Noah's Ark of Horrors

In the old Hollywood, a dog was man's best friend, a cat was something a starlet would snuggle up to, and a rodent was a funny little mouse named Mickey. Now, if it moves and hasn't got a Social Security number, watch out. Whether it be canine, feline, porcine or ursine, according to the moviemakers, it undoubtedly has only one thought flashing through its simple little brain: to kill humans.

The recent vogue in animal horror flicks began last summer with Willard, the tender story of a boy's love for his pet rat, which eventually led the pack that ate him up. So successful was Willard, which grossed $8,200,000 last year, according to Variety, that it gave birth to a sequel rat saga, Ben, which is now on the drive-in circuit, and a Noah's ark of other horrors about crawlers and creepers.

In Frogs, Ray Milland is devoured by--you guessed it. In The Night of the Lepus, Janet Leigh is hungrily eyed by 1,500 mad, mutant rabbits, photographed so that they appear six feet tall. In Dr. Phibes, bats, bees, rats and locusts are on an angry prowl. Yet to come are a thriller about man-killing spiders; a spine-tingler about murderous house cats; something called Pigs, Pigs, Pigs; Rats, Rats, Rats; and the inevitable Dr. Phibes Rises Again.

From the moviemakers' point of view, one great advantage of animal flicks is the cheapness of casting; the average cost of the pictures is only about $1,000,000. "Since it takes only 21 days for a rat to have a litter of ten to twelve, we bought a dozen and left it up to them," says Moe Di Sesso, the trainer for Willard and Ben. By the time the company "of The Night of the Lepus arrived on location in Arizona, its rabbit contingent had increased by more than 10% and was about to rise again.

Rats are the easiest to work with. For Willard, Di Sesso trained them to run toward their food, mostly peanut butter, at the sound of a beeper. When it came time for the rats to start munching on Star Ernest Borgnine, who was smeared with peanut butter, they were even polite enough to stop with the peanut butter. The rabbits, by contrast, appear never to have heard of Pavlov. "We trained them in California to associate food with clicking sounds, so that they would head in any direction you clicked from," says Lepus Producer A.C. Lyles. "When we got to Arizona, we found they'd already forgotten everything we taught them." The rabbits also had a tendency to drop out of stampedes to munch on the scenery, forcing their trainers to gorge them beforehand --thus making them too lethargic to respond to the clicks.

Worst of all seem to be the frogs. Before he produced the epic named after the species, George Edwards had a kind of frog fetish; even the door knocker on his studio bungalow was shaped like one. Now that he has got to know 2,000 of them, he says: "I hate them. They're cold, slimy, and they pee all over you." Ray Milland knew he disliked them from the beginning. "I'm not touching one damned frog," he told Edwards, who got a stand-in for the death scene.

Sometimes the feeling was mutual. Instead of charging the camera as they were supposed to do, many frogs hopped the other way, some of them giving up acting altogether for life in the swamp. Perhaps Aristophanes was right. Maybe the frogs were critics.

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