Contagion science and vampire myth in Guillermo del Toroâ ...

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jspc 1 (1) pp. 43–57 Intellect Limited 2018

journal of science & popular culture Volume 1 Number 1

© 2018 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jspc.1.1.43_1

Julia EchEvErríaUniversity of Zaragoza

Pathogens, vermin and

strigoi: contagion science

and vampire myth in

Guillermo del Toro’s

The Strain

absTracT

The first season of Guillermo del Toro’s television series, The Strain (2014–present) ingeniously merges the classical Bram Stoker vampire legend with the virus outbreak narrative by means of familiar contagion imagery and clichés that include the prem-ise of an infected airplane and the running-against-the-clock efforts of the CDC protagonist, Dr Goodweather. The series offers three complementary perspectives that broaden the scope of vampirism: the medical vision of the protagonist, who insists on treating the outbreak as if it were an infectious disease; the pest extermi-nator Vasily who refers to these beings as vermin and rat-people; and the mythical vampire approach of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who brands them strigoi. I argue that the epidemiological perspective introduced by del Toro provides verisimilitude to the vampire myth while at the same time introducing contemporary discourses of virality and adding dichotomies of purity and corruption. By exploring the use of the genre’s conventions in del Toro’s imaginative universe, I intend to prove how a television series can be the ideal medium for unfolding epidemic narratives.

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virusinfestationvampiresapocalypsepost-9/11 televisionGuillermo del Toro

05_JSPC_1.1_Echeverria_43-57.indd 43 10/18/17 11:55 AM

Julia Echeverría

www.intellectbooks.com 4544 Journal of Science & Popular Culture

1. Thenovelswerefirst(andarestillbeing)turnedintocomicbooksfrom2011onwardsundertheDarkHorseComicspublishinghouse.

It was the germ that was the villain. The germ that hid behind obscur-ing veils of legend and superstition, spreading its scourge while people cringed before their own fears.

(Matheson [1954] 2006)

The first season of the FX network series The Strain (2014–present) was promoted under a strong marketing campaign that laid emphasis on its visceral nature and on the directorial prestige of the creator of its original story, Guillermo del Toro. The Mexican filmmaker reiterated in the numer-ous promotional interviews and festival press conferences granted prior to the premiere that this was a vampire universe and a story he started envisioning as a child and began developing in the 1980s (de Moraes 2014; Nicholson 2014; Romano 2014). He first pitched the idea of the TV show to Fox in 2006, but the network suggested that he transform it into a comedy, which he flatly opposed. Instead, del Toro partnered with author Chuck Hogan and they co-wrote the vampire horror trilogy composed of the novels The Strain (2009), The Fall (2010) and The Night Eternal (2011), in the hope of adapting them later to a television series.1 It was not until 2012 that del Toro and Hogan joined forces with Carlton Cuse, well known for his work as writer and execu-tive producer of the television show Lost (2004–10), and pitched the series again to four cable networks, this time successfully landing on FX (Romano 2014). Del Toro refers to his partnership with Hogan and Cuse as a comple-mentary collaboration – ‘Three Men and a Baby for vampires’ (Radish 2014) – with each of them contributing their specific talents: the television expertise of Cuse as show-runner, del Toro’s directorial experience and Hogan’s literary contribution, which includes his creation of the pest exterminator character, an acknowledgement del Toro frequently brings to the forefront in interviews (Fienberg 2014b). Yet, what these interviews actually reveal is del Toro’s unde-niable control over the story, as evidenced by his account of the long creative process that started in his early childhood when he was an avid consumer of vampire literature and mythology. The promotional use of the Mexican direc-tor’s name in commercials and billboard posters not only works then as a marketing strategy, as a decoy to lure fans, but also confirms and recognizes del Toro’s central and genuine involvement in the series as creator, co-writer, co-producer, director (of the pilot episode) and as an active participant in crea-ture design, visual effects, makeup effects and, especially, in the final correc-tion of colour saturation, as he and Cuse confirm (Romano 2014; Fienberg 2014a). The Strain bears del Toro’s identifiable authorial stamp both visually and thematically, and forms part of the director’s organic career through the exploration, in a serialized format, of ideas, characters and a biological imagery already delineated in his previous films, especially Cronos (1993) and Blade II (2002) with respect to vampires, and notions of infestation in Mimic (1997).

In the last two decades, the name Guillermo del Toro has become synony-mous with the realms of horror, fantasy, fairy tales and monsters by critics and audiences alike. The most recent academic works devoted to the director have focused mainly on his ability to rework fantasy and horror genres, his penchant for using intertextual references and the transnational fluctuations of his career between his more political and independent Spanish-language films and his Hollywood blockbusters (Shaw 2013; Davies et al. 2014; McDonald and Clark 2014). Film scholar Deborah Shaw summarizes the film-maker’s reputation by claiming that ‘Guillermo del Toro has carved out a name for himself as a director of genre films, and he happily borrows and merges


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Pathogens, vermin and strigoi


characteristics from fantasy, realism, horror, art cinema, and adventure films’ (2013: 3). As Shaw further notes, the director’s personal style and auteurist persona does not simply stem from the mixing of genres but from the combi-nation of apparently opposing ones, such as ‘children’s stories, horror and social realism to produce an identifiable style which straddles popular and art cinema niche markets’ (2013: 39).

