 The swarms of locusts were realized by painting a few thousand  Styrofoam packing peanuts brown and shooting them out of a large air  blower. Director John Boorman (qv) had experimented with a number  of techniques to get actual grasshoppers to swarm around (including  clipping their legs off so they couldnt land!), but none were  convincing enough for him, so they used the peanuts (nicknamed  "Larrys" by the crew).