BarryHutchison

Continuing our countdown to the 250th blog post here on BarryHutchison.com, I’ve dug this little gem up from the archives.

An Open Letter to Wasps.

And as for today’s Thing That Used to Scare the Crap out of Me…?

This is a still from a movie produced in 1978 – the year I was born – called The Swarm. It stars British acting legend, Michael Caine, and tells the story of a swarm of African killer bees descending on a town and doing what killer bees do best.

It’s a terrible, terrible film which makes little or no sense whatsoever, but at the time it terrified me. In particular, the scene above reduced me to a blubbering mess on the floor when I saw it, aged about 9.

The child on the bed has just lost his or her parents to the killer swarm. I say “his or her” because I can’t remember whether it was a boy or a girl, and that hairstyle is kind of non-gender specific. I’m sure you’ll forgive me for not noticing the child’s gender, what with all my attention being fixed squarely on the frickin’ enormous bee flying above the bed.

What made it so scary, for me, was the fact that neither Michael Caine, nor the woman beside him could see the giant bee themselves. It was just a great big scary hallucination the boy/girl/other on the bed was having.

The entire scene was made up of A) the child weeping and howling like a maniac, B) Michael Caine shouting “There is no bee in this room!” and C) Michael Caine shouting “Reach out and touch it. Touch the bee!”, which completely contradicts what he was saying in point B. Reach out and touch the bee that isn’t there, Michael? Are you trying to mess with the poor kid’s head? He or she has just seen his or her parents murdered by African bees, it’s no time to be playing mind games.

Anyway, the kid did reach out and touch the bee, only to discover that it wasn’t actually there at all. Personally I’d have jumped up from the bed, booted Michael Caine in the groin, then legged it out the door before I got a stinger through the face, but that’s just me. The boy (or girl) in The Swarm was evidently made of sterner stuff than I.