In The Strain, del Toro ingeniously merges the classical Bram Stoker vampire legend with the virus outbreak narrative, thus providing a certain degree of verisimilitude to vampires through a detailed scientific grounding. The series offers three complementary perspectives on the parasitic blood-sucking creatures that start invading New York: the medical vision of the CDC protagonist, Dr Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll), who insists on treating the outbreak as if it were an infectious disease; the pest exterminator Vasily (Kevin Durand), who refers to these beings as vermin and rat-people; and the mythical vampire approach of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, Abraham Setrakian (David Bradley), who brands them strigoi. The series’ first season puts empha-sis on the epidemiological approach, a fact that gets reflected in narrative terms through a campy reproduction of the formulaic conventions of virus films. However, as the season advances and the Doctor’s scientific certain-ties are gradually shaken, these (almost ridiculed) conventions are progres-sively diluted and abandoned in favour of a more mythological tone. Even if the magical approach finally ‘wins’ the narrative, complying with the precon-ceived idea that ‘del Toro is more at home in a magical world than in a realist one’ (Shaw 2013: 75), the series reflects the director’s fascination with science, and more specifically, with biological processes of infection and evolution, a fact that has been so far underexplored. Del Toro actually refers to himself as ‘a very biological perverse guy’ and claims that ‘everything in The Strain is somehow or another based on gross biology’ (Romano 2014). The epidemio-logical perspective introduced by del Toro provides credibility to the vampire myth while at the same time stripping vampires of their contemporary over-romanticized and sexualized aura, thus setting them closer to Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and other hordes of horrifying creatures like zombies or the vampires in Richard Matheson’s novel, I am Legend ([1954] 2006).

In this article I discuss how the epidemiological conventions and intertex-tual references to other virus films work in the text on different levels, draw-ing on discourses of purity and corruption that are blatantly connected to the Holocaust and 9/11 terrorist attacks. The viral trope becomes the ideal medium for resurrecting vampires in contemporary network societies, and The Strain recognizes the power of the virus not only as a source of biological contagion but also as an embodiment of other viralities (like affects and information) that also flow in infectious waves, relying on human contact.

ThE sciEncE of conTaGion

The pilot episode of The Strain, ‘Night Zero’, opens with a poetic voice-over prologue of Abraham Setrakian quoting a poem on hunger by Miguel Hernandez. Defying Hernandez’s lines, which state that hunger is the first and most important lesson we learn when we are born, Setrakian claims that the most powerful and voracious force is not hunger but love, and signals it as the defining feature of human beings. Setrakian’s aged and deep voice is accompanied by an aerial shot of the New York City skyline at night as the camera slowly moves in. When Setrakian finishes his introductory narration,




Julia Echeverría


a descending plane appears on-screen from the top of the skyline and a temporal title at the bottom of the screen reads: ‘FEBRUARY 8th: NIGHT ZERO 20:00:00’, with the clock ticking forward. In a parallelism, the last episode of the season, episode thirteen, closes again with Setrakian’s voice-over epilogue a week later, this time explaining how this planet – ‘our host, once wild and unknown’ – has been mapped, paved and arranged on a grid by humans so that a more predacious creature than us (The Master) could come and exploit ‘the very infrastructure we so obligingly arranged’. Setrakian finishes this closing narration by claiming: ‘It is a small world, after all. We made it that way’. His concluding words are visually accompanied by the final frame of the season: an aerial shot of the Manhattan night skyline as the camera moves out and discloses several buildings on fire and the ceaseless wailing of sirens.

Setrakian’s opening and closing voice-over narration wrap the series with a literary tone that is almost a constant in del Toro’s cinema, especially through his frequent use of introductory voice-over prologues. Here, as in his 2001 film El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone), these narrations provide a lyrical opening and closure that form almost a circular fabled pattern. The soliloquies here and in El espinazo grant the elderly characters of Setrakian and Dr Casares (Federico Luppi) an authorial (and authoritative) voice only shared with the privileged spectator. By means of this private address, Setrakian is soon presented as the reliable voice in the narration, and the series subtly makes us take a stance in favour of the magical and mythical world he will come to represent later on. However, the very first frame of the series abruptly discards and contradicts this lyricism by visually immersing itself in a deluge of conven-tions that we instantly identify with the thriller genre and, more precisely, with the contagion narrative. The aerial shot of a miniature illumined New York, the temporal title (ticking clock sound and ‘night zero’ allusion included) and the plane that is about to land constitute well-known epidemiological tropes that focus on a basic contagion premise: the global transmission of viruses through geographical networks as facilitated by modern means of transport. The city of New York is presented from the distance as a vulnerable space of grids and human connections that is visually swallowed by the huge ominous plane that appears in the foreground carrying inside the infectious pathogen.

