U of Ideas of General Interest -- February 1999 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Jim Barlow, Life Sciences Editor (217) 333-5802; [email protected]
INSECT FEAR FILM FESTIVAL Event features blood-sucking insects and blood-sucking humans
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Mosquitoes will be the guests of honor Feb. 20 at the University of Illinois, and those who come to see them are invited to get pumped for blood. It's the 16th annual Insect Fear Film Festival, which this year will feature a blood drive.
Doors will open at 6 p.m. at Foellinger Auditorium, 709 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana (at the south end of the Quad) for viewing exhibits, which will include live -- but contained -- mosquitoes. Admission is free.
Visitors also can be donors. A regional bloodmobile will be on hand. Mosquitoes routinely make people into donors, of course. "We've heard a lot about the shortage of blood because of the wintry weather, so we thought it would be appropriate to have the bloodmobile come to the festival," said Mark Carroll, president of the entomology department's Graduate Student Association.
"Everybody hates mosquitoes," said May Berenbaum, head of the entomology department. She started the festival to educate people about insects by pointing out inaccuracies about them -- and often about entomologists -- in usually bad films. "The one redeeming value of mosquitoes is that you can slap them into pulp. But when they grow to 3-foot proportions they become a bit formidable. They become everyone's worst nightmare. Yet we here in the developed world have only the tiniest inkling of the gravity of the nature of the interaction between people and mosquitoes."
Such is the case in the night's feature films, which are still in the process of being arranged. In "Mosquito," a 1994 film also known as "Night Swarm" and "Blood Feast," mosquitoes become giants and terrorize a town after feeding on the blood of a dying alien whose spacecraft crashes. Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre") yields a chainsaw as a flyswatter in the ensuing battle. Next is the 1991 film "Popcorn," in which college students put on a film festival, including a mosquito film, to save a theater, but disaster strikes. Ray Walston ("My Favorite Martian") appears.
Most films fail to show mosquitoes as vectors. "Mosquitoes are carriers of all kinds of human diseases [malaria, yellow fever, St. Louis and Lacrosse encephalitis]," she said. "They account for millions of deaths and illnesses worldwide every year. Their true nature isn't shown." A rare exception, she noted, is the evening's other feature, "Yellow Jack" (1938), which depicts the work of Dr. Walter Reed and colleagues to link mosquitoes to the transmission of yellow fever.
Only female mosquitoes pose a threat to human health; they feed on the blood of birds and animals, including humans. Males feed on plant juices, and juvenile mosquitoes on decaying plant debris in standing or slow-moving water.
The films begin at 7 p.m. with an hour of short films that span eight decades. Among them will be "How a Mosquito Works" (1912) and "The Winged Scourge" (1943). Also to be shown are old public education films, which are worth seeing not only for the biological information they contain but also for the sociological changes that have occurred since they were released.
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