" Mimic, however, is to Jones the beginning of horror's conscious assessment of the ideology that spawned the horror in the first place:
[Mimic] is neither campy, nor self-conscious. It is a classic creepy film in the tradition of Them!,…and begins with a plague carried by roaches in the subterranean tunnels of New York city. In order to stop the plague, which is killing the city's children, a female entomologist, who wants to have children herself but can't, invents a new bug by recombining DNA from two different species.
The premise of the film, in fact, would return to cinemas in 2006 in Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, in which a society that can no longer reproduce is on the verge of annihilation. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the theme of missing children returns, since Cuaron and Del Toro have long been friends.
Gender Roles, Social Themes, and Iconography
The iconographic setting of Halloween typifies most modern horror films: the nice, quiet suburb is seen again and again from a Nightmare on Elm Street to Dawn of the Dead. Hope resides in the restoration of order to the pristine civilized society of suburbia. However, in Mimic the setting is skewed, for, according to Jones, "all such hope is gone":
There is no army out there ready to rescue us from the monsters science has created. We are all left to deal with them alone, after our technological solutions have failed -- alone amidst the ruins of the Radiant City in a dank, dripping subway tunnel. The only solution left is the…prime totem of folk Catholicism, the rosary, employed as the only possible hope of destroying the monsters created by Enlightenment science (Jones, 2004).
Jones, of course, is referring to the end scene, in which the technology of man fails first with the subway train, which is meant to carry the survivors away, then the elevator lift, which snaps. As the men, one by one, offer themselves in sacrificial roles to allow the others a chance to escape -- first occasioned by the officer, then the husband of Tyler. Finally, the female scientist Tyler crosses over from barren scientist to self-sacrificer by drawing blood from her hand with the aid of the crucifix on the rosary.
By first abandoning traditional gender norms for those presented by the Women's Movement, the childless Tyler becomes part of a scientific community that breeds a bug that is meant to save all the children of the social community, but which then threatens to destroy all humanity. Through...
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now