Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (30 page)

One of the earliest and best-known tales of alien invasions is H. G. Wells’s 1898
The War of the Worlds,
in which aliens are technologically advanced and capable of launching a full-scale invasion of Earth from Mars. Although Wells’s aliens are distinctly inhuman in form—they are large, oily, brown in color, and have blood-sucking tentacles around their mouths—they behave like aggressive human colonists, judging the technologically backward people of Earth as not worthy or capable of managing affairs on their own. For this reason, they attack the planet with the intention of using its resources for themselves.

Questions about the vastness of space and the unknowns associated with it are part of what makes
War of the Worlds
frightening. Certainly, when Wells was writing his masterpiece in England, many scientists in London were looking at the starry sky through telescopes
and wondering about what might be found on the planets they could see. But crucial, frightening, and disturbing elements of the story actually have little to do with the monsters of this tale being aliens.

The late 1800s were a time of expansion of the British Empire, involving the ruthless colonization of foreign lands. Native peoples were treated terribly, natural resources were plundered, and countless people died, either directly at the hands of colonizing forces or indirectly from diseases carried by them. It is not hard to see the similarities between the aliens in
War of the Worlds
and the British colonists when the aliens are described as “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” that “regarded this planet with envious eyes.” True, they lack the accent, bad teeth, pasty complexion, and fondness for tea, but they frequently disregard human life, are quick to enslave, have much better weapons than those they are invading, and often have an interest in taking resources or making “better use” of Earth than humans. The language that Wells applied to his aliens could be applied to the British colonizers. A popular theory suggests that Wells was not really writing about a fear of alien invasion but rather was offering a critique of colonization that forced everyone who read his story to reflect upon the horrors perpetrated by the British Empire and consider the possibility that one day such a fate could befall them as well.

One might think a fear of colonization could be appreciated only by people living during a time of imperialism, but this fear turns out to be more deeply ingrained in society than many people realize. Numerous movies, including several film adaptations of Wells’s original text, have played with this frightening idea and done a good job of gripping audiences with it.

An example is Roland Emmerich’s 1994
Stargate,
in which aliens come to Earth during the days of the ancient Egyptians via a portal, rule over feeble humans like gods, and use them for slave labor. Also included in this genre are Emmerich’s
Independence Day
and Tim Burton’s farce
Mars Attacks!
The plot for both simply involves aliens coming to Earth and killing lots of people in an attempt to take over the planet. However, the concept of aggressive alien invasion is most
chillingly presented in the form of the Borg species found in
Star Trek.

The Borg live to force other species to take on their own form of perfection through enslavement. They violently invade and kidnap other races so they can infest them with cybernetic technology and later use these infested individuals as drones that follow the orders of the Borg collective. This abduction and transformation process is disturbing to watch, as characters lose their humanity and are forced to follow orders they would otherwise find repulsive. Ironically, the process is called “assimilation,” in reference to the tactics used during the days of imperialism to make savages near colonies behave in a more “socially acceptable” manner.

In spite of how frequently organized invasions are associated with extraterrestrials, there are many terrifying alien films that do not involve this subject at all. The best known is, of course, Ridley Scott’s 1979 film
Alien.

The crew of the mining vessel
Nostromo
check out a distress signal being sent from a ship stranded on an unexplored planet. Some of them drop down to take a look, and one person ends up wandering into a field of egglike structures. A creature bursts out of one of the egg sacs, breaks through the man’s mask, and latches on to his face. The other crew members who are nearby drag this poor fellow back to the ship, where a conflict develops. The warrant officer, a woman named Ripley, insists that regulations be followed and the man be quarantined, but the others disagree and the crew member with the attached creature is brought on board. This turns out to be a big mistake.

All attempts to remove the alien from the crewman’s face fail. It has acidic blood that sprays when it is cut and a tail tightly wrapped around the man’s neck such that trying to rip it off would result in strangulation. Eventually the alien releases its hold and dies. The
man seems fine, but soon he doubles over in pain, and an alien, which has been incubating inside him, bursts out of his chest. It runs off and spends the rest of the film picking off the crew one by one with its sharp claws and teeth.

At its most basic level, the terror of this story is hardly new. The alien almost always attacks from dark alcoves, ventilation ducts, and tunnels. It emerges silently and unseen until it is too late for its victims to escape. This is identical to the behavior of many modern predators. Numerous great cats sneak up on mammals that they are keen to eat. The same goes for a number of sharks, including great whites, that sit in the dark depths below their surface-swimming prey and lunge forward to attack only when they think they have the element of surprise. The monster in
Alien
is playing off of the ancient fear of predators that sits deep within the mind of every human being. Other films, like John McTiernan’s 1987
Predator
and Nimród Anatal’s 2010
Predators,
which both feature an alien species that has a love for hunting humans, prove it is a theme that still thrills viewers, but it would be oversimplifying matters to entirely dismiss Scott’s monster as the Nemean lion reborn.

The life cycle of the alien in Scott’s film is a remarkably well thought out element of the story that is frightening all on its own. The alien species lays eggs that hatch into face-sucking larvae. These larvae then insert embryos into humans, ultimately transforming into adults that kill their hosts as they emerge. To modern biologists, this sort of a life cycle is well known.

The malaria parasite spends most of its time living inside humans, sucking up nutrients and causing a lot of harm. However, it cannot, all on its own, jump from one human to another. To spread its offspring to others, the parasite must allow itself to be collected by a mosquito feeding on human blood. Then, when the mosquito bites another human, the parasite offloads and begins a new infection.

