WARNING: This Article May Contain Spoilers
Unlike some of the other articles in this section, this is a phobia I don’t actually have. Weirdly, I find some rats kind of cute. However, I can understand where people are coming from as for a long time this fear was born out of the rats being to blame for the Black Plague…
Rats: Night of Terror
So, I thought going in to this that the film was going to be based on the book Rats by James Herbert as it has a rather similar plot line. Truthfully, I’m quite glad because, no offence to Herbert, the book is not very good. What I think makes this film scary is unlike other films that go down the idea of giant or mutated rats – these are just your regular black rat. OK, yes, you get the feeling they have been messed with somewhere along the line to turn them into killers and to clearly receive the instruction to kill but they don’t go over the top. The crazy thing is, it’s not any of the deaths that creeped me out! Instead, it’s post-death when the rats make their way back out of some of the bodies.
Willard
I’ll be honest, I thought Willard was going to be the rat, not the lead character. I’m not surprised Willard snaps – his mum was doing my head in too! I guess you could say that he is the real antagonist of this film instead of being Socrates or Ben (those are his two main rats by the way) as he is the one controlling everything they do. For example, Willard sets them on Walter and his wife so that he can steal their money. The only thing about this film for me is that I don’t see the horror aspect until may be 10 minutes from the end when Willard sets Ben and the other rats on Mr Martin. He’s a little creepy in this latter scene and truthfully, I can’t imagine anyone would really relish idea of being covered in rats.
The Mutation
Surprisingly, this film didn’t actually start quite as cheesy as I was expecting. It had quite a serious opening and it keeps with that same “gritty” style throughout. I was honestly expecting something more along the lines of the cheesy, low budget porno style that The Beaster Bunny took. Now that’s not to say that this film is in any way perfect because it’s not, but its just not as bad as I was expecting. Having said that, some of the fight scenes with the rat are a little cheap but the killings themselves actually looked pretty good.
Fang
I wasn’t too sure what the relevance of Billy having autism or his mother’s illness really had to the overall story. Maybe the autism was a way of explaining why he was obsessed with the dead rat outside his building? He gets bitten by the rat around 25 minutes into this film but the transition from human to rat seems to take the remaining length of the film. On the whole, this film isn’t actually scary and the rat doesn’t exactly take much precedence (yes, I am starting to question why I used it). The scariest bit for me was when I thought his own mum was attempting to rape him! Yeah the hallucinations and dreams are a bit weird but that’s about it.
Graveyard Shift
You can’t exactly go wrong with a film based on a Stephen King short story – but my God was the opening darker than I expected! The opening actually reminded me a little of Willard but only because of the way he was talking to rats – downside to loneliness I guess. What I love about this film is that with each death you see slightly more of the main antagonist but you never see it completely. The more disturbing part is that it comes across as if Warwick knows about the massive bat/rat hybrid in the basement and almost seems to be feeding his staff to it! The rats don’t really have much impact on the film as a whole – other than feeding off of the bat’s leftovers.
Of Unknown Origin
What I loved about this film, is that it’s technically a psychological horror! Yes, the audience see bits and pieces of the rat as the film goes on – much like Graveyard Shift it’s very rare that we see the whole thing in one go – but the psychological side comes from the way it toys with Hughes. By 30 minutes in, he has already developed an obsession with rats. The clever part is, the noises that are used are creepy on their own, especially when he attacks Hughes as he tries to escape from the basement. The scrabblings noises alone really got into my head. The only thing that bothered me a little was the rat we kept seeing seemed to be your average brown rat but whenever it attacked Hughes it looked much bigger – and plus there’s no way a small rat would be able to kill a cat!
