Contagion: Health, Fear, Sovereignty

4. Bio Terror: Hybridity in the Biohorror Narrative, or What We Can Learn from Our Monsters

99 Nothing has prepared the narrator protagonist of Jonathan Maberry’s Patient Zero for the experience of killing people who seem to be the kind of people he would expect to encounter in a supermarket—“a middle-aged woman with lank blond hair and a stained housedress . . . a young boy of no more than ten . . . a pretty teenage girl in a short denim skirt . . . people in business suits and bathing suits”—but who have in fact become mindless monsters with voracious appetites for human flesh. Mistaking the smile of one of his attackers for a show of “relief that someone had come to rescue her,” he is chagrined when “that smile stretched and stretched and stretched until it became a rapacious leer.” The rushing mass is made up of victims of an engineered infectious agent that has turned them into mindless zombies, or, as Maberry’s narrator says, “a predatory thing in human disguise.”1 The novel exemplifies a subgenre I call “epidemiological horror,” or “biohorror ,” in which the conventions of horror meet the dangers of contagion , as a devastating communicable disease turns the infected into predatory monsters. In biohorror scenarios, the infected might seek to Bio Terror Hybridity in the Biohorror Narrative, or What We Can Learn from Monsters Priscilla Wald 4 Priscilla Wald 100 convert human beings or perhaps hunt them as a key food source, either compulsively and mindlessly, as in Patient Zero, or more systematically. The film Daybreakers (2009), directed by Michael and Peter Spierig, for example, features vampires who have ostensibly invited human beings to “assimilate” into the new vampire-run order, but it is difficult to accept the sincerity of the offer since the vampires require human blood to survive ; their chief industry seems to be human harvesting. Biohorror proliferated in the years following World War II, fueled by the increasing circulation and popularity of both epidemiological detective stories (often case studies from public health departments or the newly formed Epidemiological Investigation Service) and horror fiction and films. Toward the end of the twentieth century, a noticeable shift in biohorror stories marked a heightening attention to terrorism, especially in the United States: anxieties about bioterror in particular increasingly inflected the subgenre. The middle-aged woman, like the rest of the infected in Patient Zero, is, as the head of a counterterrorist organization explains to the protagonist, “the new face of global terrorism.”2 The marked proliferation of biohorror-bioterror narratives in such cultural forms as fiction, film, television, and video games over the past fifteen years (accelerating in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks) attests to the anxious intermingling of two contemporary preoccupations: contagion (specifically, outbreaks of devastating communicable disease) and terrorism.3 The infectious agents are microorganisms, sometimes engineered, sometimes the result of military (biowarfare) or medical research gone awry, and sometimes the result of human encroachment on the microbe’s natural environment. In all cases, however, the infected become agents of destruction, preying on human beings, that threaten to annihilate the species. Popular cultural forms register the cultural anxieties and fascination that arise when scientific and technological innovations and geopolitical transformations introduce new ways of understanding the world. Fiction, film, television, video games, and other new media forms characteristically dramatize and, in the process, alter new theories as they appear in specialist publications and conferences and reach the general public through the mainstream media. New ideas circulate initially as a new vocabulary: images, words, phrases, and scenarios that quickly become conventional as they travel through the mainstream media. Popular cul- bio terror 101 tural forms extend these scenarios by dramatizing them in the form of full-blown plots and interactive engagements. In the process, they act as magnifying lenses, amplifying the assumptions that inform the accounts offered in the specialist and mainstream media, thereby facilitating their inspection. Monsters point to what a culture cannot (yet) classify and thereby embody the challenge to social categories that results from the circulation of new information and ideas about the world. The creatures that populate the proliferating biohorror-bioterror fiction and films have a story to tell about the particular challenges represented by catastrophic communicable disease outbreaks and terrorism, about why these perceived threats have become conjoined, and about the consequences of their conceptual entanglement. From Microbes to Monsters The monsters of biohorror narratives are in fact logical extensions of the microbe itself. For researchers, epidemiologists, and science writers whose work concerns devastating...