University of Illinois Holds 30th Annual Insect Fear Film Festival

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign held its 30th Annual Insect Fear Film Festival on Feb. 23. The screen “crawled” with a cinematic parade of members of the phylum Arthropoda, which includes spiders, scorpions and insects. One of the featured films was “War of the Coprophages” from season 3 of The X-Files, which features killer cockroaches.

The bug film fest was the idea of Professor May Berenbaum, head of the university’s Department of Entomology. “It’s about education,” she says, and righting the wrongs done to “the most misunderstood taxon on the planet.” National Geographic Editor at Large Cathy Newman caught her between classes to talk about the event.

Click here to read the interview.