The third Monster Archetype on the list is Corrupted Humanity. These represent the fear of our own internal desires, the fear of betrayal, the fear of good turning to evil, or evil impulses being unleashed by some corrupting influence. The evil is often a combinatio of something from without, and something from within.
As one would expect from the name, corrupted humanity is most often something that starts as human, and was changed by that outside influence. The key elements are going to lie in determining the nature of that influence, and what exactly is unleashed, as well as how the human body is then transformed into the monster.
Corrupted Humanity Examples: Vampire, Werewolf, Wendigo, Doppelganger, Mr. Hyde, Zombies, Eugene Tooms, Ghosts, The Possessed
Common Features
- Outside Influence/Corrupting Factor
- Through a Bite/Blood: Somewhere between mystical and scientific.
- Through A Virus/Parasite/Bacteria: For a slightly more believable origin, you can describe the “bite” or “blood” method as being simply a means of passing on an infection, and go into the details of the contagion.
- Experimentation: Something was specifically done to the person that broke them, and took away (or unleashed) a critical part of their humanity.
- Mutation/Born Wrong: Essentially a human, supposed to be human, just born different. This is tricky because it plays on ignorant fears of neurodivergent people. “Sociopathy” has always been an easy scapegoat for horror writers. Tooms is a good example of this done well.
- Forbidden Transgression: They have committed some crime against nature, so taboo, that the act itself or the mental consequences of the act have changed them. Usually a mystical explanation.
- Cursed/Possessed: Ties in with the bitten, but may have also been spell-cursed or cursed by an item or simply been in the wrong place and taken by the evil thing.
- Returned: Maybe a natural consequence of passing through death and being brought back somehow.
- Evil From Within
- Hunger: Probably the most common, as people tend to do evil things to meet their needs at some level. Werewolves and vampires have this to some extent, Zombies even moreso, but the Wendigo is the most focused specifically on hunger, because of it’s connection to cannibalism.
- Freedom: As a resistance against the constraints of society, the rule of law, of politeness, of having to worry about others, vampires and werewolves again can be an expression of the price of ultimate freedom. As can Mr. Hyde. He was Dr. Jekyll completely unconstrained by fear or morality.
- Another Mind: There is a bit of this with the example of Mr. Hyde, but more for Doppelgangers and the Possessed. In this case a completely new mind is inhabiting the body of the human, and rather than freeing them, it simply uses their body to ruin their life, hurt their loved ones, all while wearing the face of the loved one. Vampires may do a bit of this as well, depending on the specific lore.
- Twisting the Body/Gaining Powers
- Undeath: In the case of the vampires, the body is literally dead. Or close enough to it. This makes them immune to the needs of a mortal body.
- In Plain Sight: Many versions of corrupted humanity can appear human, or have an alternative “monstrous” form they take on when the hunger rises within, or when the moon becomes full. As an alternative version of this, the Wendigo cannot change it’s hideous shape, but it has it’s human voice with which to lure people.
- Savage Form: Their monstrous form may be animalistic, wolflike, batlike… something with claws and teeth, essentially a Primal Predator at that point. Something that makes them physically dominant.
- Infectious: One of the most important aspects of many stories about corrupted humanity is the potential of other people; innocents, who’d never cause harm, to fall victim and transform into monsters.
- A Specific Hunger: There is also the matter of what they crave. Vampires need blood, werewolves just need to eat people. Some versions of Zombies need to eat brains. Cannibalism is a running theme, but some monsters get very specific. Tooms’ hunger for livers, specifically, for example.
- Unstoppable: This is another common trope for corrupted humanity. Often they have some means of accessing victims that makes safety impossibly, or require ritualistic steps. The vampiric ability to turn into mist, or Tooms’ ability to squeeze through tiny spaces are good examples. Another version of this is simply being physically overpowering and nigh unkillable, like a vampire or a werewolf.
Now comes the important question of how to STOP such a monster. If it’s mystical or pseudo-scientific, the means of combating any form of corrupted humanity lies in knowing the rules IT has to follow, finding its very specific weaknesses, or denying it what it needs and will fight for in order to predict its behavior
- Rules – the various rules that may or may not be followed by any given interpretation.
- Vampires: Require Invitation to enter a place, Can’t cross running water, burn in the daylight, may be actually dead at night, turned by a crucifix, no reflection
- Werewolf: Can only transform with a Full Moon, animal intelligence, no memories, cannot control transformation, cannot cross mountain ash, visual tells like a unibrow
- Vulnerabilities – the one or few things that can harm the monster.
- Werewolf: Silver
- Vampire: Garlic, Holy Water, Stake through heart, Silver, Dead mans blood (Thanks Supernatural)
- Ghosts: Salt/Saltlines, Exorcisms, Bones
- Possessed: Exorcism, Holy Water, Faith, True Name
- Needs and Dependencies– Knowing what the monster wants can help stop it, lure it, and predict its actions. Knowing what it needs to function can help weaken it through denial.
- Vampire: Seeks blood, domination,
- Werewolf: Seeks to eat people, targets those emotionally close to human form (follows grudges and targets loved ones), may require an item to transform, such as a cloak or wolf-pelt.
- Tooms: Needs to eat five livers every 30 years, then seeks hibernation.
- Wendigo: Needs to eat, preferably human flesh.
Blending Archetypes
With this one especially there is a lot of crossover.
