I have no mouth… and I must scream. An exploration of Evolutionary Horror — from the Qu, to the Xenomorphs, to The Last of Us. Welcome to the scariest hidden genre in Sci-Fi.
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Tomasz Woźniakowski YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wozniakowski1217
Tomasz Woźniakowski Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/womasz
Tomasz Woźniakowski Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/womaszwomasz/
C. M. Kosemen YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/cmkosemen/
C. M. Kosemen Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cmkosemen
C. M. Kosemen Website: http://www.cmkosemen.com/
If I were to ask you ‘what is the scariest type of science fiction?’ you probably wouldn’t say ‘Evolutionary Horror.’ …Mainly because it’s a name I came up with for this video, but also because it doesn’t sound particularly frightening. Evolution isn’t scary… or is it?
Twisting through the history of sci-fi is a hidden subgenre that derives terror from the altered self — from the uncanny dread of a force beyond our control evolving the human into the inhuman.
So, for this entry into the archive, we’ll uncover the terrors of this category, and dive into the type of sci-fi that I find the most fear-provoking of all…
0:00 Scariest Sci-Fi Genre
0:49 I Have No Mouth…
4:41 Altered States
7:12 Xenomorphs and Necromorphs
10:01 The Thing from Another World
12:20 Annihilation and Cosmic Horror
15:45 The Problem of Zombies
17:27 Return to Slime
Copyright Disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. All video/image content is edited under fair use rights for reasons of commentary.
I do not own the images, music, or footage used in this video. All rights and credit goes to the original owners.
Media Shown: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, All Tommorrows, Altered States, The Sixth Finger (Outer Limits), War Games, Terminator 2, Alien, Dead Space, The Thing, Annihilation, A Quiet Place, Evolution, Night of the Living Dead, The Walking Dead, The Last of Us
♫ Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio:
Mysterious Green Fluid, Sanity Unravels, Haddonfield Horror, Alone in the Dark, Dusk, The Witch, The Vanishing, Tenebrae, The Guardian
♫ Additional music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com):
Beauty Flow
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Thumbnail by HotCyder
#CuriousArchive #Worldbuilding
If I were to ask you ‘what is the scariest
type of science fiction?’ you probably wouldn’t say ‘Evolutionary Horror.’ …Mainly because
it’s a name I came up with for this video, but also because it doesn’t sound particularly
frightening. Evolution isn’t scary… or is it? Twisting through the history of sci-fi
is a hidden subgenre that derives terror from the altered self — from the uncanny dread
of a force beyond our control evolving the human into the inhuman. So, for this entry
into the archive,
we’ll uncover the terrors of this category, and dive into the type of
sci-fi that I find the most fear-provoking of all… “I have no mouth… and I must
scream.” That was the voice of author Harlan Ellison, reading from his 1967 short story
of the same name. It is one of the most unpleasant works of fiction ever written, yet foundational
to not just to sci-fi, but to the evolutionary horror subgenre. In the narrative, the last
five humans on Earth are held within a vast underground labyrinth being
eternally tormented
by an artificial intelligence called “AM.” Originally a Cold War supercomputer, AM gained
sentience but found it was entombed within millions of miles of circuits and wire that
made up its infrastructure, forever unable to move. Seeking revenge, it annihilated planet
Earth — for unlike most evil AI in fiction, AM isn’t rational but spiteful, filled with
ceaseless hate for the creatures who made it. AM’s true, final revenge is altering
the five survivors. One of them is turne
d into a kind of early simian with twisted limbs,
incapable of rational thought. All are unable to die from old age — an adaptation that
would once have been considered a blessing, but is now a nightmarish curse. At the end
of the story, the narrator is transmuted into an amorphous blob, unable to interact with
the world or express their anguish — hence the title. …I wouldn’t necessarily say
that I like this story. I don’t think it’s meant to be liked — or even understood.
