Lizzie Bello loves insects — and she wants you to love them too.

“They’re really wonderful creatures,” said Bello, a Ph.D. student in entomology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). “They have a lot of cool abilities. They can come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. … And they’re a very easily accessible organism: Anywhere that you go in the world, you can find an insect.”

Bello will share her love of all things creepy crawly this Saturday as an organizer of the Insect Fear Film Festival at UIUC. For more than 40 years, graduate students and faculty in the school’s entomology department have held the public outreach event to help turn people’s fear of insects into fascination.

“They do have the capacity to harm us in certain situations. So it’s not completely unwarranted, but I think a lot of the fear comes from the unknown,” Bello said. “Even as an entomologist, if I’m out doing fieldwork and a big insect zips by my head and it’s super loud and I don’t know what it is, it still startles me. And I work with them every day.”

Bello said Hollywood has taken advantage of that fear by producing lots of horror films starring insects, some of which have been highlighted by the festival in past years. This year, the theme of the event is “Ant-Men” and will feature movies that shrink people to the size of ants, including Marvel Comics’s Ant-Man.

“One of the few sources of comfort for us when we’re faced with insect enemies is that at least we’re bigger than they are,” May Berenbaum, head of the UIUC entomology department and festival founder, said in a press release. This year’s films pose the question: “What would happen if we had to deal with them in the same weight class?”

Graduate student Bello hopes the festival, which will include a living ant display and a talk by a leading ant scientist, will help people see eye to eye with America’s least favorite picnic guest.

“Ants are pretty underrated,” Bello said. “Most people probably just think of them as a pest crawling on their counter … but they do a lot of fantastic things. They can be responsible for altering entire ecosystems, they plant forests, they farm fungus …. Some ants can have relationships with aphids that’s kind of similar to how humans have relationships with cows in terms of [raising] cattle.”

Ants aren’t the only members of the festival’s many-legged lineup. At one of the event’s most popular attractions, the insect petting zoo, festival goers will have the chance to hold tarantulas, pill bugs and cockroaches — and observe, probably from a distance, a scorpion recently acquired by the entomology department.

“We will be looking for a new name for him,” Bello said. “So if anyone’s interested in naming a scorpion, we’ll be welcoming those suggestions at the festival.”

The Insect Fear Film Festival has gotten hundreds of visitors in previous years, said Bello, including lots of families. There’s an insect art contest for kids and festival T-shirts for sale. It’s all to help people love a creature so many love to hate.

“I feel like once you get to learn more about them and how they benefit the earth and society, and people and all the cool things that they can do, I think some of those fears start to ease up,” Bello said.

The 41st Insect Fear Film Festival takes place this Saturday, Feb. 24 at the Foellinger Auditorium on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Doors open at 5:30pm.

Lisa Kurian Philip covers higher education for WBEZ, in partnership with Open Campus. Follow her on Twitter @LAPhilip.