When the plane lands at JFK Airport and no signal is received from its pilots, the control tower authorities descend to the runway to discover, as they call it, a massive ‘dead animal’, a plane that is in utter darkness, locked, with almost all its window shades shut and strangely cold, with no trace of life inside. The control tower supervisor, Peter Bishop (Andrew Divoff) – a char-acter whose name coincides with one of the protagonists in the television series Fringe (2008–13), with which this first episode bears multiple resem-blances (the plane coming from Germany and the scientific approach to fantasy, among others) – engages in a campy dialogue with his subordinate. Bishop affirms in a grave tone: ‘There’s something really wrong here’ and ‘This is bad, real bad, we got ourselves a dead airplane’ while his partner accompa-nies him with irrelevant observations such as: ‘It looks so much bigger on the ground than on the screen, I mean, they’re like buildings with wings’. All this is embellished by an exaggeratedly suspenseful tune that increases the affec-tation of the exchange. Bishop orders his colleague to call in SWAT, Homeland Security, Port Authority, FBI, TSA and CDC, a running string of acronyms that, despite the seriousness of the situation, adds a caricature touch to it, turn-ing the whole scene into a parody compilation of the campiest dialogues in







2. ‘TheArrival’(1961),anepisodefromthecultseriesThe Twilight Zone, revolvespreciselyaroundaplanethat,afterlanding,hasinexplicablynopassengersorcrewonboardandthatlatervanishes.Theepisodeoffersbothascientificrationalexplanationandasupernaturalone,followingtheseries’pattern.InthefirstnovelofThe Strain Trilogy,CaptainNavarro(acharacterthattheTVseriesdoesnotinclude)thinksaboutthisepisodewhenconfrontedwiththisotherghostairplane.

disaster movies. In her essay on 1950s and 1960s science fiction cinema, ‘The imagination of disaster’, Susan Sontag writes:

[T]he dialogue of most science fiction films, which is generally of a monumental but often touching banality, makes them wonderfully, unintentionally funny. Lines like: ‘Come quickly, there’s a monster in my bathtub’; ‘We must do something about this’; ‘Wait, Professor. There’s someone on the telephone’; ‘But that’s incredible’; and the old American stand-by (accompanied by brow-wiping), ‘I hope it works!’ – are hilari-ous in the context of picturesque and deafening holocaust.

(1965: 42)

The script in this scene seems to be a self-conscious exercise of reflexivity and homage to campy lines like those above. According to scholar Ken Feil, the notion of camp, which has been commonly stigmatized in relation to disaster movies, ‘involves the ironic appreciation of low, failed culture, and the parody of taste codes that rank cultural works as “high” or “low”’ (2005: xiv), a defi-nition that fits del Toro’s playful subversion, mixture and citation of generic conventions from popular culture. In fact, del Toro jokingly considers his entire career to be a combination of B-movie-conceived genres, and humor-ously states: ‘I grab these notions that are completely ridiculous and I tackle them with the faith of a blind prophet. I preach them to the world: Vampires! Iron robots! It doesn’t matter, I believe in them’ (ATX Television Festival 2016). In promotional interviews, both Cuse and del Toro recurrently praise the FX network for the creative freedom they were allowed, claiming they were able to offer their own ‘unadulterated’ version of the story (Radish 2014), an auton-omy del Toro found liberating in comparison to the major film studios’ ‘prud-ish’ creative restrictions whenever a big investment is at stake (Prigge 2014; Fienberg 2014b). It is interesting to notice, however, how in these interviews del Toro and Cuse complement each other’s comments with the intention of ‘selling’ the series better. Cuse underscores how FX granted them an unparal-leled amount of time for the preparation, casting and creature design of the story universe, eventually making the series, and in particular the pilot episode directed by del Toro, look like a movie in terms of its final result (Fienberg 2014a; Romano 2014). Actor Corey Stoll further refers to FX as ‘a perfect place of meeting high and lowbrow’ (ATX Television Festival 2016), a description that appropriately suits del Toro’s work. The camp reflexivity of this open-ing scene is not only rendered, then, through its artificial dialogue lines, but also through the shared collective imaginary that the impressive ‘dead plane’ evokes in the spectator. It is a premise that has become a well-known trope in catastrophe narratives, and that brings to mind, among others, the pilot episodes of series like Fringe and Cuse’s Lost (although with no plane crash) or Rod Serling’s science fiction series The Twilight Zone (1959–64), which the original Strain novel explicitly mentions.2

