Cocaine Bear and Other Human-Created Monsters

On Cocaine Bear and Other Human-Created Monsters by Tamika Thompson

I wouldn’t call Cocaine Bear divisive, but the 2023 Elizabeth Banks-directed horror film about a bear who ingests cocaine and goes on a killing spree has definitely elicited some strong opinions. 

One camp, which includes me, is excited about the thrill ride of a film in which a motley crew of characters must band together to stop the drug-induced bloodbath. 

Another camp, which does not at all include me, is put off by the vapid premise of killer animals and the Hollywood treatment of something that is typically relegated to low-budget productions. (Think Sharknado.)

But I plan to watch Cocaine Bear and root for the people as well as for the bear. These things are not mutually exclusive.

Nature always wins

When I was a kid, my family had a video rental card, and I wasn’t afraid to use it. 

One of the earliest horror movies I watched was the 1976 film The Food of the Gods. The premise is that a fluid oozes from the ground on a remote island, and, when mixed with food, makes the chickens, wasps, and rats into giants that kill. The film ends with the same fluid making it into the milk supply, which is consumed by the schoolchildren, who are also susceptible to the liquid’s detrimental effects.

The B-movie was probably a decade old or so when I caught it for the first time, and it not only creeped me out, but it also changed the way I looked at the relationship humans have with other animals. It was the first time it hit me that humans are, in fact, animals, but animals who are supposed to be enlightened, with big, intelligent brains that allowed them to climb to the top of the food chain, above all apex predators, where they sit in dominion over all creatures. 

Many people even point to biblical justification for our dominion, in Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 26: 

”And God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’” 

Some of us believe it is our divine right to be predator and never prey, to have all resources on the planet at our disposal to be used how we see fit.

That’s why The Food of the Gods is terrifying. Because of the sheer size, brute force, and overwhelming population of common creatures we encounter daily, in this and other creature features like it, humans are reduced to fighting for their lives. Surviving, not thriving. And even when the characters are seemingly able to take back their position at the top of the food chain by the end of the movie, the cycle continues, because their children will be next. 

At the start of the global coronavirus pandemic, when the U.S. government was talking of containing the virus and stopping its spread, a good friend of mine said, “Nature always wins.” And I would agree. We have managed to not all die from SARS-Cov-2, but we were never able to contain it, we have simply survived it, and, in the process, we’ve lost more than a million people in the United States alone.

So, I tend to side with nature.

Sure, the creatures rising up in these horror tales are frightening, but they are often the victims of humans first—military experimentation, unethical scientific practices, greedy and/or negligent governments and corporations. It’s a specific type of creature feature I’m drawn to, one in which humans have created the monster.

In the 1904 H.G. Wells novel, The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, which served as the source material for the 1976 film, scientists—Mr. Bensington and Mr. Redwood—create the substance in a lab and test it on an experimental farm. Bensington discusses his intentions:

“Really, you know,” he said, rubbing his hands together and laughing nervously, “it has more than a theoretical interest.

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“For example,” he confided, bringing his face close to the Professor’s and dropping to an undertone, “it would perhaps, if suitably handled, sell.”

Challenging the idea of genetic engineering and scientific interference in nature, the work and others like it are a warning about people lacking reverence for the earth and its non-human inhabitants. 

Which is another criticism of Cocaine Bear—that the film makes light of a real-life tragedy. And there is truth in that. I too have compassion for the bear the film is loosely based on. After all, it died by eating cocaine dropped from a drug smuggler’s plane, bricks of coke that had otherwise been on their way to poison people.

Human malice is one reason horror films and books are cultural necessities.

They hold up a mirror to the monsters inside us, our wicked ways that we often take for granted, our vile practices that sometimes go unnoticed. And human retribution tales, in particular, beg the question—does dominion mean violence?

Whether the movie is an entertaining, coked-out flick like Cocaine Bear, or a thought-provoking meditation on human vulnerability written shortly after World War II like Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds, human violence against nature is an additional lens through which to view these stories.

There are several works of horror fiction featuring creatures that are the direct result of human interference in nature, phenomena that often make news headlines but then are lost to time. 

Cocaine Bear and Other Human-Created Monsters

The Host (2006): Military chemical dumping

Directed by Bong Joon-Ho, of Parasite fame, The Host features a mutant monster created by chemicals the American military dumped in South Korea’s Han River. The film follows one family and the way the beast’s arrival devastates their lives. 

And guess what. In 2000, the U.S. military admitted to disposing of 20 gallons of formaldehyde in Seoul’s wastewater system near the U.S. military base, an episode that drew protests by local activists, who accused the U.S. military of dumping far more than 20 gallons and not in the wastewater system, but in, you guessed it, the Han River.