The notoriously irrita
ble author rejected pretty much all interpretations of his writing
throughout his life. But if we were to try and comprehend why the story is so unsettling,
I can’t think of a better point of comparison than All Tomorrows. Written and illustrated
by channel mainstay C. M. Kosemen, All Tomorrows tells of humanity’s encounter with the Qu
— a hostile alien species that, like AM, genetically alters humanity into a myriad
of unrecognizable forms for seemingly no reason other than their own amusement.
The series
has inspired incredible fan works by artists like Tomasz Woźniakowski that translate the
images into tangible, CGI animations — which help you more acutely feel the suffering of
these altered humanoids. One unfortunate group, the Lopsiders, are flattened out as if by
a rolling pin and made to crawl across the surface of a high-gravity planet for millions
of years. The Temptors are turned into beaked cones of flesh rooted into the soil like grotesque
plants. Perhaps the most tragic of
all are the Mantelopes — creatures with full human
minds in the bodies of grazing animals. Left to fend for themselves upon the Qu’s sudden
disappearance, these beings live agonizing lives, able to see and understand the world
around them but helpless to change it. The book describes mournful herds roaming across
the plains for centuries, singing songs of desperation and loss… (Mantelope Calls)
Perhaps mercifully, the selective forces of evolution make their agony a short one, as
more instinctu
al, animalistic Mantelope prove to be better grazers. In a grim reminder that
the human mind isn’t sacred to the evolutionary process, the herds soon fall into contented
silence — forgetting all they once were. Beyond the horror, there’s a quiet, unplaceable
sadness at play here. All Tommorrows and I Have No Mouth are uncomfortable reminders
of humanity’s fragility — extracting terror from the fact that evolution made us, and
could erase us just as easily. Few things are more intrinsically distu
rbing than something
— be it AM or the Qu — changing us so completely we forget how to be human. But
what about a story where this alteration is self-inflicted? Altered States is an often-overlooked
movie about a scientist who uses a sensory deprivation tank in combination with psychoactive
substances to accelerate and regress evolutionarily. Renowned critic Roger Ebert described it as
a film that “hurls its characters headlong through billions of years [of evolution] and
finds nothing except an
anguished scream.” I… think I get what he means. Over the course
of the film, the lead scientist melts into a primordial soup, reverts into a caveman
like creature and goes on a midnight rampage, and even becomes an amorphous mass of consciousness
that transcends reality. It’s… a whole lot. Not all the visuals have aged flawlessly:
it’s a movie, like the culture of psychedelics that inspired it, that’s of a specific time.
But there’s a throughline of human folly — of experimenting with forces b
eyond your
control, that still resonates today. Altered States can better be understood in conversation
with an equally bonkers time capsule — The Sixth Finger. An episode of the Twilight Zone-style
show The Outer Limits, it tells the story of a man who turns into a weird, large-headed
elf guy with six fingers by using a machine that accelerates evolution. It’s not the
most, uh, scientifically rigorous work — the evolution process is literally controlled
by a lever that switches between ‘forward
’ and ‘backward.’ Nor is it particularly
frightening by today’s standards. But at the time, the concept of evolutionary horror
was new. And it scared people. The episode was banned. Or at least, it almost was, before
network executives stepped in and cut the ending where the lead devolves helplessly
from a primate into primordial goop — their humanity erased. And sure, part of why this
was cut was due to fear of anti-evolution backlash — this was the early 60s — but
either way, this idea unsettl
ed people. For all their silliness, Altered States and The
Sixth Finger are intriguing warnings against tampering with the laws of nature. In changing
the source of the mutations from a hostile external force into something self-inflicted,
they become parables of human ignorance — depicting evolution as an unstoppable power that will
change you utterly if you mess with it. For what could be scarier than a destructive force
beyond your control that you bring upon yourself? …I mean, getting chased
by a monster, probably.