The mysterious premise of the plane and the different agencies (up to twelve) called in by Bishop open a whole range of possibilities as to where the show’s main narrative line may go. When these officials arrive at the airport there is an ensuing discussion concerning which one should manage the situ-ation. Homeland Security instantly (and wrongly) presumes it is a terrorist attack and is eager to get on the plane. However, Dr Ephraim Goodweather, the Chief Medical Officer of a rapid-response team division of the Centres for Disease Control in New York, bluntly jettisons that initial theory on the crude




Julia Echeverría


and rather tactless basis that ‘terrorists usually crash planes, not land them and shut them down’. With a rather arrogant attitude, Ephraim succeeds in imposing the viral outbreak thesis, even more so when he is informed that there have been no emergency calls from the inside of the aircraft. It is in this particular sequence that Ephraim markedly defines his scientific position and, by extension, that of the series, whose generic boundaries confine and accom-modate the protagonist’s epidemiological viewpoint, discarding altogether the other possible generic codes and narrative lines each agency would have added to the story. Ephraim engages in a dialectical battle with who appear to be two FBI officials and delivers a moralizing, clichéd and mostly uncalled-for speech on the nature of epidemics when they question the viability of a conta-gious event in such a short period of time:

Ephraim: How often do you touch your face?

FBI: What?

Ephraim: In a day, how often?

FBI: I don’t know, once an hour?

Ephraim: Every three minutes. You have mouth/hand contact every five minutes. You touch somebody else every twenty minutes. That’s how contagion works. You don’t like terrorists? Try negotiating with a virus. A virus exists only to find a carrier and reproduce. That’s all it does and it does it quickly. It has no political views; it has no religious beliefs; it has no cultural hang-ups and it has no respect for a badge. It has no concept of time or geography. It might as well be the Middle Ages except for the convenience of hitching a ride on a metal tube flying from meal to meal to meal. That’s how a plague begins. So you still want to be the first one through the door?

When Ephraim begins articulating this unexpected monologue, his two CDC colleagues, Jim (Sean Astin) and Nora (Mia Maestro), who are standing behind him, smile at each other and exchange a knowing look of sympathy as if they already knew what Ephraim was going to say. This telling reaction shot, which reveals to us that Ephraim is probably always using the same arguments and data, creates a distance between the main protagonist and the audience. Nora and Jim’s gesture mirrors the spectators’ likely reaction to a speech that sounds like a pastiche and an amalgam of already-heard dialogue lines and worn-out notions from previous epidemic films. In Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), Dr Mears (Kate Winslet) provides a similar scientific ‘lecture’ on the number of times an average person touches their face, and then she details the reproductive rates of different viruses, elaborating it in a more technical fashion. Here, Ephraim superficially enumerates preconceived popular ideas of what a virus is and how it functions. The association of infectious patho-gens with the global trespass of borders enabled by planes is an argument that can be cinematically traced back to the post-War period (Ostherr 2005: 70). In particular, Ephraim’s monologue brings to mind a parallel scene in Panic in the Streets (1950) in which the main character heatedly exclaims that ‘we are not living in the Middle Ages’ and that, therefore, any infectious disease would rapidly travel to any continent in no time. Allusions to the Middle Ages are a recurring conceit in contagion movies as a way of reinforcing the threat, terror and helplessness that a ravaging epidemic like the Black Death would







generate in our globally interconnected contemporary world – a rather iniqui-tous equivalence of two radically different historical moments. Many contem-porary contagion movies also use these references to a medieval past either implicitly or explicitly in order to signal it as a dark historical moment to which our fragile civilization could easily revert.

The immediate connection Ephraim establishes between the plane and disease bears a common presumption that consists in placing disease abroad, picturing the virus as a foreign agent that arrives from exotic lands (in this case the not-so-exotic Germany) and invades ‘us’. In her essay AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988), Sontag expands upon this notion by claiming that ‘there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. It lies perhaps in the very concept of wrong, which is archaically identical with the non-us, the alien’ (1991: 134). Ephraim’s skewed comparison between viruses and terror-ists (with viruses resulting in being the most dangerous, indiscriminate attack-ers) both personifies the virus as an enemy and ‘viralizes’ terrorism, placing terrorists within the same us/foreign logic on which contagion narratives tend to rely. The binary opposition healthy/infected works as a suitable metaphoric vehicle for any discourse that establishes a central us and an outsider threat-ening other, and it has thus become a popular trope not only in contagion movies but also in other apocalyptic tales that use diseased bodies for building social, cultural and political allegories of unsteady times, as illustrated by alien invasion films of the 1950s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956) or post-9/11 zombie films.

