I know it’s too late to complain about this year’s Oscar nominees, but it’s still a shame Alex Garland’s Annihilation didn’t get much attention. Based on the Southern Reach book trilogy by Jeff Van der Meer, Annihilation starred Natalie Portman as a biologist whose husband (played by Oscar Isaac) falls ill from exposure to an anomaly called, “The Shimmer.” The Shimmer is a vast, forested area surrounded by an ever growing wall of chromatic light. Anyone who ventures in becomes “changed” by the alien forces at work.

Some of the beautiful creatures produced by ‘The Shimmer.” (Image source: Paramount)

Annihilation’s special effects team outdid themselves in creating the menagerie of mutated wildlife the characters encounter. The real show stopper, however, comes in the form of a hideously mutated grizzly bear. This bear is larger than average with black fur, a hide riddled with sores, topped off with a twisted half-human, half-animal skull face. As for a name, it has two of them. Internet memes have christened it, “The Screaming Bear,” because of it’s ability to mimic the screams of it’s human victims. The creature’s designers named it, “Homerton,” as a play on the name for the less terrifying Paddington Bear.

Stranger still, Homerton is far from the first mutated grizzly to appear in a Paramount produced sci-fi/horror movie.

Prophecy was a Paramount horror film from 1979 directed by John Frankenheimer. It came out during the cycle of “Nature Run Amok” movies that take after Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. The movie’s existence alone is strange given the pedigree of talent behind it. One might expect a Roger Corman, or a Sam Z. Arkoff to be involved. Not the director of The Manchurian Candidate (then again, he did the oddball hitman movie, 99 and 44/100% Dead).

Cast of a monster movie or a 70’s folk-band album cover. You decide!

Prophecy begins with Dr. Robert Verne (Robert Foxworth, voice of “Ratchet” in the Transformers movies) who is so disgusted by the barrage of urban decay that he makes it difficult for his wife, Maggie ( Talia Shire, fresh off of Rocky and The Godfather movies), to come clean about her pregnancy. The Environmental Protection Agency gives him a job in the wilds of Maine to settle a dispute between the Native American Original Peoples (or “Opies”) and the lumber company. Robert decides to bring Maggie along with him to get away from city life ( and provide a half hour of melodrama).

Their love for the northern wilds is soon warped by the presence of duck-eating salmon, football sized tadpoles, and psycho attack raccoons. John and Ramona Hawks (played by Armand Assante and Victoria Racimo) inform the Vernes about the negative impact the logging and paper mill is having on the Opies. It is deduced by Dr. Verne that the increase of mutations (or “Freakism!” as Foxworth sensationally puts it) and animal aggression are caused by mercury deposits from the mill. Meanwhile, Maggie is trying to come to terms with not only her pregnancy, but that her unborn child might’ve been affected by the mutagen.

“I picked at it.”

The star attraction of this eco-horror tale is also a mutated grizzly, this time named Katahdin. Katahdin resembles a giant, ambulatory pig-in-a-blanket that fell on the floor. Colloquially described in the film as a sort of chimera: “Part of everything in God’s creation.” Whatever ursine features the creature possesses are obscured in favor of the warped and mutilated side. In other words, imagine if Harvey “Two-Face” Dent was reincarnated as a grizzly bear and you have Katahdin. Katahdin is also the mother of two mutated cubs who get taken by the human characters as living proof of the mill’s environmental damage. Big creatures might be neglectful parents, but they are protective.

Katahdin is at her best when she’s jumping out of the shadows or silloueted in distance shots. Up close, you start to notice it’s just an actor running around in a stiff rubber suit.

Kevin Peter Hall (1955-1991) looking smart.

Inside that bear suit was the original Predator himself, Kevin Peter Hall making his feature film debut (listed in the credits as “Kevin Hall”). Katahdin’s guttural roars came from the mouth of Frank Welker, voice of Fred from Scooby Doo and many others. In a spiritual sort of way, the rubber suit acting and Welker’s roars makes Katahdin an illegitimate American version of Godzilla.

Like the original Godzilla movie (Gojira, 1954), Prophecy was also inspiried by a real life tragedy befell Japanese citizens. In 1956, it was discovered people living in Kumamoto Prefecture were experiencing symptoms related to methlymercury poisoning. Evidence showed high levels of mercury were being leaked into the water supply, via Minamata Bay, by the Chisso Chemical Plant. These cases of “Minamata disease” would receive international attention by way of an expose from Time photographer W. Eugene Smith. Minamata is brought up in Frankenheimer’s film,but the disease’s heartbreaking effects are never depicted.

David Seltzer, author of The Omen, wrote the film’s screenplay and the official novelization. Seltzer works in all the relevant social messages of the seventies from the environment, Native People’s rights, the fallout of Roe v. Wade. Even the relationships of the human characters feel driven by a societal topic. In the end, all it amounts to is window dressing. It’s no different than fifties monster movies capitalizing on the fears of atomic radiation.