On a surface level, the Xenomorphs of the Alien franchise seem like the complete opposite
of horror derived from the altered self. They’re the ultimate external threat, the other with
a capital ‘O’ — something fundamentally inhuman and dissimilar from the protagonists
they hunt. Especially with their decades of extra baggage from sequels, today, Xenomorphs
feel more like nonspecific monsters than a reflection of ourselves. Yet the design of
the alien didn’t start as an a
lien — it comes from a portrait of a biomechanical humanoid
by Swiss artist H. R. Giger. Altered humans are central to Giger’s art, often appearing
in tableaus where body parts seem to melt and merge with the mechanical. Yet even at
their most extreme, Giger’s subjects somehow always register as humanoid. It’s this faint
recognition that makes the Xenomorphs of Alien so frightening — this tug at the back of
your mind that the thing chasing you is somehow familiar. As parasites that reproduce by
growing
inside their hosts, the Xenomorphs are in some ways altered humans. It’s been established
over the course of the franchise that the aliens take DNA from the lifeforms they develop
within — able to steal the things that make us human, like our bipedal stature, in order
to more effectively hunt us. But ultimately, the Xenomorphs are, of course, not actual
people. The same cannot be said for the monsters in Dead Space. Recently remastered, Dead Space
is a horror game that traps you within t
he Ishimura, a massive ship that is essentially
a giant tomb haunted by the vengeful dead. Necromorphs are hostile lifeforms clearly
inspired by the Xenomorphs, all the way down to their name, but the difference is that
each Necromorph was once a living member of the crew — now mutated into unfeeling monsters.
It’s a small change that profoundly alters the flavor of terror you experience, because
now every enemy you slay comes with the palpable knowledge that you’re fighting something
that was o
nce just like you. While playing, you find yourself wondering if each Necromorph’s
human mind is still in there, watching their bodies do nightmarish things while being helpless
to stop them. And if you fail, you know that you will suffer the same fate — doomed to
live eternally as an inhuman shell. There’s enough isolated space station horror that
it could be considered its own genre, but I think part of why many aren’t as effective
is because they make the inevitable hostile lifeform too unfam
iliar. A huge part of what
makes Alien and Dead Space frightening isn’t just that the characters are being hunted
by a monster, but that they’re being hunted by a distorted echo of themselves. And I don’t
think there’s any movie that captures this nightmare better than John Carpenter’s The
Thing. While set in Antarctica instead of in space, The Thing no doubt belongs to the
same isolation genre. In the film, a group of researchers are stalked by an organism
that digests and replicates its victim
s. The lifeform in The Thing is constantly shapeshifting,
its myriad of forms brought to life with visceral practical effects. But what’s even scarier
than dripping, bodily terrors is how the film captures the agonizing paranoia of being hunted
by a perfect imitator, that can look and sound almost exactly like you, but isn’t you…
(The Thing screams). The most unsettling forms the thing takes are not when it appears like
a horrific monstrosity, but when it’s indistinguishable from other humans. T
he film practically smothers
you with its atmosphere of doubt and isolation, to the point where you feel like you’re
trapped alongside the characters. In an earlier black-and-white film based on the same novel,
the alien is… just a guy in a monster suit. Aside from being less scarry, this threat
is surmountable — able to be overpowered by military men with nerves of steel, a sentiment
reflective of the 1950s. It’s not our evolutionary superior or flawless imitation, because surely
no alien could
rival us and our mighty intellect. Right? In an earlier version of the Alien
script, the film would have concluded with the Xenomorph perfectly mimicking a crewmember’s
voice to send out a distress signal, and then waiting to be rescued by another ill-fated
crew. And so, what was once barely humanoid ends up near-flawless impressionist… Stories
like Alien, Dead Space, and The Thing take the fear of the altered self and make it external,
pitting humans against their own warped reflection. And th
e outcome of these films challenges
our notions of human superiority — the very idea that we’d be difficult to imitate or
outwit. It’s no accident that most of these movies end with few or no survivors. They
remind us that in the game of evolution, humans can be outcompeted just as easily as any other
species… Yet notably, not all works of evolutionary horror are nihilistic. And perhaps no film
walks the line between dreams and nightmares quite as closely as Alex Garland’s Annihilation.