By means of this overly clichéd speech and Jim and Nora’s reaction shot, the series introduces the character of Ephraim and the epidemiological line he will stubbornly uphold for most of season one, but does so in such an ironic and campy way that it establishes an insurmountable distance between the spectator and the series’ main protagonist. Ephraim is purposely depicted as a stereotype. He represents the American archetypal white-male lead, gather-ing every possible flaw and hackneyed trademark: he is a divorced man who still loves his ex-wife but occasionally sleeps with his co-worker Nora; he is struggling to get his beloved son’s custody but forgets his appointments with the lawyer; he was barely present at home because of his demanding job; he is a recovering alcoholic who avoids attending AA meetings; he has control issues and is egotistical; and he is equal parts brilliant and arrogant at his job, usually not conforming to the rules. Ephraim’s clichéd artificiality is visually brought out by means of the wig that the well-known bald actor Corey Stoll is compelled to wear for the role, a wig that definitely distracts the specta-tor’s attention and ultimately hinders any trace of identification with him. The character’s one-dimensionality has been understood by many critics as being a weakness on the part of the series. A reviewer writes that ‘Eph’s ego and pride and wig prevent him from acting intelligently or rationally’ and judges Stoll’s performance as being ‘uncharacteristically embarrassing’ (Ferguson 2014). However, Ephraim’s gradual disempowerment as the story advances confirms the critical lens with which the series intends to present him. Ephraim is an unlikely protagonist within del Toro’s universe, a universe whose central char-acters usually escape this white male hero norm, as evidenced by the assorted types of protagonists of his previous films: an elderly vampire man in Cronos; a woman entomologist in Mimic; a young boy and girl respectively in El espi-nazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone) and El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) (2006); a black half-bred vampire in Blade II; and, as Deborah Shaw (2013: 40) posits, a teenage superhero in Hellboy (2004). Guillermo del Toro himself




Julia Echeverría


3. GuillermodelTorohasdeclaredthattheserepulsivebugsareactuallybasedontworealparasiticworms:theheartwormthatlodgesintheheartofinfecteddogsandaso-calledhorsehairwormthat‘overtakesthebodiesofinsects’(Romano2014).

obliquely confirms Ephraim’s plainness is deliberate when he asserts in inter-views that Corey Stoll is perfect for the role because he is ‘capable of wear-ing the character’s flaws very clearly’ (ATX Television Festival 2016). Thus, Ephraim functions almost as an intentionally derisory figure both within del Toro’s filmography and in the series, especially when an old pawnshop owner like Abraham Setrakian gets to dismantle his pragmatic scientific theories and makes him eventually recognize the limitations of science.

Even when confronted with the mutant blood-sucking creatures in which the plane passengers and crew start turning, Ephraim obstinately continues to impose his epidemiological principles on every ‘symptom’ of the disease, radically questioning and ignoring at first Setrakian’s vampire explanations. Together with Nora, Ephraim embarks on a scientific quest that follows the different steps author Priscilla Wald (2008) identifies with contagion narra-tives of health surveillance. As Wald explains, the fictional outbreak narrative genuinely reflects the ‘epidemic’s own logic’ (2008: 24), which she compares to the logic of a detective story. Wald identifies three main stages in this formu-laic outbreak plot: first, the detection of an emerging infection; second, the layout of ‘the global networks throughout which it travels’; and, third, the scientific work and research that leads to its containment (2008: 2). Although Ephraim is unable to get to that third stage of containment and research for a cure, the first half of the season complies with these narrative conventions as it accompanies Ephraim in his journey. Indeed, the episodic nature of a television series like The Strain favours the gradual and detailed depiction of an epidemic outbreak, a genre underexplored in television except for isolated instances like the 1994 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, The Stand (1978).

In what would correspond with Wald’s first narrative stage, ranging from episodes one to four, Ephraim identifies what he believes to be a potential communicable disease when four of the apparently dead aircraft’s passengers suddenly wake up and show mild but unusual symptoms – bloodshot eyes, paleness, cold, hair loss and hearing noises. He proceeds to apply a quarantine protocol in order to explore them and avoid a possible pandemic, but they are soon released by his superiors, who believe there is no risk of an outbreak. When Ephraim and Nora search the plane’s fuselage, they discover a worm-like pathogen the size of a hair that looks like a virus carrier desperately look-ing for a host.3 Although by episode three the spectator is already familiar with the whole mutation process that affects the airplane passengers who start awakening from what was actually a nesting period, it is not until the end of that episode that Ephraim, Nora and Jim face and kill the first completely full-fledged vampire. Ephraim practices an improvised autopsy on him that brings to mind similar anatomy sequences of Mimic’s abject mutant insects and of Blade II’s physically analogous virus-ridden vampires. As they open up the body and reveal the gruesome new physiology of the vampire, Ephraim calmly describes in medical jargon the organs and viscera he comes across, including a six-foot ‘stinger’ that protrudes from the creature’s mouth. The new system looks very much like that of reptiles or birds, with no genitals and a cloaca instead of excreting organs, a body structure that the doctor describes as ‘efficient’. Instead of blood, the body carries a white viscous substance full of worms. Ephraim concludes that, once inside their host, these worms start rewriting human biology and turn the host bodies into parasitic creatures that feel the urge to feed from the blood of healthy beings so that the worms can reproduce and consume their next host.







