Introduction

Introduction

I'm not feeling so good.

There was blood in my vomit this morning. The doctor says there's nothing wrong with me.

There's a little girl across the street. I think it's a little girl.

She's been watching me for three days.

I think she wants something from me.

We like to believe we are in control of our own bodies, that all we do is somehow an affirmation of our own superiority over ourselves. The truth is far more insidious. We are held hostage by our own bodies, and the subversion and control is so complete we often don't even realize it in our daily lives.

Our hearts beat, our lungs breathe, our eyes blink, our muscles twitch, and our bodily functions and systems operate without our conscious consent. They could stop at any time, and while we may be able to sublimate our breathing for a long time, we will, eventually, draw in that ever important breath.

Ever more frightening, then, is that even this lack of control can be subverted by bacteria, viruses, and parasites beyond our flesh. It's an invasion of being, a rape of life so common we simply shrug and accept its existence as normal. We can fill ourselves with vitamins, medicines and eat "healthy" all we want, but the inevitable will occur. We will get sick, and there's nothing we can do about it.

A Game of Lost Control

Over seventy percent of the human body is water. Seventy percent of what's left is made up of fungi, viruses, bacteria, endosymbiotes, and other forms of life that are not technically part of our forms. If most of these are removed, we die. The humble mitochondria, for example, are a prokaryotic entity that possesses its own genetic code, but neither animal nor plant could exist without them, and they could not live without the parentage of their keeper cell. Human infants produce massive quantities of a virus that suppress the mother's immune system, allowing the child to survive those ravages. As we are born, live, and die, these systems do, as well, but they do so at a rate far faster than our own, and thus, they evolve at a breakneck pace compared to ourselves. What if these interconnecting systems that are not controlled by the human mind attain a consciousness to call their own?

In Pathogen, a human has been awakened to a new biology, a morphological mutation of unknown nature not understood or acknowledged by medical science. It cannot be detected by medical means, at least, not at first, but by the time it's gone that far, the powers have awakened, the human has been inducted into the society, and it's too late to turn back.

Even more sinister, when the once-human tries to alert others of his new condition, he is driven by unknown desires to keep the infection a secret, avoiding doctors subconsciously and actively destroying evidence of his own existence. Even then, when the victim manages to break from this cycle of subconscious control, his very body betrays him, and he loses consciousness, only to discover that he's been someone else while he's been out.

Monsters Inside

Once, long ago, the world was full of monsters. Every dark shadow had one, every corner a potential lair for the hideous beasts of the world. Then, one day, the monsters grew to such prominence that one day someone brought a monster home and called it a puppy. After that, humans spread like wildfire, taming, ripping, tearing, and burning what couldn't be brought under the sway of rope and spear. Monsters slowly vanished until the modern day, and yet people still insist that monsters exist. They say that monsters never went away, that they just went into hiding, and that the monsters are still out there. They're right, in a way. They're just looking in the wrong place. The monsters are real, and they are there. They're inside, and they're just waiting for the right moment to come out.

Perhaps that is why an infected individual goes off the deep end, or perhaps that is why infected are prone to blacking out and waking up in the middle of other tasks, uncertain of how they arrived there. The Mutation subversion alone seems to bear this out, each further form a step away from the human inside and closer to the beast. They pathogen may be the monster, or it may just be the vector by which the monster is set free.

Monsters Outside

Sometimes the creatures infected by the pathogen cease to be what they are in totality. This occurs most often when plants or animals are infected, though in more than a few cases the monster that is man becomes something more terrible, with features reminiscent of its own inner demon. The human mind is easily sublimated by instinct, smell, and the animal hiding inside. When the ruling order is turned inside-out, and the man is consumed by the monster, the flesh will follow. Mutant beasts stalk the corridors of the night, from shuffling, zombie-like entities to twisted human or animal forms that hunt for living, breathing flesh.

In a few cases, these monsters resemble beasts of legend, such as three-headed dogs, scale-covered monsters with wings, or massive worms. Otherwise, they are sticky with patchy flesh, overgrown hair, large eyes, and other features vaguely resembling their original forms. They are driven with a biological imperative to feed on organic matter, from plant to animal to human, and their territories are often devoid of life if they have been active for too long. Such creatures are called Chimeras, and they actively seek out the infected as their most preferred prey.

Blood and Sex

The monster of the body is grotesque and captivating, erotic and gory. For all the blood, bile, snot, and bone of the human figure, we are entranced by its movements. The flow and pulse of life is sweet and inviting, however filled with terrible promises it may be. In films where the monster is a mutated human form, entreaties to the humanity still left are made, and so many ultimately end in failure. The monster uses its mutations in unsubtle and horrific ways, using sex to draw in its prey and its spines or tendrils to choke the life from those it captures. From the female protagonist of David Cronenberg's Rabid to the Giger's creature in Species, the genre is stuffed with sensual and horrific beings and imagery.

