50 Years Later, Squirm Still Makes For Deeply Uncomfortable Eco-Horror
It can really worm into you.
When filmmaker Jeff Lieberman was around eight years old, his older brother told him a curious scientific fact. The two used to go fishing together, and his sibling shared a method for finding worms. “He had read that you could get the worms out of the ground by taking a train transformer, from a toy train set, and sticking the poles in the mud,” Lieberman told The Flashback Files. “It has to be muddy and you have to do this at night. Then when you turn on the electricity the worms will be shocked and they’ll come out of the ground.”
Not only did the brothers apparently perform the experiment successfully in their backyard, but the younger Lieberman also learned that if one turned on lights to see where the worms were, the creatures would hurriedly slide back underground. Some 12 years later, Lieberman recalled the incident and put pen to paper, writing the first two pages of a script that would eventually become his cult classic 1976 movie Squirm.
Filmed and set in rural Georgia, Squirm begins with a heavy storm downing a power line, sending it into the muddy ground and electrifying the vast numbers of worms living there. Meanwhile, a local woman named Geri (Patricia Pearcy) picks up her boyfriend Mick (Don Scardino) at the bus station, where he’s just arrived from New York City, using a truck borrowed from worm farmer (yes, they exist) Roger Grimes (R.A. Dow). After 100,000 worms in the back of the truck mysteriously disappear and townspeople begin turning up as half-devoured skeletons, it becomes clear the town is under siege by a literal flood of flesh-eating critters.
Squirm squished onto screens smack-dab in the middle of a run of “eco-horror” movies — films where nature, in the form of animals, reptiles, insects, or birds, ran amok and sought murderous revenge against humanity. The subgenre’s most famous entries are Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), and it really took off in the ‘70s with films of varying quality like Frogs (1972), Night of the Lepus (1972), Phase IV (1974), Grizzly (1976), Day of the Animals (1977), The Long Weekend (1978), Prophecy (1979), and many more, of which Squirm remains a standout some 50 years after its release.
A resident of Fly Creek begins to feel something squirming.
The “revenge of nature” theme is very much prevalent in Squirm, but Jeff Lieberman, on the Blu-ray commentary track, also likens his movie to a “Nancy Drew mystery,” as Geri and Mick are drawn into solving the puzzle of why the townspeople are dying and why worms are appearing everywhere. There’s also an early “red state vs. blue state” undercurrent, as the local sheriff and some of the townspeople of Fly Creek eye the affable Mick with suspicion for no particular reason (perhaps irrationally fearing he somehow brought the trouble, just like Tippi Hedren in The Birds).
The small-town melodrama and moments of comic relief give the film some character, even if the first hour is fairly slow. But there’s still a grisly shock or two along the way, and the movie really lives up to its title in the third act, when Lieberman unleashes his worms (a combination of rubber props and some three million of the real thing, many of which were ironically prodded to perform by electric wires) for a gruesome final battle in which several Fly Creek residents are consumed.
The gory makeup effects, including worms crawling under people’s skin and inside their guts, were handled by the legendary Rick Baker, and there’s no question that they make the film queasy for anyone who finds worms unsettling to begin with. The sight of worms crawling down walls with a trail of slime behind them, oozing out of a showerhead, and undulating over half-eaten rib cages is far more terrifying than watching their stadium-sized cousins churn through the deserts of Arrakis.
It’s enough to put you off spaghetti for a while.
Even with its impressive effects, Squirm is still very much low-budget drive-in fodder, although Lieberman’s use of non-professional locals in small supporting roles gives the film a certain amount of verisimilitude (along with a few shaky line readings). As for his leads, Lieberman admits that he had Martin Sheen, Kim Basinger, and Sylvester Stallone — the latter two relatively obscure at the time — lined up to star at one point, but let them get away for various reasons. Nevertheless, Scardino and Pearcy have a nice, wholesome chemistry, while Jean Sullivan stands out as Geri’s mom, who’s right out of Southern Gothic central casting.
Jeff Lieberman hasn’t been all that prolific as a filmmaker since Squirm, although his resume does include two more cult favorites: the psychedelic sci-fi head trip Blue Sunshine (1977) and the intense backwoods slasher movie Just Before Dawn (1981). And it all started with a muddy backyard, a toy train transformer, and a whole lot of squirming, icky worms.
Squirm is available on Prime Video.