After having crossed this first ‘epidemic detection’ phase and having veri-fied that a bizarre illness is actually spreading through New York, Ephraim moves on to the second stage and starts tracking the disease along its differ-ent routes of transmission. The series employs the usual multi-protagonist structure characteristic of contagion narratives, exposing and opening differ-ent storylines as the disease spreads. The geographical and temporal dissemi-nation of the pathogen becomes the essential motive at this point, and the series recognizes and reproduces this centrality by means of its clock-ticking temporal and location titles, which set the action in different New York City districts such as Harlem, Queens and JFK airport. These orientation titles epit-omize, albeit in a rather stereotyped fashion, the characters’ socio-economic backgrounds, situating Ephraim, for instance, in a suburban area of Queens and the Mexican ‘trouble-maker’ characters in Harlem. But the significance of these location titles resides principally in their function as visual signi-fiers. Maps, grids and geographical settings are fundamental tools in the race-against-the-clock tracking of a virus, and constitute a common trope in contagion narratives. In her book Cinematic Prophylaxis (2005), Kirsten Ostherr acknowledges the centrality of this geographical trope and relates it to the problematic impossibility of visualizing a contagious event at the moment it takes place because of the invisible-to-the-eye quality of infectious patho-gens. Ostherr claims that the desire of public health organizations has always been ‘to monitor, regulate and visually represent the spread of contagious disease’ (2005: 123). As she notes, in real life this desire gets reflected in these agencies’ reliance on artificial means of representation like maps and audio-visual support in order to make the invisible visible, but these resources, as she states, end up being a mere displacement of a contamination event that cannot be fully grasped (Ostherr 2005). Fictional cinematic representations of contagion are aware of this impossibility and are inclined to challenge it and visually construct the patterns of contagion at the same time they occur. The beginning of The Strain adjusts to Ephraim’s epidemiological thesis, and thus makes abundant use of these visual tropes. Apart from portraying the itiner-ary of the disease by means of these time/setting signs, the series alleviates these real-life representational frustrations by including other visual tech-niques that render the exact moment of contagion, such as a chilling shot of a microscope-like image that shows the interior of a victim’s body at the exact moment a parasitic worm invades it and bites the artery.

As the show progresses and Ephraim’s scientific certitudes start to crum-ble, these stylistic references and medical protocols also start disappearing in favour of a much more mythical and less sanitary tone. In fact, the ticking clock is already absent by episode two, and the location signs are less frequent as the different narrative lines start to merge, completely disappearing by episode seven. It is precisely during Ephraim’s tracking of the airplane passen-gers that his narrative line collides and fuses with Abraham Setrakian’s own vampire hunting quest. Setrakian, an Armenian survivor of the Holocaust, instantly becomes the antithetical character to Ephraim. If Ephraim embod-ies the pragmatic white male lead, Setrakian represents old European folklore, mythology and literature. Even his name, Abraham, alludes to the character of Abraham van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Just like van Helsing, Setrakian soon becomes the intellectual leader of the newly formed group, as he is the only one who understands the real scope of the outbreak. When he tries to share his first-hand knowledge of vampires with Ephraim in episode four, he wisely adapts his language to epidemiological terminology. He starts




Julia Echeverría


4. Curiouslyenough,intheirfolkloreorigins,zombieswerealsoslave-likecreaturescontrolledbyamaster.

explaining how this scourge has been caused by a millennial vampire Master whose aim is to destroy humanity by corrupting the flesh and spirit of human beings by feeding on their blood, but when he notices Ephraim is neither following nor believing what he is saying, he rephrases it thus: ‘I suppose you might call him “Patient Zero”. He spreads his virus through the parasites in his blood driven by his horrible will’. In Setrakian’s rephrasing, The Master fits both the role of Patient Zero – the first individual who gets the sickness – and of Typhoid Mary – the infected person who wilfully infects others.

These terminology adjustments continue to occur during the rest of the season. Ephraim refuses to abandon his epidemiologist’s viewpoint, and thus keeps naming the world accordingly. The huge coffin filled with soil that appears in the cargo of the plane, and in which The Master travelled from Germany to New York (a reference again to Dracula’s arrival in London in a coffin in the Demeter), is a ‘cabinet’ or ‘box’ to Ephraim, not a coffin. And he avoids calling the creatures ‘vampires’ or strigoi, as Setrakian refers to them in Romanian. When Jim states that everybody knows vampires do not like sunlight, he abruptly corrects him: ‘Not vampires, viruses. The die-off rate for any genome-based pathogen when exposed to direct ultraviolet light is over 90 per cent’. But when he is faced with other supernatural facts, like the idea that The Master controls the vampires’ minds as if they were their slaves and that if The Master was killed, the plague would disappear, Ephraim cannot find any reasonable scientific explanation and thus incredulously cries in what is yet another campy line: ‘That makes no biological sense!’. His medi-cal ethic and frame of mind make him approach these attacking creatures as diseased bodies, as patients, and so his priority whenever a character like Jim gets infected with a worm is trying to save him through sloppy surgeries instead of killing him directly as Setrakian suggests. The series makes use in that respect of what Kyle Bishop refers to as the ‘euthanasia metaphor’ (2010: 28) of zombie films by which ‘[t]he slaughter of the infected living becomes an essential form of mercy killing’ (2010: 29) in an apocalyptic scenario in which survival is the top priority.