When I started writing this in 2018, I wanted to build a link between Prophecy and Annihilation based on the emphasis they placed on their ursine antagonists. I found it really curious that Homerton was a creature invented for the movie version (no such creature appears in Van der Meer’s books) to embody the damage the Shimmer was causing on the environment. Just like how Katahdin was both a victim and manifestation of methlymercury. Andrew Whitehurst, Annihilation’s VFX designer, made another connection when he said: “[Homerton’s] an animal who doesn’t really know what it has become and is clearly suffering, and that side of the story was important because you didn’t want something that was just this horrific killing machine: You wanted a creature that was in a situation that was not of its own making and that it was unable to deal with.” Beyond this, no one involved with Annihilation’s production has even acknowledged Prophecy and it’s starring monster, making all this nothing more than speculation.

Me after first seeing “Annihilation.”

There’s one link that Prophecy and Annihilation do share: they’re box office bombs. Prophecy opened in the shadow of Ridley Scott’s Alien where it made $22.7 million against a $12 million budget. Annihilation’s box office was undercut by a bitter dispute between the film’s producers. A deal was soon struck between Paramount and Netflix that was similar to the arrangement made for The Cloverfield Paradox. Paramount handled its US, Canadian, and Chinese releases, and Netflix distributed the film digitally to other territories. It opened on February 23rd way behind Black Panther at fourth place. The final worldwide gross was $43 million against a $55 million budget.

Besides some similarities, both films have varying critical receptions. For all its financial woes, Annhilation continues to rake in praise to this day. Though there are a fair amount of gripes about its story and characters. Some felt the film was “too intellectual” and dour to appeal to wider audiences. Issues were also taken with how Natalie Portman was playing a character who was written as Asian in the books. None of them would stop critics (and former President Barack Obama) from listing it on their “Best Films of 2018” lists.

Critics in the late seventies received Prophecy like it was a bad joke told at a benefit for Lou Gehrig’s disease. Robert M. Stewart, in his review for Cinefantastique, called it “an unethical rip-off of reality.” Stewart’s write-up eulogized Eugene Smith (who passed away in 1978) and shamed director Frankenheimer and writer Seltzer for not including more emphasis on the human element. What critics hoped would be a true-to-life China Syndrome-type movie, turned into another Jaws knock-off. (They would get their wish forty years later with Minamata, starring Johnny Depp as Smith.) John Frankenheimer would even concede to the negative reviews. “I think we made two mistakes,” he said. “One, the audience was way ahead of us…The audience knew long before the film’s hero and heroine, that we were coming to a monster. That’s not terribly good. And another thing, I don’t think our monster was very frightening.”

But, not all of Prophecy’s bad reviews were “bad.” Stephen King wrote about the film in his non-fiction book, Danse Macabre, within a chapter titled-“The Horror Film as Junk Food.” King slammed the film for all of it’s non-Minamata related faults (Hokey effects; Maine Indian tribes built wooden lodges, NOT teepee villages; Did we mention Armand Assante in Native-face yet?) Despite all that, he praised it for being a comfortably bad movie. He even claimed to have seen it four, maybe five, times at the drive-in!

King’s enthusiasm for Prophecy would shine through with future viewings. Repeated showings on the Sci-Fi Channel and AMC allowed Prophecy to build a small b-movie cult identity. Whether it’s at the same level as “small” cult films like Madman, Critters, Q: The Winged Serpent, or My Bloody Valentine (another Paramount horror film that got the shaft) is a matter of opinion. It does, however, stand with the likes of The Giant Claw, Godmonster of Indian Flats, and The Horror of Party Beach for craziest looking monster. Add a guy and his robot pals (or a certain boobophile from Grapevine, Texas), and we’re definitely talking quality schlock watching.

“Let’s get cereal!”

Today, Google image searches will bring up Katahdin fan art, posters, lobby cards, and scans of foreign home video boxes. Youtube has more than a few uploads of that scene where Katahdin attacks a campsite and a kid decides the best way to escape is by hopping away in his banana yellow sleeping bag (Spoilers: It ends in a cloud of bloody feathers). Trey Parker and Matt Stone give a subtle nod to the movie in their South Park: Imaginationland story-arc when a Katahdin-like creature that Al Gore invented, called “Manbearpig,” escapes into the “real world” to tear up some scientists.

Even though Prophecy ended with a sequel hook, no follow-up film was planned. Today, if you get enough people chatting about the movie online, talk of a remake would naturally follow. Rebooting Prophecy won’t be as clear cut as taking something that didn’t work so it can magically work the second time. Ideally, one could base a new movie off of Seltzer’s aforementioned novelization, which fleshes out the human characters and depicts a scarier monster (Katahdin was originally written to be part-flying squirrel, too).

Foreign 8mm with gory deleted scene for cover.

Before we get started on a remake, how about a special edition Blu-ray of Prophecy? The only copy on the market is a repackaged edition of Paramount’s bare-bones 2002 DVD. Let’s get a full “Criterion Collection” style release with digital remastering and a buffet of extras. I want commentaries, interviews, deleted scenes, trailers & TV/radio spots, and a gallery of concept art, production photos, and publicity materials.

At the end of it all, John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy and Alex Garland’s Annihilation are like two animals that share the same family tree, but on different branches. Homerton isn’t the main threat in it’s movie, but owns every moment of its screen-time. That short scene of Homerton menacing a bound and gagged Natalie Portman is the closest we may ever get to a Prophecy remake anytime soon. Monster and B-movie connoseuirs, though, will always regard Katahdin as “The Original Screaming Bear.”