The Tokutei Kadai (Special Research Projects) fund supported my dissertation project, entitled “The Insect Others: Ecocultural Critique of Insect Representation in 1970s American Horror Films.” The project examined eleven films featuring insects and arachnids from the decade, analyzing them in relation to socio-ecological contexts. It adopted an ecocultural approach, advocating a reading of culture that recognizes the ways nature is implicated in the production of power. In this framework, insect horror films are understood as a specific cultural practice in the 1970s, a practice that was deeply intertwined not only with ideas about nature and animals but also with the hegemonic social and political structures that shaped how these ideas were organized, represented, and disseminated. 

My dissertation demonstrates how scientific authority in the 1960s and 1970s – particularly concerns about insecticides and research on insect social behavior that challenged human exceptionalism – contributed to the surge of insect films in the 1970s. It analyzes discourses surrounding specific insects, including ants, bees, and spiders, demonstrating how the films reflected and shaped scientific and social understandings. It further traces how these representations intersected with historical and ideological contexts: the threat to Cold War liberal humanist ideals posed by dystopian ant collectives, xenophobic and racialized narratives surrounding the spread of Africanized honeybees in “killer” bee films, and anxieties about sexual liberation and the women’s movement in depictions of female-centered insect reproduction. By examining the underexplored cultural significance of insects as both a symptom of and challenge to anthropocentric frameworks, my project contributes to film studies, animal studies, and cultural studies.

The Tokutei Kadai fund enabled the purchase of essential scholarly texts and DVDs for this filmic, historical, and theoretical analysis. This support was crucial to the successful completion of my dissertation at the end of the 2025 academic year. It has also laid the groundwork for future research on this topic, including an article currently under review and an upcoming conference presentation at the 9th International Symposium on Literature and Environment in East Asia in June 2026.