Even if you don’t know his name, you’ve seen his work: the hypnotic, dizzying poster for Vertigo (and its iconic opening credit sequence), the vaguely horrifying original poster for The Shining, and a pretty sizable selection of household logos, from Lawry’s to the goddamn Girl Scouts. On top of that, legendary graphic designer Saul Bass has done the title sequences for a number of movies for Martin Scorsese, including Casino, Goodfellas, and Cape Fear, Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder and Exodus), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Psycho, and North By Northwest, just to name a few. It’s Saul Bass and his wife Elaine (who too rarely gets her proper credit) who essentially reinvented what opening credits for a film could and should be. Bass once proclaimed the absolute importance of quality credits and opening shots stating that he “had felt for some time that audience involvement with a film should begin with its first frame.” He’s got a point. His work for Hitchcock, for instance, was uniquely capable of setting the mood for the director’s greatest hits while staying sleek, stylish, and unapologetically artistic.
The cultural impact of Bass’s work, particularly in the film industry, makes him as ideal a candidate for moviemaking as anybody else. Oddly enough, he’s only directed but one picture, a cerebral and visually-striking horror film about a killer ant colony titled Phase IV. Much more 2001: A Space Odyssey than the sleazy kind of creature feature you’d expect from its premise, Phase IV bears the brushstrokes of a master artist experimenting in a new medium. In the hands of most other filmmakers, a movie about a murderous ant colony would have assuredly become B-movie heaven, but in the hands of Bass it becomes something far better, something decidedly more…weird. It’s an under-seen and under-valued little sci-fi gem that should have sparked a prolific career in directing for Bass, but instead remains the designer’s sole credit in the category.
What Is ‘Phase IV’ About?
Image via Paramount Pictures
After an indescribable astronomical event, the forces of the cosmos cause a sprawling colony of ants to undergo a fantastically rapid evolution. Before long, the ants (communicating via telepathy, it is assumed) build towering columns out in the desert. They look a lot like the monolith from 2001 if it was made from dirt and sand. There’s something unworldly about these towers, and Doctors Lesko (Michael Murphy) and Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) —an entomologist and cryptographer, respectively — are sent out to investigate. It’s dangerous business, of course, since the ants are seen behaving very un-antlike, defying the very concept of the food chain by killing and eating larger predatory insects. The cause for concern? What’s to stop these ants from going crazy and killing something bigger. Livestock, perhaps? Even humans?
Well, a sheep ends up dead with nearly perfectly round circles drilled into its bloodless neck. Mr. Eldridge (Alan Glifford), a local farmer, shrugs it off as “some kind of an infestation.” He doesn’t yet know how right he is. It’s once Lesko and Hubbs issue an order for the farmer and his family to evacuate that things start getting really weird. Lesko starts communicating with the ants with his fancy (and very expensive) computer equipment hooked up to a massive antenna. The ants’ towers, you see, seem to act as communication devices reverberating directions to the colony. While Lesko tries to come to an understanding with his insectan brethren, Hubbs gets bitten by an ant and loses his goddamn mind. He wages guerrilla warfare on the creatures, blowing their towers to smithereens with some sort of grenade launcher.
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Why does he do this? He can’t understand them. They won’t communicate with him. If there’s common ground between the two species, neither is able to find it. To Hubbs, the rational answer is to blow them off the face of the earth as punishment for their differences. He vows to kill their Queen and put an end to their reign. Lesko, meanwhile, still tries his damnedest to communicate. Perhaps a bit heavy-handedly, the movie here places these two men as logical opposites for mankind’s various responses to mysterious potential threats, as well as nature as a whole: understanding…or destruction! Along the way, the scientists employ a disgusting yellow tar-like insecticide that (accidentally) gets turned against fellow humans, killing them in an unimaginably painful manner. Many of the ants perish, but enough survive to regroup, repopulate, and approach their reluctant war from a new, more effective direction. It only gets weirder from there, with the movie’s hallucinatory climax wrapping up one of the strangest sci-fi pictures of the 1970s. It’s a good thing.
‘Phase IV’ Is a Strange, Psychedelic Horror Movie
Image via Paramount Pictures
Even though it’s been largely neglected by time, Phase IV is one of the greatest eco-horror films out there. It’s aforementioned weirdness is a virtue worth celebrating, sure, but even more crucial is Bass’s confidence on a visual and aesthetic level. It makes sense, considering the instantly recognizable quality of his posters and credit sequences, that Bass’s sole work as a director would be so confident in its composition. The vast desert landscapes are striking, and when they’re ultimately dwarfed by the ants’ massive structures, the impression is powerful.
