While the “creeper” at the heart of Jeff Vandermeer’s book is absent from Alex Garland’s adaptation of Annihilation, the film is filled with unsettling, hybrid creatures. The “bear” that terrorizes members of the expedition while they’re tied to chairs might be the most disturbing of all. What makes this creature so unsettling? Why is it more creepy than an actual bear would be? Or, if several others have written entries on the “bear”, ask yourself what makes another creature from the film unsettling.
8 thoughts on “Annihilation (movie)”
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The bear is creepy because of its voice. It uses the voice of the last person it kills in order to invoke a reaction from individuals. Humans that react to the voice are then next to die and the pattern continues. The ability to hold the voice of the last person it kills is particularly creepy because it calls into question the ability of humans question their most innate human instinct to try to aid those they trust. In the zone the group is dependent on one another for everything, however, the bear preys on human trust in order to kill its next victim. Moreover, the bear does not act without the humans making noise, which further preys on the human instinct to protect others in our group. The ability to prey on human emotion by bringing up the person who had been killed last is creepy because of the emotional effects it has on individuals..
I find the bear especially disturbing based on its appearance, and the fact that it has absorbed the womens voice after it killed her. The bear doesn’t seem to have a face, and its whole body is full of holes, in fact, it could be blind. When things don’t have a definable face, like the mirror dogglengander in the lighthouse, it takes away the humanity of the creature, even though it resembles something familiar to us. It’s also distorted in size, is exceptionally strong and difficult to kill.Real bears are a scary thing, but this bear even more terrifying, as it has all these heightened qualities that makes it more freighting. Its creepy and massive, and when it’s growling or roaring, it’s actually mimics the woman’s voice it killed earlier, which simultaneously attracts them to the bear and makes them fear it. When this happens, it becomes a nightmare. She is now part of that bear, as it took her voice, which is a very human quality. It’s a conflict for the people who hear it, they are terrified of the bear, yet they keep hearing their friends voice and it draws towards the bear; it’s almost like a magnet. Its is totally hunting the group, yet it methods of attacking are deceptive, as it seems to attack for no particular reason. It also moves so slowly, but deliberately, like a tank, something that just keeps coming that you can’t stop. The bear doesn’t need to necessarily go out of its way to find its prey, as the voice draws its prey towards them.
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I find the bear especially disturbing based on its appearance, and the fact that it has absorbed the womens voice after it killed her. The bear doesn’t seem to have a face, and its whole body is full of holes, in fact, and it could be blind. When things don’t have a definable face, like the mirror dogglengander in the lighthouse, it takes away the humanity of the creature, even though it resembles something familiar to us. It’s also distorted in size, is exceptionally strong and difficult to kill. Real bears are a scary thing, but this bear is even more terrifying, as it has all these heightened qualities that makes it more freighting. Its creepy and massive, and when it’s growling or roaring, it actually mimics the woman’s voice it killed earlier, which simultaneously attracts them to the bear and makes them fear it. When this happens, it becomes a nightmare. She is now part of that bear, as it took her voice, which is a very human quality. It becomes a conflict for the people who hear it, as they are terrified of the bear, yet they keep hearing their friends voice and it draws them towards the bear; almost like a magnet. It is totally hunting the group, yet it’s methods of attacking are deceptive, as it seems to attack for no particular reason. It also moves so slowly, but deliberately, like a tank, something that just keeps coming that you can’t stop. The bear doesn’t need to necessarily go out of its way to find its prey, as the voice draws its prey towards them.
Garland offers his own interpretation of mutant creatures throughout the film, some of which are extremely creepy looking. The first creature resembling an animal that he introduces to the audience is the ‘crocodile.’ This inexplainable creature initially appears when it attacks Josie in an abandoned house. The soundtrack is filled with anguished screams, which creates fear, creepiness, and curiosity from the viewers perspective. Garland soon after reveals the true visualization of the creature. An abnormally large sized, wide snouted crocodile emerges from the river bank and creeps forward to attack the group of women. Garland cuts to multiple shot angles to display some of its noticeably obscure characteristics. In particular, I was intrigued by the creatures vibrant-colored skin texture: green, white, and red. Similar to a real crocodile, its thick, armored skin has scales and humps, however as Lena vocalizes in her analysis of the creature, she alludes to the fact that the creatures genes are one of a kind. Thus, explaining its unique color pattern. While taking a closer look, she compares its teeth to a shark, implying a potential cross breed of different species. The creature’s doubleness suggests that every creatures’ DNA in the Shimmer may be altering, which Garland confirms later in the film.
