Do you know what’s lacking in horror? Parasites.
Not the kind that take people over to make them a danger to others. The transformative horror there is rather played out, and most of the time there’s little attention to even that, it’s just used as an explanation for where the humanoid monsters come from.
I’m talking about disgusting things that squirm their way into your flesh millimeter by millimeter, hurting you and disfiguring you at the same time. And that disfiguration serves only to leave you open to new infections, new things leeching your blood out. And then finally you die, twisted up and in pain, leaking contagion everywhere for the next victims.
Below the cut: horrible videos illustrating this point!
And don’t think your opposable thumbs will save you. They won’t.
Even human brains aren’t enough to be safe.
There should be more horror that’s simply illness and misery. Every now and then you have a game go as far as giving people blurovision when they engage infected enemies, but what about your vision beginning to be obscured by crawling worms? What about seeing your fingers slowly bloat with worms until holding things does damage, until you can’t hold things at all?
Something that doesn’t kick in immediately and that you also can’t easily get rid of. A crawling horror, and not simply the sensation of things under your skin but the repercussions – the slow breakdown of your body, the loss of ability, and pain that is crippling all by itself. Even on the occasions you get fiction about this, it’s generally brief and the focus is on how bizarre it is as the centerpiece. You don’t see it as an actual complication.
Also
Even rabies, which is the one everyone references for infected ragemonsters…it really isn’t. This dog is aggressive enough to be a danger, even aggressive enough for people to put something over its head and tie it on, but not so aggressive they couldn’t bring it, or so aggressive it attacks when it’s freed.
This cat is similar. The biggest sign something is wrong is how the animals struggle to move. An entire town of rabid people would be scary, but it wouldn’t be because you expected the people to successfully kill you, and they’d be mowed down by anyone armed.
And this is ultimately scarier than the image people have of things obviously vicious. Both those animals would get a bite in precisely because people wouldn’t realize how aggressive they were. The dog manages to bite several people before it occurs to anyone to bring it to a vet. The danger is in the infection, not the vector. And even then, we have vaccines for this – but they won’t save anyone with the actual symptoms. The horror is what happens to them far more than what they might do to anyone else. And it’s horrible to imagine becoming like this, agonized and increasingly mad.
There should be more misery in horror and less shotguns.
I scrolled down through this post going “NOPE NOPE NOPE” at all the video thumbnails. Well done!
My friend really likes Scott Sigler’s novels; I read the first one and I think I would describe it more as [extremely] black comedy, it’s not heroic and has an incredibly bad end for the POV character, but it doesn’t quite reach the levels of misery here described. The Southern Reach Trilogy might, there’s a pervasive sense of failure and helplessness in those ones.
The Southern Reach Trilogy didn’t strike me having that sense of misery or failure, but that might have been because I was enjoying it too much. I guess that might be true of the non-POV characters more than the POV characters (excepting the lighthouse keeper obv.)
“The horror is what happens to them far more than what they might do to anyone else.”
Oh, that reminds me of when I was reading a tvtropes (always a riot) page for Enigma of Amigara Fault, and there was this entry in Funny section where someone talked about how the result of going through the hole would obviously not being able to move and obviously wouldn’t be all that dangerous, so they aren’t scary.
And I just looked at the text in astonishment. I mean, way to miss the source of horror: you really aren’t supposed to think about what DRR people can do to you, but rather imagine yourself in their place.
Man, I miss old TVTropes, before it turned into Overly Literal Tonedeaf Hour.
Part of the reason horror doesn’t focus much on parasites and diseases and such is because you can’t really fight back; there’s no great evil you can kill, there’s no action to be taken. It lends itself to a slow, creeping horror, which isn’t so much mainstream nowadays; even with, say, zombie plagues, the focus is on killing the infected, not on fighting the virus/disease/magic/whathaveyou.
There’s also the fact that most people won’t be exposed to illness like this; disease is, for the most part, something that happens to poor people outside of North America or Europe. When you have no frame of reference for how awful a true epidemic is, the horror of it all can ring a little hollow — after all, the biggest killers in the developed world are lifestyle diseases like coronary heart disease or diabetes; they’re not contagious and it’s easy to blame the victims (regardless of the socioeconomic factors that might play into it).
Horror of this sort has empathy as a prerequisite and I don’t think a large-scale mainstream movie or game could pull that off very well. A smaller, indie production might though, and a skilled writer could probably punch you right in the feels with it.
There’s also the fact that most people won’t be exposed to illness like this; disease is, for the most part, something that happens to poor people outside of North America or Europe. When you have no frame of reference for how awful a true epidemic is, the horror of it all can ring a little hollow
I think that the lack of exposure is just why people don’t think of it, but humans come preloaded with strong ingrained responses to any sort of parasite – I mean, these videos themselves provoke horror and revulsion in people who haven’t seen them just fine.
I’m thinking it’d work well if it developed slowly. In a traditional story, it’d be another component of wearing down the hero, just like regular injury or exhaustion. Visual media has done similar things with slow zombification or similar clearly fantasy disease, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done with something more plausible. And there’s been games that had disease/injury remove previous abilities, this would just make it more visceral to the player.
Out of curiosity, are you a veterinarian, Farla?
Only an amateur one. With lots of pets, it’s cheaper to be able to deal with some stuff yourself.
It’s also really satisfying to remove parasites.
I see, that makes sense. And ugh, you have a much stronger stomach than me; I’m a wimp when it comes to these sorts of things.
I have to admit I’m grossed out by anything large – fleas are totally okay but dog ticks are a bit ick and the swollen ones are awful, but that just makes me more motivated to get rid of them. Really tiny ticks I don’t get upset even with them on me – I used to clean one cat by going over him and then going over my legs the next day for red spots where they bit.
It also helps if they don’t really move much – squirrel lice crawling on me was no big deal even though they’re a bit bigger than fleas, but a cat came home once covered in something similar sized but really wiggly and I got freaked out.
I’m actually fine with ticks, even the really fat ones. I actually prefer those, they’re easier to find and remove. But lice? Urgh.