Most impactful, though, is the frequent use of microphotography by Ken Middleham. In what feels almost like the stop-motion monster animation from Ray Harryhausen, the ants are observed with a discomforting intimacy that is at once revealing and wholly alien. The film gains plenty of potency from its refusal to be B-Movie sleazy in its portrayal of the horror tones. The effects are disquieting, but never gory. One scene involving an ant crawling from a hole in a hand is chilling in a way that’s difficult to explain. Others featuring close-up photography of ants crawling across a body is enough to make you instantly itchy.
The Ants’ Purpose in ‘Phase IV’ Is Unclear
Image via Paramount Pictures
Middleham’s photography is crucial to the film, but so is the mystique that Bass allows through restraint. We can see what the ants are doing without explanation, but rarely do we understand why. We aren’t supposed to, as they’re operating according to a logic that defies our capability. It’s precisely why Lesko is ultimately stumped by the behavior. It rebels against what we understand about ants. Would it be easier to have the ants’ behavior —their thoughts — more clear? Probably, but that wouldn’t have had the same effect. We share the scientists’ inability to understand, and we’re consequently placed in the same place of deciding how to proceed. Blowing them all sky-high is clearly barbaric, but how can one communicate with those who don’t want it?
Bass’s film ponders the question of humankind’s place in nature, and, ultimately, in the food chain. Man’s dominion over fish, fowl, and earth places them largely only at the mercy of themselves, but this is also a presumption largely taken for granted. In its final act, Phase IV steers into territory covered by Invasion of the Body Snatchers, swapping the metaphor for Communism (or hysterical anti-Communist paranoia, depending on your reading) for humankind’s arrogance in the face of nature. While it’s not hard to unpack an ecological subtext from the movie, considering Hubbs’s crude if contemptible run-and-gun approach to combating natural threats, it’s also left largely up to interpretation. The final five minutes perform a mind-bending circus trick that’s hard to unpack. It makes an ambitious gambit that few filmmakers would have the courage to pull off. By the time the credits finally roll, one’s left wondering what the hell it was they just watched.
Saul Bass Wanted a Different, Weirder Ending for ‘Phase IV’
Image via Paramount Pictures
The respectable, but ultimately flawed finale of Phase IV is admirable in its refusal to explain things outright. The ants’ intentions are revealed but never explained. Their spontaneous evolution occurring with some strange cosmic event is never explored deeply. While critics could justifiably dismiss this as a consequence of being underwritten, this reluctance to wrap things up neatly actually works for the film’s benefit. It adds to the terror of the natural world. It leans on our lack of understanding of the universe and its infinite complications to reminds us that there could merely just be things beyond our understanding.
Even better than the film’s slightly undercooked finale is the one that the studio altered before its release. Bass’s original ending, though far more esoteric, is vastly superior to the ending pushed by the studio. Like Dr. Bowman’s journey through an omnichromatic, evolutionary tunnel (???) at the end of 2001, the original finale of Phase IV takes to presenting a montage of bizarre and psychedelic images that lean more towards expressionism than clear-cut narrative punctuation. Images of two people sprinting up a sprawling staircase atop a geometric building, traversing a maze, and running across the top of what looks like a massive ancient structure soon give way to something even more odd.
Image via Paramount Pictures
Images collide like kaleidoscopic colors. A person sits across from a monkey on some strange altar. An image of a flying man is superimposed alongside a bird of prey mid-flight. Natural landscape images blend together. A giant ant crawls out from a hole in somebody’s forehead and rules dominion over all. What does it all mean? Are the ants given omnipotence from the infinite powers of the universe? Do these ants choose to enslave humankind, selectively breed it, and create a tightly-constructed New World Order that operates on hivemind mentality? It’s hard to say, but Phase IV’s ending ranks up there with some of the most confusing ever committed to film.
Long before its cryptic ending, Phase IV takes risks with style and narrative alike. The film favors the abstract over the straight forward. It escapes simple classification, toying with the heady cerebralism of so-called art-house science fiction and an absurd sort of premise one would see in flicks like Them! or Frogs. It takes a silly idea (killer ant colonies is a bit goofy, after all) and makes it genuinely discomforting through restraint and atmosphere. With Bass’s original ending, Phase IV belonged among the most fascinatingly bold sci-fi movies ever made. For a first film, it’s a fantastic swing that, even when it misses, is still admirable as hell. If Bass would have tried again, the results would have imaginably only been better.
The Big Picture
The article discusses the influential work of graphic designer Saul Bass, known for his iconic film posters and opening credit sequences. Bass directed only one film, Phase IV, a visually striking horror movie about a killer ant colony, which displays his confidence and artistic composition. Phase IV is praised for its unique approach to eco-horror, utilizing striking visuals and microphotography to create a disquieting and chilling atmosphere. The original ending, although esoteric, adds to the film’s overall strangeness.