Click on a picture to enlarge it Snakes in Movies Group Pages All Movie Snakes Must Die! All Movie Snakes Want to Kill You! Dancing With Snakes Giant Monster Snakes Pet Snakes Shooting Snakes Snake Bites Snake Charmers Snake Face Snake Fights Snake People Snake Pits SnakeSexploitation Snakes & Skulls Snakes Run Amok Snakes Used as Weapons Snakes Used for Comedy Snakes Used for Food or Medicine Snakes Used Realistically Throwing and Whipping Snakes Kinds of Snakes Rattlesnakes Cobras Black Mambas Boas, Pythons, and Anacondas Unusual Species Settings Snake in the House! Snakes in Beds Snakes in Jungles and Swamps Snakes In Trees Genres & Locations Snakes In Westerns Snakes in Asian Movies Herps in Australian Movies Herps in James Bond Movies Herps in Silent Movies Herps in Spielberg Movies

Snakes in Movies   Black Moon (1975)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is an experimental film from the great French director Louis Malle. At the beginning of the film we see a teenage girl named Lilly (Cathryn Harrison) driving a car in a countryside where an army of men and an army of women are at war. She stops to watch a group of male soldiers execute a group of female soldiers, but she is spotted as a female and the men try to kill her. She escapes by driving her car off the road and deep into the woods where she finds an ancient road that is ultimately blocked by a fallen tree. She gets out of the car and begins lifting stones from the edge of the road so she can drive around the obstacle. Under one rock she finds a pair of snakes mating and she is startled and stops to stare blankly at them. (Lilly is probably surprised to see male and female animals that are not trying to kill each other.) As far as I can determine, these snakes are Western Whip Snakes - Coluber viriflavidus, which are not native to southern France where the movie was filmed. I like the way these snakes were revealed because it involves rock flipping - a popular herping technique that can be very productive in the right season and habitat but I don't think I've ever seen it done in a fiction film. The scene of mating snakes sets us up for the adolescent journey into sexual awareness that follows, and a snake returns at the end of the film to help Lilly, in a sybolic and creepy way that may be just the imaginings of the girl's psychotic mind. There are several scenes in the film where Lilly seems out of touch with physical reality which have been interpreted to mean that what we see on screen is derived from her psychotic visions. As she is staring at the mating snakes, Lilly turns to see some female soldiers torturing a man. One of them spots her so she runs away deeper into the woods. Eventually she gets to an old country house where she enters a strange surreal world with a talking unicorn that recites Shakespeare, with naked children who chase pigs, and where an old woman has conversations with a rat in a fantastic language. In the old woman's room Lilly opens a drawer and finds another snake. This one appears to be one of the North American gartersnakes. And at the end of the film, another Western Whip Snake crawls up onto the bed where she is lying.