Blended with Primal Predators: Obviously, any time a human is corrupted it generally gains a physically and often magically superior form, rendering a fight for survival one very similar to being the prey to a predator. Werewolves are the key example, but the same could be said for Dr. Hyde.
Blended with Twisted Reflections: Zombies are an interesting category to explore because an argument can be made for them in just about every archetypes. But the strongest correlation I think is between Corrupted Humanity and Twisted Reflections. The Zombie represents a fear of mindless ravenous hordes consuming everything around them. So individually, it is a corrupted human, but in the massive numbers in which they often appear, a zombie plague is much like an invasion. The ugly side of this is how it can be seen to represent fears of the poor, the other, fears of immigrants, fear of the overwhelming numbers of starving, sick, dirty, uncivilized folk. So unlike most twisted reflections that represent a kind of a sin twisted, magnified and thrown back at it… Zombies are more like a twisted view of how we might see other people we don’t welcome.
Blended with Divine Enforcer: This most often shows up where the corruption is an answer to a transgression, someone deservedly cursed, or the result of hubris and mad-science. You can see zombies here again if they are the result of a man-made contagion, but a different example would be the Cathoga from the Relic movie. (SPOILER ALERT) In that case, the huge almost lovecraftian monstrosity turned out to be a human researcher who had been infected by some kind of egg/seed/fungus given him by the native tribe he was researching, which transformed him permanently into a monstrous guardian creature. (Again, one that blends with primal Predator).
Let’s Make a Corruption
I think we need to begin with what specific behavior or evil in human nature is being unleashed or emphasized. As usual, I don’t want to do something that has already been frequently done, so it can’t just be hunger or freedom from morality. Also, as per my previous vow from the last two lets-make-a’s I can’t do anything with birds (Which is unfortunate because my mind is already working on something about greed and birds and shiny things out of rebellion, but no! I shall resist!)
So what else could be unleashed? Let’s see. How about dreams? That might be promising. When we dream we might do all kinds of selfish, horrible, even violent things because in the dream it just kind of happens, or seems normal, or maybe we are even a bit lucid nd realize we are free of consequences, so follow whatever impulse pops up.
The Effects: Okay, so the idea of a drug that convinced you that you’re dreaming is freaky, but frankly I think it might already exist, maybe even not in fiction. So this corruption has the effect of not only convincing someone they are in a dream, but maybe also reshaping their reality according to their dream-mind’s whims. They may have moments of lucidity, they haven’t lost their essential nature, but they’ve been given raw power of creation and completely lost focus on their identity or any actual ties to the consequences of what they are doing.
Also, I don’t want it to be a drug.
The Source: Instead, since I’ve gone kind of science-fiction heavy in the last two creations, lets go with some raw fantasy here. Lets say it is an artifact. Maybe you could even tie in some biblical mythology. It is something forbidden to humans because it IS the source of the power of creation. Maybe like the ark of the covenant, or the nectar of the gods, or the forbidden fruit. Let’s more make something up and say it is… maybe not something physical. A song? An instrument? A sound? I’m liking the idea of a sound. So maybe a bell, or a piece of metal that rings like a siren song and once you hear it, you begin to fall out of frequency with this reality, into a kind of a control-reality where ideas and thoughts are made manifest in the physical world.
The Change: The physical change is harder with this idea, because initially I would say that you’d change based on whatever you dreamed as you lost yourself more and more, but that lacks the beautifully iconic nature of the werewolf, or the fangs of the vampire that really make it memorable. So it needs something simple and universal, a way to identify a Dreamer. Maybe, glowing blue eyes? I like it but I worry it is a bit cliche. Okay, so maybe if their eyes are closed… There is something spooky about them when they start the process basically being able to operate fully with their eyes closed and technically asleep. It may need something more than that, but that’s a good start.
Ooh! Maybe their eyes do glow if you get them open,a nd what I like about that idea is maybe looking into their eyes when they are in that state is just like listening to that frequency. That gives it the potential to be infectious as well.
Defeating and Containing: I don’t think you could really contain a Dreamer with any particular material or item. Confronting one would be always dangerous because you might be transformed, coopted into a weird slice of pseudo-reality, or even just erased. Not to mention just being killed physically by some element of the dream. Unless there were another item like the chime which would push them back to their own frequency, all you can really do is get in close and manipulate them, using their own dream logic to calm them, and then trick them into either reality-twisting them back into normal (if you imagine yourself as normal and dream that you never heard the noise…) or getting them to burn themselves out and basically implode as they dream themselves out of existance or just imagine something that kills them.
Waking them up would be a temporary reprieve.
Conclusion
What I like about that corruption is that it has the potential to make someone afraid of their dreams, IN their dreams. Someone could be a hero or a monster with it, or might easily switch from one to the other. Either way it would always be destructive.
And you know there’d always be some asshole who wants to wield the power and think they are strong enough to handle it, so they would seek out the chime, or the crystal, or the light, or whatever it ends up being.
If someone with night terrors got it, the effects could be nigh apocalyptic.
If you have any thoughts or opinions, other monsters you want to analyze, or have something you’ve created that you want to share, I’d love to hear about them, so please feel free to comment!
Next week we’ll cover the last of the four Archetypes, and get to the one I’ve been looking forward to since the beginning: Making a Kaiju!
See you next world!
—Charles