What The Hellstrom Chronicle is trying to do is combine wildly different forms—a genuine nature documentary, satirical mockumentary, and horror film—to take something we all know and frame it as something completely monstrous and alien, basically demonstrating the manipulation at the heart of the documentary form. It’s sensationalism, but not done in the name of making people dumber; by crediting a writer in the opening of the film and putting the fact that scientist narrator Dr. Nils Hellstrom is played by an actor in big bold font at the end, it’s putting its own fictional nature out there as openly as possible. There are whole sequences where the film is definitely wearing its own fakeness on its sleeve—the part where Hellstrom tries to prove humanity’s instinctual fear of insects, by showing random people in a grocery store and restaurant having their days ruined by them, is played as comedy (also played as comedy: the blues music playing over a scene of two black widow spiders mating); similarly, an interview between Hellstrom and a farmer about his use of DDT is also filmed like a scene from a movie, not like an interview in a documentary. It’s not trying to be any sort of propaganda; this is basically just one long prankish experiment in tone, which makes the fact that it won the best documentary Academy Award all the more baffling (although considering that the previous year the academy nominated the film version of Chariots of the Gods?, maybe it’s not so surprising.)
The thing about it that I find most interesting is how, through the use of great nature photography, editing, and intentionally exaggerated argument, Hellstrom is trying to make the most common form of life on earth into this monstrous horde pitted against humanity for domination—essentially transforming our own normal, natural world into an alien menace. “The Earth was created not with the gentle caress of love, but with the brutal violence of rape” Hellstrom intones over the blackness of the film’s beginning, which sets the kind of over-the-top horror atmosphere of the rest of the movie—yes, a nature doc could become a horror movie by posing the idea that nature does not conform to the sentimentalist ideas borne in the human mind. Insects are referred to as mindless survival machines, compared to computers and robots, devoted solely to maintaining their numbers, eating and breeding or protecting a hive with selfless devotion—this is why they will remain after we have destroyed ourselves, Hellstrom argues, because they do not stop to feel or contemplate anything, just to continue existing through sheer instinct. He mentions how insects are the only organisms that can survive being bombarded with radiation, and how they adapt to the pesticides we use against them, speeding through evolution and outwitting us with our own weapons. Just by presenting these kinds of facts about insects, they are made to look scarier than any movie monster (they even include a clip of Them! To help demonstrate it.)
As the ending text crawl tells the audience, none of these arguments are actually too far from the mark, science-wise—I don’t think arguing that insects will still be here long after our species is gone is particularly controversial. That Hellstrom has apparently sacrificed his career, and potentially his sanity, to tell us that insects are pretty good at surviving is just part of the intentionally ludicrous mock-narrative the film is pushing—the idea that humans and insects are competing to control the planet is a silly interpretation of our global ecosystem, but it’s easy to spin the implication because it’s not something a lot people think about. At one point, Hellstrom says that with their current trends in population growth, hungry insects would eventually defoliate the entire planet—which is nonsense, and nonsense that is very clearly a wink at the audience, especially since it’s said over sped-up footage of caterpillars eating leaves with overdone foley effects. I wonder if part of the effectiveness of The Hellstrom Chronicle’s tongue-in-cheek argument is tied to its time and place—these facts about insects were certainly widespread by the time I was a kid who watched nature docs and read animal books constantly, but maybe that wasn’t true in 1971. Maybe when the film was new, the idea of communication via pheromones WAS this crazy new thing, and no one had ever seen footage of swarms of army ants (used as the frightening climax of the film) before—for a person like me, it’s Hellstrom’s narration and on-camera appearances alone that heighten the film’s tone, but it’s possible that this particular nature footage in a time before everyone watched Planet Earth would have been equally as crazy. It does seem very seventies at times (look at those clothes!)—and the talk about nuclear radiation and DDT certainly place it in that era of environmentalist discourse, which is where you may find the film’s actual underlying purpose, which is less that insects are superior to humanity, but rather that humanity is good at screwing over itself.
But what convinced me to check this thing out in the first place was just the idea of framing a nature documentary as a monster movie, and how easy that can be—unless you’re a weirdo like me, who finds footage of ants and termites mangling each other or the step-by-step of a caterpillar moulting to be inherently fascinating, it’s pretty easy to find close-ups of insects unnerving, and even easier to make their life cycles and behaviour seem even scarier. It reveals one of the deeper truths of monster fiction, which is that it’s a lot of invented fears with a hazy but real basis observable reality, which readily contrasts the reality we’ve constructed in our collective minds; humanity often views itself as infinitely superior to other animals, but this film highlights the sheer brutal efficiency of animals we have total disregard for, and that, in the particular mindset given to Hellstrom, means that they are the true superior organism. Depending on your perspective, the idea that these weird things are likely to outlive us throws the entire basis of how the world works out the window, which is one of the things a good monster is supposed to do. The difference is that these intruders into our reality are not intruders at all, they are a normal part of everyday life. The Hellstrom Chronicle is playing games with how we view the monstrous: insects are just as natural as every other animal on this planet, including us, but they still behave in ways that seem contrary to the way we’ve come to understand life—so just seeing them do their thing while a “scientist” gravely explains their intractable survival instinct can make them look like something otherworldly.
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