters and scenes to making the science plausible; instead, it relies on the well-worn trope of ‘bad scientist destroys nature and brings destruction’. As a result, for much of the film, Hubbard is more of an enemy than the cockroaches – which often find themselves simply squashed.

This all changes when another 1980s horror trope arrives: a gloriously silly and gory practical effect. In the film version of The Nest, the cockroaches are able to take on human form and become grotesque human-cockroach hybrid monsters. But in much the same way that Douglas’s over-the-top written descriptions lend themselves to comedy, so too do the practical effect roach humanoids and their stumbling gaits.

The cast does a pretty convincing job of screaming and running, but the whole effect is just as likely to elicit giggles in the audience as it is fear. This keeps pace with the rest of the film, which generally asks the viewer to suspend their disbelief and have a good time rather than spending considerable effort constructing a plausible new ordinary fear. The implausibility of the film is not a flaw; rather, it reflects that the goals of the movie are simply different.

After spending considerable time arguing that the film and the novel are different, I want to briefly end by considering how they are the same. Following in the footsteps of Sapolsky et al., who audited incidences of violence in 80s and 90s slasher films, challenging perception with fact, I push back against the notion that The Nest, in any form, must necessarily be a mindless gorefest. In both iterations analyzed here, I point to the intentional constructions of science, fear, and morality that go largely uncredited in low-budget creature features and pulp fiction. Future research could usefully embark on systematically analyzing these themes across the genre more broadly in order to develop a more nuanced theory of ordinary fears and a more accurate consideration of the sociological values hidden among tales of super spiders, giant snakes, and 100-foot sharks. I spent no time at all in this analysis considering whether or not The Nest is a good book or a good film. To that end, you should discover this roach-filled horror for yourself.

Notes

[i] The Nest, the focus of this essay, has been re-released as part of the Paperbacks from Hell series published by Valancourt Books. The Nest is one such novel written by Eli Cantor under the pseudonym Gregory A. Douglas. I use the pseudonym hereafter.

[ii] See Hendrix (2017) or Will Errickson’s introduction in Douglas (1980) for a more detailed chronology of the themes and hindsight recollections of 70s and 80s horror paperbacks.

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Works Cited

Douglas, Gregory A. The Nest (with an Introduction by Will Errickson). Valancourt Books, 2019 [1980].

Bixler, Byron. “‘They Look Like People’ and the Horror of the Mundane.” Filmic Magazine, 6 January 2017.

Hendrix, Grady. Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction. Quirk Books, 2017.

The Nest. Directed by Terrence Winkle, Concorde Pictures, 1988.

Sapolsky, Burry S., Fred Molitor, and Sarah Luque. “Sex and Violence in Slasher Films: Re-examining the Assumptions.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1, 2003, pp. 28-38.

Wyrick, Laura. “Horror at Century’s End: Where Have All the Slashers Gone?” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 33, no. 2, 1998, pp. 122-126.