The creatures of Alex Garland’s cinematic rendition of Annihilation are a strange combination of extremely disturbing/terrifying species, such as the bear, intermixed with unusually beautiful flowers and majestic species such as the deers with flowering antlers . This juxtaposition of such horror with such beauty creates an eerie dissonance within the atmosphere of Area X and the movie in general.
In addition to the creepy psychological nature of it that has been previously touched upon, the blatant grotesqueness of the bear is a large part of what makes it so unsettling. It is given almost zombie-like features, with thin deteriorating skin and rotting flesh, and visible skull where you would expect to see its nose and other parts of its head. This appearance results in a very unsettling creature due to the fact that it is based upon an animal we are familiar with, yet it looks nothing like we would expect. It is simultaneously both alien and non-alien to us. What furthermore makes the bear unsettling is not just its appearance but perhaps more importantly its behavior- it does not act like you would expect a bear to act. In the scene where Lena, Josie and Ventress are tied up and the bear enters the room, the bear seemed to act reminiscent of the way a serial killer might behave, walking amongst and terrifying the three women but not outright attacking them. You can’t tell what its motives or intentions are, and it seems to be playing mind games with the them.
The most horror-ish scene in Annihilation seems to me to be the screaming bear attack, when three of the expedition’s members are tied up and the fourth has let paranoia and fear control her actions. The scene begins with a bait-and-switch, as Anya initially presents the threat of human violence but is lured outside by the screams of her known-to-be-dead colleague, only for the soundtrack to cut out with a bear’s roar and, thus, greater threat. The audience experiences extreme dissonance as we hear a human woman’s voice come out of a horribly mutated bear’s throat. Garland also throws in a shot of the extreme fear on the women’s faces as the skull face of the bear pushes slowly between Lena and Josie — very reminiscent, I think, of shots of the Xenomorph in the Alien franchise. There’s a massive disconnect between what we empirically observe about the bear’s mutations and what we expect about a bear. We see a bear, but hear a human (it’s pretty much the only noises we do hear, accompanied by Anya’s screams as she’s mauled, until the soundtrack kicks back in when the bear charges Lena). We see a horrible amalgamation of an exposed bear skull mashed with a human jaw, and slightly human eyes, though it’s tough to see them; visible skull usually means dead, but the bear poses a real threat. It’s bigger, faster, quieter, and smarter than a “real” bear, which makes it terrifying as a horror element and uncomfortable to the audience when thinking about what changes could be happening to those in The Shimmer. I think the creature is so unsettling because it uses something we consider pretty human — speech — to interact with people in one of the oldest relationships on earth, predator and prey; this time, though, as isn’t particularly common, the humans are the prey. It’s primal, and at the same time, totally unfamiliar. That separation between expectation and reality is part of what drives the prickling discomfort when the bear is onscreen.
The “bear” in the movie reminded me of the “dolphin” in the book. Both creatures seem to contain human elements, as if the souls of their prey remain alive. While the bear poses a normal threat to the women on the expedition, the organism is particularly unsettling because it highlights the disintegration of traditional biologic boundaries on which humans rely to interpret the living world. Further, the “bear’s” biologic duality suggests that the women who remain in human bodily form up until that point in the movie may be undergoing transformations into alternate life forms, which is realized when Josie begins to turn into a “plant”.
Annihilation is an extremely interesting movie because although I liked it, I found it extremely creepy and at points hard to understand. Interestingly enough, one of the creepiest parts of the movie for me was the mutilated bear that terrorizes members of the expedition. I think that the reason it is especially creepy is slightly complicated but can be explained by the psychological nature that comes with it. Specifically in real life, if a bear attacks you, it isn’t going to stop attacking you if you stop screaming like the bear did in the movie. By having the bear stop if you don’t scream, the movie is enforcing what seems like backwards psychological behavior. What I mean by this is when something is attacking you, every person’s natural reaction is to scream so not screaming is extremely hard and, in many ways, scary and creepy. While this alone is enough to consider the bear creepy, the main reason it is creepy is the voices and screams that are inside of it. While viewers never know for sure, they are left to suspect that the screams are from previous people that the bear has eaten to death. In the case of this specific expedition, the screams are coming from the co-worker and friend of the girls the bear is currently attacking. Thus it should come as no surprise that this is extremely hard for the girls because not only is a big scary creature in front of them, but it also sounds like one of their friends and to make matters worse, if they react naturally and scream, they will become dead too which must be a psychological nightmare. Once again this is a lot worse than a regular bear because even if a regular bear is near you, it is not testing your psychological power by sounding like your friend as well. All in all the bear in the movie is a very creepy creature and one that I hope I never have to cross paths with.