The maw the better

Or, scary mouths I have known

I went to see Dune 2 last Sunday. I liked the first one very much, but was a bit disappointed that rather than this sequel wrapping things up, we were left feeling like another film was probably coming. I’m not into a Dune film franchise, it’s too stressful!

Timothée atop a worm - touché, my dear Chalamet!

There are quite a lot of fearful things in the Duniverse (I thought I’d just made that up, but googling shows me that of course I didn’t!), but one of the scariest is understood to be the Sandworms. The Sandworms in Dune are like the Sarlacc in Star Wars - absolutely enormous and filled with teeth. But I feel like once a mouth and teeth get that big, you aren’t being eaten so much as lost forever. Which sounds awful, of course - but not as awful as being mangled by an animal with jaws more proportional to a human body.

I think there’s a feeling we have that the bigger a predatory animal is, the scarier. Which makes sense on a visceral level - enormous things are just sort of existentially frightening. But practically, once a thing is big enough to eat you, does it really matter if it gets bigger? I could no more fend off a polar bear than a T-Rex, and I think it’d be preferable to be eaten by the latter, as it would be quicker. As an equation (?), in scariness terms:

Jaws>The Meg
Worms from Tremors>Worms from Dune
Normal anaconda>Anaconda from J.Lo film

Now let us express this idea with this graph:

So what I’m saying is that we have reached peak maw size. The bigger it gets, the less scary it gets. And also, can’t we imagine worse from our bad creatures than enormous teeth and mouths? I remember an episode of Radiolab where they talked about that truly offensive jewel wasp that stings beetles, lays eggs in them and then turns them into actual zombies with some psychotropic venom, so that the beetles bury themselves alive and allow the baby wasps to hatch out of their living bodies and devour them. Now THAT’S sinister!! SANDJEWELWASPS FOR DUNE 3!!!

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I speak from experience about animal mouths, as this comic I drew a few years ago will attest…