Concerning The Rat
As anyone familiar with this particular project may know, the characters in the story encounter (and one violently dispatches) creatures described as "rats" or "giant rats". This is the description used in the short story, which is written in first-person from the perspective of the human character. As may or may not be evident in the short story, this character is...well, he starts off as kind of an asshole. In actuality, there is a whole other side to this guy that I won't even begin to get into now; suffice to say, he's not a very good person and by the end of this, he's....at least a little bit better. Probably because he can't ever remember being the jerk from before the story starts.
Now this character sees a large, semi-aquatic mammal with a hairless tail, calls it "a rat", and that's as far as his analysis goes. The short film adaptation would be able to show the critters as they were intended: much more "mutant dog" than rodent.
It was brought to my attention that using "rats" as a monstrous, alien presence could be taken as ---
-- yes, I know, I'm getting to it! It could be taken as contributing to a negative perception of a real-life animal that is anything but monstrous or alien.
Here is a rat, for example:
and another one, being monstrous:
Although the word "rat" has always been used (in the short story and in the notes for the film) to indicate the creatures scurrying outside the boat, the actual, original idea of them was much more dog-like and was, in all honestly, partially informed by the silly-yet-somehow-still-terrifying creatures from the film Attack of The Killer Shrews:
When they weren't toothy hand-puppets, they were simply dogs in poorly-made costumes. And they moved as such. Now just like describing the critters in this story as "rats", āAttack of The Killer Shrewsā made monsters out of what actually looks like this:
So my initial reaction when asked "why demonize rats?" was "Well, they're not really rats! They're like mutant dogs!" So sure, fair enough, mutant dogs and not rats -- but that brought up another, deeper problem. The creatures outside the light of the boat, which are dangerous and hunted, are like mutant dogs.....which is an entirely original idea.
Nothing like "mutant dog" has been used in recent horror/fantasy.
It's an inspired and visionary creation that no audience has seen the likes of.
People will be shocked by the revolutionary concept of the "mutant dog-like creature".
Only that's NOT TRUE AT ALL!
This concept is not only unoriginal, but has been run well past "trope" territory and into "Already Half-Expected Cliche Land". I had inadvertently committed one of the most grievous crimes I can think of in storytelling: Using a cliche and expecting it to seem original. Ugh....Pfffthth.....
So....although I can honestly say that termĀ āratā in the story (which is actually never spoken once in the short film) is a misnomer and does a poor job of describing the mammalian critters in the dark, even the actual visual concept of the creatures is a tired trope that would likely inspire nothing but boredom, or, at best, a feeling of familiarity.
NO. GOOD.
So....Let it be known, that friends of real-world, non-monstrous rats (like, say, @spoonriverrat, and Iām just pulling letters at random here) can rest assured that not only are no rats being portrayed as horrid beasts, but that even pausing to question it brought the realization that theĀ āsemi-aquatic threatening mammalsā in the story needed a rework. So thatās in the pipeline.
They still wonāt be rodents, but will hopefully be a bit more original and surprising than what I was blindly willing to put on the screen. And to preserve said surprise, I will not be sharing their design or build once completed. Where would the fun in that be?
Until next time, be well, and donāt write stories that involve mutated canids. Itās played out.