Along a similar vein, schistosomiasis, which plagues much of Africa, is caused by a parasite that lives part of its life inside humans but spreads its offspring into water sources by traveling out of the body in human waste. Once in water, the offspring of the parasite
infect snails, where they grow and mature. Ultimately, they swim out of these intermediate hosts and travel to bare human feet in nearby water. They burrow through the flesh of the foot, enter the body, and begin a new infection.

Perhaps the parasite that most closely resembles the monster in
Alien
is the human botfly of Central America. It grabs female mosquitoes and attaches its eggs onto their bodies. When these mosquitoes later feed on blood, the eggs hatch, the larvae drop down onto the flesh of the animals being fed upon, and begin burrowing. Similar to
Alien,
they mature into adults inside the human body and later burst out in a bloody and painful mess. It is utterly gross. And while this all sounds bad, these parasites are nothing compared to the parasites that other species must put up with.

Work being done by the parasitologist David Hughes at Pennsylvania State University reveals that ants in the tropics are often attacked by a group of fungi belonging to the
Ophiocordyceps
genus that stick to the insects’ exoskeletons, inject themselves inside their bodies, and mess with their minds by releasing chemicals into their brains. These chemicals lead the ants to seek out locations where other ants are often found. Once there, the infected ants climb nearby plants and walk out onto the undersides of leaves. Here, they bite the leaves with their jaws and attach themselves firmly in place just as the fungus kills them by consuming their brains. The fungus quickly spreads through the bodies of the ants, consuming all it can. It uses the nutrients it has sucked up to build a reproductive structure that emerges from the bodies of the insects. This organ releases spores that rain down on all of the other ants passing by below. These spores stick to their bodies, infect them, and start the cycle all over again.
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It is entirely logical that Scott’s 1979 monster parasite functions
much like many real parasites alive today. Since nobody has any idea what alien life would look like, it makes perfect sense for the creators of an alien monster simply to turn to real-world horrors as they conjure up a terrifying creature. Yet it is curious that such a monster does not grace the screen until 1979.

The subtle lives of multiple host parasites have been well known, and properly dreaded, since the days of Victorian specimen collecting. The Natural History Museum in London, where many of the most prestigious Victorian collectors sent the strange specimens they found in remote parts of the world, is loaded with the preserved organisms that were used to study how various parasitizing worms and insects lived.

It was during the 1880s when doctors first realized that malaria was caused by a parasite and related to mosquito bites; before this, nobody knew why so many people caught the disease. Although parasites were not popular movie monsters until Scott’s parasite-like alien stepped into the limelight, they did make an appearance in early horror literature.

In 1939, Alfred Elton van Vogt published a short science-fiction story titled “Black Destroyer.” This thrilling tale features the crew of a spaceship who are attacked by an alien that comes aboard and has the ability to insert its eggs inside human bodies. These eggs incubate, hatch, and kill their hosts in a manner startlingly similar to
Alien,
hinting that human fear of parasites was already alive and well back in the 1930s.

The sequel to
Alien,
James Cameron’s 1986
Aliens,
further played off fears of parasites by revealing the existence of an egg-laying queen and drones that collect human hosts for infection.
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The television
series
X-Files
also made good use of these same fears. In the episode “Ice,” which appeared in the series’ first season, arctic worms use humans as hosts. And in “Firewalker,” a fungus-like organism found deep within a volcano treats humans in exactly the same way as the
Cordyceps
fungi treat ants, controlling their minds and infecting others with spores sprayed by stalks that burst out of human bodies in a rather disgusting manner.

X-Files
explored the range of what an “alien” could be defined as, but it mainly took on predatory and parasitic forms mirroring both ancient fears of carnivores and more recent fears of horrific parasites. This is all entirely understandable. While few people today have a credible reason to fear being eaten by a lion, human evolution has likely hardwired into the brain a fear of being preyed upon, giving modern storytellers an easy terror access point. As for parasites, new species, including many closely related to the
Cordyceps
genus, are constantly being found and the powers of parasites over people are only just being discovered.

The protozoan
Toxoplasma gondii,
which spends much of its life inside felines, jumps from one cat to another by infecting mice via cat waste. Inside these rodents, the parasite interferes with their brains, causing mice to lose their natural fear of cats and triggering them to be attracted to their scent. As a result, infected mice become easy prey. This is perfect for the parasite that needs to end up in a feline body to complete its life cycle. However, this does not solely take place in cats and mice. Toxoplasmosis also has the ability to infect people, and if an infected human is eaten by a great cat, researchers speculate that the parasite can complete its life cycle just as easily.
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And this is where things get creepy.

Recent research shows that toxoplasmosis has a lot of effects on human behavior, one of the most fascinating being impaired hand-eye coordination. Worryingly, one study found that infected humans have increased chances of being in automobile accidents. So does this mean the parasite has a history of hampering human physical coordination so lions and tigers could more easily catch ancient people and become infected while feasting on human flesh? It is too early to be certain, but work in this area is swiftly moving forward and the horrors of toxoplasmosis and many other parasites will continue to make it into the news in the decades ahead. With this in mind, it seems likely that aliens and other monsters that carry parasitic attributes will continue to be rather common. Yet in spite of the many horrific forms that aliens take, there is no denying the fact that not all are bad.

It is easy to tremble at the vast inky blackness of space, but it is just as easy to look up at the night sky, marvel at the beauty of the stars, and make a wish. Before astronomers discovered the other planets in our solar system, the concept of aliens was, quite literally, alien. This makes the shadowy veil of space distinctly different from the shadowy veil that was once created by jungles and the oceans. Unlike these two other dark, monster-inspiring locations, space was often viewed with wonder before it was viewed with fear. It is this dual nature of space from which aliens of a good nature are also born.