Prophecy

Director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) imparts straight-faced camp and a “social conscience” to writer David Seltzer’s affectionate love letter to 1950s American bug movies. In rural Maine, the recently formed Environmental Protection Agency sends a doctor (Robert Foxworth) and his secretly pregnant wife (Talia Shire) to investigate an ongoing clash between a Native American tribe and the local paper mill, whose waste mismanagement has damaged the environment and created a hulking mutation in the woods. When this outrageous ecological horror film came out in 1979, it failed to fully resonate in a decade already defined by such recent classics as Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, and Alien, but its surprisingly serious ideas about environmental destruction, colonialism, and abortion—not to mention an iconic death scene involving a sleeping bag—make it a creature feature worth revisiting.