The last narrative line to get merged into the newly formed group is that of Vasily Fet (Kevin Durand), the city pest exterminator who joins them in episode eight to fight the already uncontrollable plague. Vasily embodies the action superhero archetype, his physical strength and height making him look like a character from a comic book. Vasily does not stand either by Ephraim’s viral premise or by Setrakian’s mythological one. He refers to the hordes of creatures as vermin or as infestations of rat-people, thus foregrounding the animalistic and insect-like nature of these monsters (also compared to para-sitic leeches and ticks), adding a new disaster genre to the contagion–vampire mix. The progressively growing numbers of blood-thirsty grunting vampires makes them stand closer to masses of zombies – what Victoria Nelson has accurately termed ‘zampires’ (2012: 154) – rather than to the slick romanti-cized and sexualized individualistic vampire. Aware of this inevitable compari-son, Carlton Cuse wittily argues that The Strain is unlike The Walking Dead (2010–present) in that these vampires have a complex caste system and are controlled by The Master as if they were chess pieces (ATX Television Festival 2016).4 Both Carlton Cuse and Guillermo del Toro also explicitly distance themselves from the Twilight saga and from vampire series like True Blood (2008–14), claiming that they intended to portray frightening and repulsive vampires, not attractive ones. In fact, The Master bears a striking physical resemblance to F. W. Murnau’s vampire in Nosferatu, both being bald, with the







same pointy ears, long fingers and nails, and, especially, both being associated with rats, symbols of contamination, impurity, filthiness and medieval plague.

The vermin perspective inevitably intersects with the viral contagion trope. As the virus looks for new hosts to reproduce itself, the number of infected ‘others’ grows, thus making these bodies look like an infestation of an over-reproduced species of the Mimic kind. At the same time, these rewritten vampire bodies function like viruses themselves in the sense that they are constantly looking for new human ‘hosts’. Following Ephraim’s campy monologue, these creatures also exist only to find a carrier and reproduce, with no trace of ideology. Kyle Bishop draws attention to this same idea in relation to zombies, stating that George Romero’s zombies ‘act like a virus, for direct contact with the living unavoidably results in conversion to the dead’ (2010: 114). The Strain’s mixture of these three complementary disaster genres – contagion narratives, vampire horror and infestation stories – provides an intricate web of intertextual references and generic codes from which the notion of virality centrally emerges as the shared linking element of the three.

ThE aGE of viraliTy

What does the scientific epidemiological perspective add to the vampire myth? The fact that the series’ beginning focuses both thematically and stylistically on the virus premise, delaying the disclosure of The Master and its origins as far as possible in the narrative with relation to the novels (an idea for which del Toro credits Cuse), engages the spectator, along with its protagonist, in what looks like a scientific journey of health surveillance and contagion tropes. The gradual discovery of the disease symptoms, the worm-like pathogens and the host’s biological physiology, adds, first and foremost, matter-of-fact credibility and corporeality to a trite supernatural being that has been traditionally surrounded by an aura of mysticism. However, at the same time, the campy and stereotyped way in which the doctor is presented and his immovable scientific tenets underline the limitations and ineffectiveness of such science when confronted with an event that surpasses its realms. The season’s evolution from this pure scientific approach to the acceptance of a supernatural vampire world is reflected in stylistic terms and can be spotted in the evolution of the episodes’ titles themselves, the first two being ‘Night Zero’ and ‘The Box’, visibly supporting Ephraim’s perspective, and the last two being ‘Last Rites’ and ‘The Master’. In that sense, The Strain ultimately corroborates the idea that ‘del Toro is more at home in a magical world than in a realist one’ (Shaw 2013: 75).

