Abstract
I recently had the somewhat dubious pleasure of watching a low-budget horror film from 1959 that is now considered a minor classic: The Killer Shrews. The film’s hero is a daring young sailor who lands on an island off the Texas coast to take shelter against an approaching hurricane. He and his navigator meet a colony of scientists and hangers-on who have been experimenting with rodents — specifically, with shrews — in order to explore mechanisms for population control. The scientists, it transpires, have been besieged for several months by a mutant species of killer shrews who were originally bred in the lab but have escaped. They are the size of large dogs, and, when we finally get to see them, they closely resemble greyhounds wearing giant shrew masks. These menacing creatures are also poisonous. The scientists have set out powerful poison in the hope of eradicating the shrews, but instead of dying from the poison, the shrews have developed the ability to kill anything with a single bite because the poison has collected in their salivary glands instead of being metabolized. (Evidently the film’s creators were unaware of the natural toxicity of shrews’ saliva, even without scientific intervention.) The giant shrews are ravenous, having run out of food on the island and being required, rather like their miniature rodent counterparts, to eat three times their own weight each day.
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© 2010 David Wootton & Graham Holderness
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Marcus, L.S. (2010). The Shrew as Editor/Editing Shrews. In: Wootton, D., Holderness, G. (eds) Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500–1700. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277489_6
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