Animal apocalypse movies come in two-by-two, in single file, or sometimes in marauding hordes. The quantity varies, but the films keep arriving. There is an inexhaustible supply and they are as durable as cockroaches. They come to devour Main Street, destroy Manor Farm and put mankind in its place. Just maybe they are coming to eat up the arthouse as well.
White God is a terrific Hungarian picture in which the stray dogs of Budapest take over the city and wreak a terrible revenge on their two-legged tormentors. In this respect the film can take its place alongside a raft of other forthcoming creature features. These include Zombeavers (killer rodents at summer camp), Beaster Day (Easter Bunny goes bad) and Timur Bekmambetov’s Squirrels (tagline: “Hold on to your nuts”). The difference, however, is that only one of these films won a top prize at Cannes and was recently selected as its nation’s official submission for the foreign film Oscar. White God is an anomaly. I’m seeing it as Lady, with all the rest playing Tramp.
Is it a redundancy to complain that animal horror films are typically silly and cheap, and lacking in logic? That’s part and parcel of the genre’s USP. Animal horror has always been the great dumb beast of the cinema family, full of screaming extras and B-movie actors in flight. But amid the pursuits and ambushes, the snarling and slithering, might there be space for nuance and metaphor too? White God seems to think so. It takes the high road through some very well-trampled terrain.
“In eastern Europe, they wouldn’t necessarily see a film like this as part of the horror genre anyway,” suggests author and horror expert Kim Newman. “I think they would see it in much more allegorical terms.”
In White God, specifically, the mix-breed dogs of Budapest are a metaphor for the underclass. Persecuted and incarcerated, they eventually rise up under the leadership of the headstrong Hagen, who has a ginger coat, a furrowed brow and a curly tail. Hagen’s army is savage, ruthless and baying for blood. And yet these dogs aren’t the villains; they are angels of reprisal. Tellingly, director Kornel Mundruczo compares Hagen with Roy Batty, Rutger Hauer’s vengeful replicant from Blade Runner.
One thing I like about White God is the way it confounds expectations and keeps changing its coat. Mundruczo’s film sets out as a social-realist family drama, briefly mutates into a Lassie Come Home-style tearjerker, and then suddenly kicks out the fences, blooming into an absurdist black comedy of animal armageddon. So it’s a mongrel movie about mongrel mutts; a vibrant jumble of genre genes. And this, the director tells me, reflects his experience of 21st-century Europe.
“The idea of European union – what does that even mean?” he says. “In the past five years, the reality has changed. Pure genres and pure ideologies are just ruined. First we had the economic crisis and now we have the moral crisis. Today, if I walk from one block of Budapest to the other, I feel that I’m passing from a melodrama to an action movie to a political drama to a fantasy. Everything’s running together. So a mixed-genre movie is the only one that makes sense.”
He allows that a pedigree breed would be an easier sell. “A crossover movie is always difficult to place. This isn’t hardcore arthouse but it’s not a big Hollywood genre movie either. And if people don’t immediately understand what something is, in my experience they don’t want to work with it.”
I hope he’s proved wrong; I suspect that he will be. Besides, even a species as hardy as this one has to adapt and recalibrate in order to survive. Down the years the animal horror has flirted with critical acclaim (Hitchcock’s The Birds) and blockbuster success (Spielberg’s Jaws) and enjoyed a purple patch in the early 70s, when mounting alarm about global pollution gave rise to such cutprice paranoid classics as Frogs (which was about frogs), Sssssss (snakes) and The Night of the Lepus (rabbits). But in recent decades – as Big Ass Spider begat Dragon Wasps and Piranha 3D – the genre has largely mislaid its political bite, tipped into comedy, or found itself neutered by technological advances. One reason White God works so well is because Mundruczo has opted to load the film with 250 dogs. CGI beasts, for all their glossy coats and glittering fangs, lack a crucial whiff of chaos, dirt and danger.
“It’s actually a difficult genre to do well,” says Newman. “Most film-makers are lazy. Most animal horrors wimp out. You have to have real animals in the frame with real actors. That’s why Snakes on a Plane didn’t quite work – it was really Pixels on a Plane.” He looks back fondly on films such as The Naked Jungle, in which Charlton Heston coated himself in honey before running through a swarm of army ants. “It’s hard to imagine Ben Affleck doing that today.”
