Willard Collection

Willard (1971) and Ben (1972) make up the whole of this short-lived franchise. The first is adapted from Stephen Gilbert's novel Ratman's Notebooks, directed by Daniel Mann, and produced by Bing Crosby Productions — though by 1971 Crosby himself had no involvement with the company; he'd sold it to Cox Broadcasting in 1968, and Willard was its first theatrical release since the sale.

Bruce Davison stars as Willard Stiles, squeezed out of the company his late father founded by his boss (Ernest Borgnine) and dominated at home by his mother (Elsa Lanchester); his only real companionship comes from the rats he raises, and eventually turns on both of them. Nobody expected much from it, but it became the surprise hit of the summer, the twelfth highest-grossing release of 1971 — enough to make a sequel inevitable.

Daniel Mann didn't return for Ben; veteran journeyman Phil Karlson, a generation into directing noir and westerns by that point, took over instead. The sequel drops Davison's character entirely in favor of Danny Garrison (Lee Harcourt Montgomery), a lonely boy with a heart condition who adopts Ben, the surviving lead rat from the first film — a shift from workplace revenge story to something closer to a boy-and-his-pet drama, right up until Ben's colony turns violent again and the police have to burn them out of the sewers.

The one thing most people remember about Ben has nothing to do with rats: its theme song, sung over the closing credits by a thirteen-year-old Michael Jackson, became his first number-one single as a solo artist and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Both films are usually filed alongside the decade's run of "animals attack" horror — Frogs, Night of the Lepus, Squirm, eventually Jaws — a cycle Willard is often credited with kicking off, even though critics have long noted it's a more character-driven, psychologically grounded film than most of what followed in its wake.