Shakma (1990) and Building Fear Through an Animal

Everyone has their fears.  Horror movies are made to play with those fears.  They are meant to exploit the fears that people have and make for a frightening movie going experience.  If they are not frightening, they are at least supposed to pump up your adrenaline and get the viewer exhilarated.  If you’re afraid of clowns, movies like Poltergeist, or the mini-series of It will use those fears to create scares.  If you are afraid of ghosts, you have movies like the Paranormal Activity series to get you.  Then there are the movies that are there to scare the people who are afraid of animals.

Shakma falls into the category of animal attack horror movies.  The 1990 film is about a group of medical students locked in a school building while a vicious baboon is on the loose and killing them.  Along with the students is their professor, played by Roddy McDowall.  He’s joined by Christopher Atkins, Ari Meyers, and Amanda Wyss in the cast.

I’ve written about animal attack movies before.  They are basically slasher films that are dressed up as something else because the animal is the cause of the deaths instead of a serial killer.  At the most basic level, however, the two subgenres are nearly identical.  A group of people end up in a situation where someone or something is picking them off one by one.  I went much more in depth about that aspect of animal attack movies before, but this time I would like to use Shakma as an example of how an animal attack movie can be used to play with the audience’s fears.

If you took a survey of your average movie going audience and asked about things that they were afraid of, you would get a myriad of answers.  You would hear things from heights to darkness to death to public speaking.  You would also hear some fears of different types of animals.  I’m not sure that too many people fear baboons, only because most people typically don’t have experience with baboons.  Shakma puts the baboon fear right into the hearts of the people that don’t have it, and it never lets up once it begins.

The movie starts by setting up how ferocious a baboon can be.  Then they add that the baboon in their laboratory is even more ferocious than that, upping the ferocity that the viewer is about to witness.  To the average viewer who might not be paying attention to every single thing happening in the movie, they might think that it’s only a normal baboon.  This is where the fear sets in.

Shakma is a movie about a baboon attacking people.  It was released in 1990.  There wasn’t a vast wealth of computer graphics.  This means that for a movie of Shakma’s budget (1.5 million dollars), a real baboon had to be used.  When Shakma the baboon appears on screen, it’s a real baboon.  When you see Shakma running down the hall, jumping off walls, destroying lab equipment, screaming, and attacking people, it’s a real baboon.  The audience is watching a real baboon doing these things.  When computer graphics are used in place of a real animal, there tends to be a disconnect between the movie and the audience.  The audience doesn’t get that visceral feeling that they would experience while witnessing the real thing.

Also playing on the fear is the way that the attacks get more and more violent.   The first attack was in an open area.  The second attack included acid.  Then there was an attack in an elevator with the doors open, in an elevator with the doors closed, and finally in a bathroom stall.  The first attack was the first attack, the second was more dangerous, and then the attacks began to occur in smaller spaces with less chance of escape.  The situations in which the attacks happened became worse and worse, instilling a deeper fear of the baboon in the audience.

Finally, take the attacks and toss in both the shrieking of the baboon as well as the physical prowess of the animal.  Shakma puts a lot of focus on these two aspects.  The baboon is frightening because of it.  The shrieking can be heard throughout the silent building in a way that could chill a person to the bones.  The physical ability of the baboon was shown through the numerous clips of it running, jumping, and fighting with people.  The combination of these two characteristics helps to highlight just how scary a baboon can be.

The people behind Shakma worked hard to create a fear through the animal.  It was playing on the human instinct of survival.  They built up the villain, in this case a baboon, to be of a nearly unstoppable strength and dangerousness.  The movie shows many instances in which the baboon overpowered the humans and killed them.  It makes the audience fear the baboon.  It has used fear to give the audience a satisfying horror experience.

Many animal attack movies and horror films in general use the fear inside the audience to make the experience of seeing the movie ever more frightening.  Shakma used the fear created through the baboon to build scares within the movie.  The movie might not have been entirely successful at providing the scares due to factors outside of the villain, but it had enough of a blueprint to make the movie worthy of a watch.  It is entertaining like many other horror movies that try to build scares.  Will it put the fear into you?

There are a couple of notes for this post:

• The original animal attack post was for Two-Headed Shark Attack.
• If you have any suggestions for future Sunday “Bad” Movies, feel free to leave a comment or message me on Twitter.