Secondly, the virus trope adds new fruitful discourses to the vampire myth based on the healthy/infected dichotomy. As we soon discover, The Master has been brought to New York under the influence of an old decrepit multi-millionaire tycoon, Eldritch Palmer (Jonathan Hyde), whose aim is to buy The Master’s favour and gain immortality. This plotline shares many similarities with del Toro’s Cronos, with both Palmer and Setrakian being directly inspired by the characters of the dying greedy capitalist Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook) and the old pawnshop owner Jesús (Federico Luppi), as Shaw notices in relation to The Strain novels (2013: 34). The vampire strain is connected by Palmer to notions of health and immortality, as opposed to his ailing human body. At one point he explains to a hacker he hires that his purpose is to carry out the ultimate hack – cheating death – by rewriting the human DNA ‘software’ and controlling the hardware, ‘the meat muscle and tissue that is




Julia Echeverría


mankind’. Thomas Eichorst (Richard Sammel), The Master’s German acolyte who helps Palmer bring The Master, elaborates this further by making use of discourses on purity and corruption, drawing a blatant relation with the Holocaust. For these characters, the virus contamination paradoxically implies cleanness, healthiness, regeneration and homogenization. The virus becomes a metaphor for the spread of fascism, in the same way as in Karel Capek’s 1937 play The White Disease. For these characters, the diseased corrupted bodies are those human impure bodies that have not been inoculated with the vampire-fascist virus, a way of ironically resurrecting fascist discourses like those of the Nazi propaganda publisher Julius Streicher, who associated the Jewish with ‘bacteria, vermin and pest’ and claimed that ‘[f]or reasons of cleanliness and hygiene we must make them harmless by killing them off’ (Bauman 1991: 48). Here, these fascist ideas are related to contemporary capitalism and conspir-acy narratives through the character of Palmer who literally brings them back to life for his own benefit. Additionally, the series builds a bridge between the Holocaust concentration camps where Setrakian met The Master and the World Trade Centre by emphasizing how The Master is attracted to places of great human misery and by implicitly associating fascism with terrorism.

Finally, the epidemiological discourse helps to set vampires in a contem-porary reality in which the notion of virality is central. Media theorist Tony D. Sampson (2012) asserts that ours is indeed the age of contagion, and that the proliferation of networks facilitates the spread not only of biologi-cal diseases but also of flows of desire and other phenomena that spread in radial networks. In The Strain, apart from the virus that arrives in a plane from Germany and spreads through the already mentioned geographical networks, other things like love, information and economy are portrayed as spread-ing virally through human networks of affect, digital networks and finan-cial networks, respectively. In his opening voice-over monologue, Setrakian describes love as an unquenchable thirst that cannot be extinguished. Those ‘love networks’ that join individuals are used by The Master precisely to spread the disease. The newly infected bodies, though irrational, still retain that affection, and thus return to their loved ones and spread the patho-gen. Besides, Eldritch Palmer hires a young hacker to shut down the Internet and all communications to prevent the instantaneous spread of information through digital networks. In this way, the authorities and general public are unaware of the outbreak and the vampire disease can spread almost with-out obstacles. The series also mentions, although in a more secondary way, that the mysterious plane and subsequent strange events make the financial markets plummet, thus bringing to the fore this interconnectedness and the centrality of different types of contagion.

conclusion

In The Strain, Guillermo del Toro takes elements from some of his previous films – the characters of de la Guardia and the vampire Jesús from Cronos, the physiology of the vampires from Blade II and the infestation and repro-ductive motives from Mimic – and effectively merges them with the conta-gion narrative, a form that he had not deeply explored so far (although an epidemic is briefly mentioned in the beginning of Mimic and the vampires from Blade II are said to be infected by a virus). Del Toro’s creative stamp is felt throughout the whole first season, including many of the elements that Deborah Shaw (2013) associates with the filmmaker – his fascination with







underground scenes, the organs in jars, the use of practical effects for the creation of the monsters and the ‘rich and contrasting colour palette’ (2013: 67). His abundant use of ochre and yellow, which in his other movies gets associated with domesticity and the fantasy world (Shaw 2013: 75), appropri-ately bears here connotations of infection, filthiness and biohazard, similar to other epidemic films like Contagion. The incorporation of the scientific epide-miological approach to the vampire myth, in the fashion of Matheson’s I am Legend, can be ascribed to a contemporary trend that places the virus at the centre of apocalyptic tales, be it contagion stories or other genres like zombie films or vampires. Even the origin of the downfall of humanity in The Planet of the Apes (Schaffner, 1968) is explained by means of the virus outbreak trope in the franchise’s recent instalments (2011, 2014). As has been argued, the virus offers a credible scientific explanation to supernatural beings, but it also adds rich and mouldable metaphors through its healthy/infected dichotomies and the pervasive viral contamination and spread through networks, making it the preferred metaphoric vehicle for our age of contagion.

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suGGEsTEd ciTaTion

Echeverría, J. (2018), ‘Pathogens, vermin and strigoi: Contagion science and vampire myth in Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain’, Journal of Science & Popular Culture, 1:1, pp. 43–57, doi: 10.1386/jspc.1.1.43_1

conTribuTor dETails

Julia Echeverría is a doctoral candidate from the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Her main research interests are the representation of viral contagion in contemporary cinema and the zombie genre. She has previously published on the films Children of Men (2006) and Blindness (2008).

Contact: University of Zaragoza, Calle de Pedro Cerbuna, 12, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain.E-mail: [email protected]

Julia Echeverría has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.




http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jspc.1.1.43_1

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