Snakes in SF/F/H (Or, Drumming Up Fear from Ignorance)
As someone who keeps reptiles and still occasionally searches for them in the wild, very few things annoy me more than the way genre films treat snakes. In fact, one of my biggest rants on Torture Cinema concerned the sea snake inaccuracies in Sphere (1998). To this day, I find it difficult to watch films which feature snakes of any kind because almost all of them get nearly everything wrong and most of them use snakes as plot devices for fear. There are a lot of problems with the way snakes are portrayed in SF/F/H, especially film. The biggest, however, can be summed up in these three points: