More Rats

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I’ve asked other survivors of the 1970s if they knew that the Michael Jackson hit “Ben” (his first solo number one recording) was written about a rat.  Most had no idea.  The song is the theme for the sequel to Willard, namely, Ben.  Now, I have a soft spot for seventies horror movies.  Before the days of streaming I repeatedly looked for Willard in DVD stores and never did find it.  I eventually found it on a streaming service and even wrote a Horror Homeroom piece on it.  One winter’s weekend with not much going on, I finally got around to seeing Ben.  Neither are great movies, but I’ll give them this—people in my small hometown knew about them.  Everyone I grew up around knew that “Ben” was a song from a horror movie.  In case you’re part of the majority, Ben is the chief of the intelligent rats who turns on Willard at the end of his movie.

An incompetent police department and other civil authorities can’t seem to figure out how to exterminate rats when they begin attacking people.  A little boy, Danny, has no friends.  He is apparently from an upper-middle class family, and he has a heart condition.  Ben finds him and the two become friends.  Danny tries to get Ben to lead his “millions” of rats away from a coming onslaught, but for some reason Ben decides to stick around and nearly get killed.  In the end, badly injured, Ben finds his way back to Danny.  Cue Michael Jackson.  It really isn’t that great of a movie—the number of scenes reused during the tedious combat scene alone belies the pacing of a good horror flick.  I felt that I should see it for the sake of completion.  Check that box off.

It’s a strange movie that ends up with viewers feeling bad for the rats.  They’re not evil, just hungry.  They do kill a few people (poor actors, mostly) but it’s often in self defense.  The best part is really the song, and the premise behind it—boy meets rat, boy falls in love with rat; you know how it goes.  Michael Jackson famously loved horror movies, and as many of us have come to realize there’s not much not to like.  This movie is pretty cheesy (with the rats attacking a cheese shop, but only after an unintentionally hilarious spa scene) but it has heart.  And it has a fair bit of nostalgia for those of us who grew up in the seventies.

Solomon’s Rats

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Some ideas keep coming back.  Since you can’t copyright an idea, retelling a story is always an option.  In fact, some writers suggest they’ve written nothing new—the classic ideas are out there and are ripe for rewriting.  I’m on the fence about Solomon’s declaration that there’s nothing new under the sun.  Some startlingly original stuff is out there, it seems.  In any case, a few months ago I watched Willard for the first time.  Although it’s quite dated in many respects, it was quite a big splash when it came out.  I remember being curious about it as a kid but although we were allowed to watch monster movies on TV, going to a theater to watch horror was out of the question.  That would have to wait for college.

Discussing Willard with a friend after seeing it, the idea came up that it had quite a bit in common with Disney/Pixar’s hit Ratatouille.  I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Pixar or Disney—it seems they try too hard much of the time, although they hit it out of the park with Wall-e.  Still, this connection seemed worth pursuing.  I’m not going to discuss the commonalities here since I just had an article published in Horror Homeroom about it.  The connections are pretty striking.  I would classify Willard as swarm horror.  Rats naturally follow people around because we give them many food options.  To gather from older movies, rat bites used to be a big concern.  These days we tend to think of them as a big city problem, but rats are not far from where people live.  The problem is the swarm.  Being overwhelmed, even by a fairly small animal, is terrifying.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

With the warming weather, getting out and doing repair work around the house has made finding weekend time to watch horror rare.  I’ve got a long list of movies and an even longer list of repairs.  Recently another friend has struck up a conversation (via email) about horror films.  The thing is, at my article suggests, they aren’t that far removed from mainstream fare.  Many children’s films come close.  Most movies based on anything by Roald Dahl have dark undercurrents.  More recent efforts—and here I’m thinking mostly of Pixar—seem to jump from crisis to crisis without having that underlying story old Solomon seemed to appreciate (or to have been weary of).  That’s why I find such connections worth pondering.  Even classic revenge tale can be made gentle for younger viewers.