In addition, biological horror is visceral. Not merely content to splatter blood on the wall and call it a day, biological horror rends the flesh and twists the organs, stringing bile-soaked pieces of the brain across mutated innards, growing the ribs into legs with which to skitter away from the growing pool of mucous beneath. Worms devour the skin in an exaggerated parody of myiasis, tentacles sprouting from the inside of the sinuses and throat choke the victim to death, and ordinary humans are driven to eat the flesh of their fellows by urges implanted by strange invaders. This is not the blood-drinking of the vampire or the visceral terror of a werewolf devouring a corpse, this is the brutality of a human being coerced by their own instincts to devour another living being.

Theme: Body Horror

The body horror or "biological horror" genre was explored in the decades before the 1980s with films such as It! The Terror From Beyond Space and Voyage of the Space Beagle, and the true depth of the genre perhaps began with films like Alien and The Thing. Recently, media like Parasite Eve and Slither have added new spectrums to the genre at large. Body horror focuses on radical physical transformations, mutations, and invasion of the body by malicious organisms or disease. Body horror merges aspects of psychological horror with these themes, and the changes are often uncontrolled or fought with varying degrees of success (usually with no success at all). In Pathogen, then, it is a Theme. An Infected character fights not for his or her soul, but for the body, constantly seeking to take control of the silent, unknowable thing with which they now share their corporeal form.

Mood: Anxiety

As an Infected progresses further in the road to complete understanding and symbiosis, he grows further removed from humanity. Resonance climbs, and the human becomes something new, something other, trying desperately to come back to what he or she once was but too transformed to continue living a normal life, with needs and wants that seem at once familiar and all too alien. The horror of becoming something wholly other, a near slave to the needs of the body, reshaped beyond the control of the mind by something to which you cannot communicate begins to grate on the victim, causing him or her to subconsciously lash out at others, or is it the parasite itself doing such things to the victim? Separation of the body and mind and the infected from society progress until the gulf is so wide one cannot see the other side to tell the difference between land and sea.

Movies

The body horror genre is almost exclusively a by-product of the 1980s, having been spawned by the likes of David Cronenberg and other directors seeking more shock-related horror than anything with depth. As the directors moved toward more serious studies of the body and the implications of this sort of transformation, films about alien hand syndrome, the Capgras delusion, and others began to appear until at last, the genre slowly began to die out, and is now consigned to the bargain bin and low-grade action flicks.

Alien is always a classic; check out the director's cut – also note that the alien was originally supposed to be turning the crew into eggs.

In The Brood, a woman gives parthenogenic birth to strange and inhuman creatures that act out her repressed aggressive behaviors.

In the Stuart Gordon film From Beyond (an adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft short story), a scientist is hideously transformed by otherworldly creatures and begins to prey on the others in the laboratory.

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a true classic about the spread of communism and its looming specter, but also about the loss of control to an external, alien entity – or maybe that's the same thing.

In Nightbreed by David Cronenberg, a group of monsters living in a fictional city defend themselves from the real monster that is humanity.

Resident Evil – The film series. An unscrupulous corporation creates a virus that's supposed to do one thing, but instead tends to animate the dead, and they shrug and move forward with the project anyway.

Shivers is a film directed by David Cronenberg about worm-like parasites that drive humans to acts of madness and sexual promiscuity.

Slither is certainly a film about the loss of control of the body due to the invasive actions of a parasite.

Society, directed by Brian Yuzna. The rich literally feed on the poor in this film about a separate species of intelligent life that lives among humans.

Tetsuo: the Iron Man is an incredibly gory film about a man slowly turning into a pile of hideous, malformed, flesh-enhanced junk. The scene with the girlfriend is probably one of the freakiest scenes ever put to film.

John Carpenter's The Thing, based on John W. Campbell Jr's novella Who Goes There? is quite possibly the crowning achievement of the body horror genre, encompassing all aspects of the genre itself into a single film with questions about identity and the true master of the human body.

Videodrome is about a man who tunes in to a strange television channel and slowly breaks down as the world around him and he himself changes shape. One of the film's sequences is the primary inspiration for Sadako's entrance in The Ring.

Other Things

In Ray Bradbury's short story Fever Dream, a young boy is afraid that his body is being taken over by a strange microbe (starting with his hand), and his parents, doctor, and others won't believe his cries.

Frank Herbert's novel Hellstrom's Hive is an insight into a world of humans who have chosen to live like social insects, the genetic controls they place upon themselves, and the terror that can be unleashed when the ultimate communist society exists – the procreative stump alone is a horror for any woman.

In the Japanese novel Parasite Eve (and its video game sequel), human endosymbiotes become endoparasites, and all manner of havoc breaks loose as they attempt to artificially evolve humanity to become a more perfect host.

The Resident Evil series of games follows the monkeyshines of a corporation concerned with profit at any cost, even if that cost includes hordes of undead, mutated monsters loose in the world. Especially if that's the cost.