Eight-Legged Freaks (2002): Corporate chemical spills

This horror comedy’s source of toxic waste in the river that creates the giant, killer spiders is a chemical spill from a truck in a bankrupt town. We’ve seen this story several times in the news before—Exxon-Valdez, anyone?—and often humans, especially poor and/or marginalized people, are the victims of corporate poisoning. 

Deep Blue Sea (1999): Animal testing

Scientists experimenting on shark brains in search of an Alzheimer’s cure accidentally increase the sharks’ intelligence, and the animals are now capable of coordinated attacks as they rise up against the humans in their underwater lab. 

The Humane Society estimates that more than 50 million animals are used in experiments in the United States each year, and the animals are typically killed at the end of the experiment. As of late 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration no longer requires animal tests before human trials. Although sharks are not the animal of choice for most experiments, works of fiction like Deep Blue Sea force the audience to consider the rats, mice, monkeys, and dogs that are used in our labs.

Night of the Lepus (1972): Animal culling

Based on the Russell Braddon book The Year of the Angry Rabbit, this film’s science-experiment-gone-wrong might sound extreme—scientists are trying to reduce the rabbit population without also hurting the land around it. But in real life, the Australian government unleashed the myxoma virus on the rabbit population in the 1950s, and, over time, the rabbits developed immunity to it (though the virus might be evolving to outmaneuver the resistance). In the film, scientists inadvertently create mutant, killer rabbits. 

Reducing an animal population by finding some way to execute large swaths of them is known as culling, and it is common. Just type “culling” and…say…“male chicks” into a search engine, and you’ll get a better idea of this practice around the world. 

Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds (1952): Climate crisis

​The bird attacks resemble WWII air raids, and the setting in Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 version is South of London, not Bodega Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area like in the Alfred Hitchcock film. Through a modern lens, the story can be viewed as a meditation on human-induced climate change, as if du Maurier’s vision could stare down decades into the future—”I have a notion the weather will change. It will be a hard winter. That’s why the birds are restless.” 

And after the first attack in his home, on which Nat Hocken blames the weather, his wife challenges that assessment:

“But Nat,” whispered his wife, “it’s only this night that the weather turned. There’s been no snow to drive them. And they can’t be hungry yet. There’s food for them, out there, in the fields.”

“It’s the weather,” repeated Nat. “I tell you, it’s the weather.”

And shortly thereafter, Mrs. Trigg discusses the same:

“Can you tell me where this cold is coming from? Is it Russia? I’ve never seen such a change. And it’s going on, the wireless says. Something to do with the Arctic circle.”

Whether you believe The Birds’ pages infer climate change or that humans are responsible for the current climatic upheaval on this planet, the story is a taut, suspenseful read and is worth exploring if you haven’t, and again if you have.

By this point, you may have surmised that I maintain a plant-based diet. And as a writer, I often explore animal retribution narratives. In my story collection and recent novella, I look at the pets that no longer want to be “owned,” military-altered salamanders mutating to become killers who can possess their victims, killer zombie bats, trees that find a way to go after the people who chop them down, because I not only believe beasts could topple our planet’s hierarchy, but also that nature coming back to kill us is already happening. Nature always wins.

 Unshod, Cackling and Naked by Tamika Thompson

A beauty pageant veteran appeases her mother by competing for one final crown, only to find herself trapped in a hand-sewn gown that cuts into her flesh. A journalist falls deeply in love with a mysterious woman but discovers his beloved can vanish and reappear hours later in the same spot, as if no time has passed at all. A cash-strapped college student agrees to work in a shop window as a mannequin but quickly learns she’s not free to break her pose. And what happens when the family pet decides it no longer wants to have “owners?”

In the grim and often horrific thirteen tales collected here, beauty is violent, and love and hate are the same feeling, laid bare by unbridled obsession. Entering worlds both strange and quotidian, and spanning horror landscapes both speculative and real, Unshod, Cackling, and Naked asks who among us is worthy of love and who deserves to die?

Tamika Thompson

Bio
Tamika Thompson is a writer, producer, and journalist. She is author of Unshod, Cackling, and Naked (Unnerving Books), which Publishers Weekly calls “powerful,” “unsettling,” and “terrifying,” as well as author of Salamander Justice (Madness Heart Press). She is co-creator of the artist collective POC United and fiction editor for the group’s award-winning anthology, Graffiti. Her work has appeared in several speculative fiction anthologies as well as in Interzone, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two children. You can find her online at tamikathompson.com and on Twitter/Slasher @tamikathompson.