Squirm (1976) is cult filmmaker Jeff Lieberman's first feature, which follows small-town Geri (Patricia Pearcy) and her love interest, city slicker Mick (Don Scardino), as they discover the horrifying consequences of a powerful thunderstorm and downed power lines—the town comes under siege by super-charged killer worms. Lieberman has often stated in interviews that his main inspiration for the film was a childhood experiment he conducted with his brother in which they electrified a pool of mud exciting the worms beneath to emerge. Despite this explanation, the movie's biggest influence is arguably the work of classic film director Alfred Hitchcock, especially his film The Birds (1963).

In a 1980 interview with Mick Garris, Lieberman discusses his first two films, Squirm and Blue Sunshine (1978). He shares the story about the experiment with his brother, citing it as the main inspiration of the film. He also mentions that he combined this experience with a real type of carnivorous worms called glycera, or bloodworms, to come up with the idea for the killer worms in Squirm.

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However, he goes on to say that Squirm and others movies of the natural horror genre, namely Jaws (1975), essentially "ripped off Hitchcock's The Birds," specifically what Lieberman calls Hitchcock's "concept of taking a common thing and looking at it in a different way." He credits Hitchcock as being one of the first directors to move the natural horror movie genre away from the 1950s obsession with giant mutated animals. He states that The Birds is more realistic, and that "everybody else is just cashing in on the idea."

Squirm's Other Hitchcock Influences: Small-Town America & The Shower Scene

Squirm's Hitchcock influence doesn't end with the concept of more reality-based natural horror. The movie also features a theme that Hitchcock, an Englishman, often revisited in his work—that of pretentious city folk invading small-town America. Squirm is set in a stereotypical backwater town called Fly Creek, where city boy Mick goes to meet his love interest, Geri. The Birds is set in Bodega Bay, a bucolic small town outside of San Francisco, where cosmopolitan Melanie (Tippi Hedren) goes to pursue her love interest, Mitch (Rod Taylor). This theme of the city versus the country is not unique to Hitchcock, but it is a theme he was known to be fond of, especially in his earlier work, namely Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

The most obvious Hitchcock references in Squirm are the film's two shower scenes, the first in which Geri narrowly and unknowingly escapes a gruesome death by the flesh-eating killer worms. In the second, her sister turns on the shower and leaves it running, also not realizing that the slimy assassins are oozing from the shower head, which fills the house with the insatiable creatures. These scenes are inescapably Hitchcockian, despite the fact that they don't result in immediate death as they do in Psycho (1960).

Jeff Lieberman has noted that Hitchcock wasn't a huge influence on his overall filmmaking, despite his giving credit to the director for practically inventing the modern natural horror genre. Regardless of whoever or whatever Lieberman gives credit to for influencing his work, his first feature undoubtedly owes a lot to the Englishman. Be that as it may, Lieberman himself has become an icon in horror, not only for his unique work in Squirm, but also for his subsequent films, most of which have achieved cult-horror status.

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