The Deadly Mantis (1957) on Netflix
Approved19571h 19mHorrorSci-FiThriller
The Arctic ice shifts and frees a praying mantis frozen for millions of years. Col. Joe Parkman and Dr. Nedrick Jackson track the giant insect ravaging an outpost in northern Canada.
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- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.2/104,578 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes33%
Trailer
Plot summary
A volcano erupts in the South Seas and shifts the icebergs at the North Pole, waking a praying mantis two hundred feet long that has been frozen for millions of years. In northern Canada, a radar station loses contact with one of its outposts. Col. Joe Parkman flies there and finds the buildings destroyed, the men gone and long slashes in the snow. When a creature attacks an Air Force plane, Joe recovers a spur five feet long from the wreckage. Dr. Nedrick Jackson, a paleontologist, identifies it as a spur from a praying mantis of gigantic size.
Cast
- Florenz Amesas Prof. Anton Gunther
- Helen Jayas Mrs. Farley
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Deadly Mantis (1957)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Deadly Mantis was director Nathan Juran's first science-fiction film, and Juran said he personally devised the idea for the film's opening sequence.
- The giant mantis was built as a 200-foot, 40-foot-tall papier-mache model with a hydraulic system and a 150-foot wingspan, backed by two smaller 6-foot and 1-foot models, while real praying mantis footage was used for its climb up the Washington Monument.
- The filmmakers padded out the movie with recycled stock Air Force footage from shorts like "Guardians All" and "One Plane - One Bomb," and lifted its Inuit village scenes from Universal's 1933 film S.O.S. Iceberg.
- The film built a lasting cult afterlife: it was riffed on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1997 and has been rerun on the horror-host show Svengoolie in 2008, 2012 and again in 2025.
