ABSTRACT
In the films discussed in this chapter, female monsters or "queen bugs," offer new but nasty examples of female agency in horror. The bugs are pitched against female protagonists who lead the human defense against them. Like other horror films, women-and-bugs films aim especially at evoking fear or dread. Bugs live in filthy sewers, dark scary tunnels, or wet storm drains. Large-scale bugs are truly frightening monsters because of their alternative social structures, communicative ability, swarm behavior, and amazing physical powers. The women-and-bugs movies offer a kind of inverse of Frankenstein, since they are about ways of bypassing the masculine role in reproduction. Mimic is an interesting and different sort of bug movie rooted in the Frankenstein tradition. Species and Species II are perhaps the oddest and most genre-bending entries into the women-and-bugs subgenre. Women have sometimes also been monsters and agents of horror.