All animal horrors are equal; it’s just that some are more equal than others. There is a distinction, Newman argues, between movies such as Jaws, Piranha or Alligator, in which animals are just doing what animals do, and films such as The Birds, The Pack or Frogs, in which they manifestly are not. The first bunch are basically disaster movies. The second, though, are where the pure horror resides. “What’s scary is when the seemingly innocuous animals turn on you, the ones you least expect. That’s always more more jarring, when nature turns strange. It suggests that society is not running right. That there is something really wrong with the world. And that the animals are somehow striking back.”
Is there an ancestor for all of these allegorical horrors? Newman suggests The Terror, a 1917 short story by Arthur Machen in which the livestock of middle England start channelling the savagery in the trenches. Alternatively one might cite the 1954 adaptation of Animal Farm, George Orwell’s pointed recasting of the Russian revolution as a barnyard revolt, replete with pigs, dogs and horses. Created by John Halas and Joy Batchelor, it’s a thunderous, stentorian cartoon of oppression, revolution and the corruption that follows. Except it transpires that even this approach is as old as the hills.
“The tradition of animal fables goes back to Aesop and the original tale-tellers,” says film historian Brian Sibley. “It’s already a popular form by the time that Orwell came along: the idea that animal life mirrors human life. You could argue that any animal film, whether it’s Tom and Jerry, Wile E Coyote or a Hollywood horror movie, is a way of reflecting and commenting on our own human foibles.”
In Animal Farm, the beasts literally see red and proceed to turn on their masters. Orwell’s version ended in glorious bleakness, with the pigs carousing with the men and the old order re-established. And yet Halas and Bachelor’s film was bankrolled by the US. It demanded that the pigs (and by implication Soviet Russia) be itself overthrown by yet another insurrection. The good animals rise up, the bad ones are defeated. The film-makers’ daughter, Vivien Halas, explains that her parents were socialists; they initially baulked at the changes. “But the money came from a slush fund to promote American art, which later morphed into the CIA. So they were forced to add an ending that had at least a glimmer of hope.”
Can one trace a line from the animated Animal Farm to Mundruczo’s White God? The first film is rural and the second is urban. Both, however, stand as harsh political allegories of oppressive human frameworks. Its inhabitants are dangerous and they surely mean harm. But while the animals are the monsters, they also represent us. They are the downtrodden in our midst; angry and unsung and on the brink of revolt. If we can only learn to love them, we may just be OK.
In steering White God on its route to the apocalypse, Mundruczo held true to one guiding principle. “Man needs the dog and the dog needs man,” he says. “It’s a relationship of cruelty and shame, but we are still bound up together. And maybe we just need to put ourselves in their shoes, or put ourselves on their level. If we really want to know who we are as a people, we should all take a look into the eyes of a dog.”
Revolting creatures: they’re coming for you
Dogs
Before White God there was The Pack, a 1970s schlock horror in which a band of discarded canines start munching on the residents of an exclusive island resort. All at once the dogs are relishing a rich diet of wealthy bankers and the random tourists too corpulent and slow to climb into the trees. “They’re not pets any more!” the tagline needlessly informed us.
Frogs
Ray Milland’s wicked industrialist celebrates a birthday to die for in the bone-headed eco-fable Frogs. When his pond is polluted, all the Kermits rise up. “Man is the master of the world,” rails Milland at one stage. But the army of amphibians has a different idea.
Birds
“It’s the end of the world,” laments the town drunk as the crows and seagulls attack Bodega Bay. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds juggled B-movie hysterics with arthouse gloss, sending sugar-frosted Tippi Hedren dashing from the playground to the dock. Are the birds a twisted manifestation of human sexuality or societal rage? Nobody knows; chaos reigns. The stark hanging ending leaves the film’s mysteries intact.
Moths
Mothra, it should be noted, is no ordinary moth. She’s the ancient god of an island tribe, summoned from her slumber, fried by reckless nuclear testing and hellbent on laying waste to the city of Tokyo. Following her big-screen debut in a 1960s kaiju flick, Mothra went on to battle Godzilla in a gaggle of sequels.
White God is out early 2015. Animal Farm is re-issued on Blu-Ray/DVD/iTunes on 27 October.
