The second wave came in the 1970's, she said, when there was a spate of films linking fearful insects to toxic-waste dumps and exploiting the early reports of the "killer bees" that had escaped captivity in Brazil and were heading irrevocably northward. Included in this wave were "Empire of the Ants," starring Joan Collins, "Terror Out of the Sky" and "Deadly Bees."

And there have been plenty of bugs on the big screen before and between the three great waves. The first appearance of an insect on celluloid is thought to be in "Ladyflowers and Butterflies," a short feature made in 1900. But insects did not get their really big break until Luis Bunuel discovered their easy shock value and had ants swarming over a human hand and cockroaches crawling from a piano in his 1928 surrealistic picture, "An Andalusian Dog."

Because they are responsible for recycling dead organisms, insects are a handy analogy for death and disintegration. They often eat waste matter, and so they can be a sign of filth or moral turpitude.

In depicting aliens, movie makers often use parts of insects, like antennae, elbows that bend in the wrong direction, multifaceted fly eyes. The creatures in "Alien" have a life cycle much like parasitic wasps that develop inside hosts before burrowing out. The aliens also have extendable mouths-within-mouths like the mouth parts of certain types of dragonflies. 'No Point of Empathy'

"Insects are so structurally different from humans that they seem like aliens," Dr. Berenbaum said. "There's no point of empathy." Insects are also much easier to manipulate on the set than are other animals. They have stereotyped hard-wired behavior, entomologists say, and they will unfailingly perform any one of their limited activities if given the proper stimulus. A cockroach will run away from a light source, and bees can be made to fly in certain directions by anyone who understands the slightest bit about their behavior.

Raymond A. Mendez, a photographer and special-effects expert in New York who had the job of manipulating the moths in "The Silence of the Lambs," says that insects are such malleable actors that in the 1970's he coined a term for the sort of work he does with them in movies: insect wrangler.