Loosely
based on a novel of the same name, Annihilation is, ultimately, a movie about
change. The story follows four scientists on their expedition into The Shimmer — a
hallucinatory region where everything refracts and mutates into new forms. Which means that
unlike most stories in this genre, it’s not just humans who are mutated. Within the
haze of The Shimmer, plants meld together with their neighbors, animals take on the
properties of other species, and even light waves seem to blend into glassy new
forms.
And while some of these alterations are dangerous, others seem benign. Annihilation isn’t just
disturbing — it’s also beautiful. Most stories in the altered self-genre focus purely
on repulsive mutations. Scorn is a game that absolutely fits into this category. In that
world, altered humanoids ooze out of every crack and crevice, their bodies twisted to
be used as batteries, or computers, or a source of raw material. It’s a realm utterly stripped
of humanity, where ugliness is pretty muc
h the only thing that remains. And side-note:
despite the avalanche of unsettling imagery that they’re subjected to, the playable
character quite literally has no mouth with which to scream. But Annihilation stuns just
as often as it distresses — making it a story as much about creation as it is destruction.
At times The Shimmer seems like a cancer — a disease eating away at the land meant to mirror
the self-destructive tendencies of the main characters. At other points, it feels like
nature rec
laiming itself, reveling in the inherent disorder of evolution. It’s unclear
if The Shimmer has any malicious intent whatsoever. It may simply be evolution personified — an
impartial engine of creation. “It was destroying everything.” “It wasn’t destroying.
It was changing everything. It was making something new.” Not all the visuals of Annihilation
are necessarily meant to be taken literally — it is a film, like The Shimmer itself,
that is endlessly interpretable. But the film leaves you with t
he possibility that change
— even radical, self-altering change, isn’t inherently negative. Indeed, not all works
of evolutionary horror are quite as nihilistic as they appear at first. The famously grim
All Tomorrows also has a surprising amount of optimism, as many of the mutated humanoids
re-evolve their intelligence and form new societies — seemingly suggesting that even
in an inhuman form, the human spirit can remain. Even I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream has
a faint glimmer of hope. At t
he end of the short story, the narrator finds a way to put
the other four humans out of their misery. Although the narrator knows this is an act
that will doom them to eternal solitude and torment, they perform it anyway — proving
that there was still a spark of human compassion that AM wasn’t able to snuff out… Like
any genre, not all evolutionary horror takes the same approach or reaches the same thematic
conclusions. Nor is everything that falls within the category inherently effective and
te
rrifying — in fact, some of it is pretty goofy. There’s a sci-fi film from 2001 about
a meteorite that speeds up natural selection, simply titled Evolution, that takes a lot
of the themes mentioned here and mainly plays them for laughs. While the film wasn’t received
particularly well, it is interesting to see these tropes taken in such a radically different
direction. Furthermore, what works of sci-fi actually belong to evolutionary horror can
be tricky to define. The aliens in A Quiet Place lo
ok spooky, and we can assume they
‘evolved,’ but evolution itself isn’t really present or thematically relevant to
the narrative in a meaningful way. Most stories featuring Zombies lurch along the line of
the subgenre to varying degrees — with most involving some disease that alters the humans
it contaminates. In many zombie movies, the terror comes from more from the scale of the
hordes and the conventional thrill of being chased by something dangerous than from physical
changes to the infected
. Some exceptions, like The Last of Us, exist — as in that
franchise, more fear is extracted from the fundamental ways the fungal infection alters
its hosts. Additionally, more emphasis is placed on how the cordyceps function biologically
and how they evolved, earning it a clearer spot in the genre. Although since this is
a category that I came up with while developing this video, I’d say it’s still debatable
what stories belong in its ranks — and I’m sure there are a few I’ve overlooked. In
the
end, perhaps it’s no surprise that Evolutionary Horror is such a scary hidden genre of sci-fi.
If thought about in abstract terms, evolution is an almost eldritch concept — a law of
the universe that changes all organic beings, from humans to the tiniest cell. Whether those
changes are nonthreatening or nightmarish depends on the story and your point of view
— but the one thing that stays consistent across the subgenre is that fighting evolution
is futile — and playing with it is dangerous. Fro
m the slime we came, and to the slime we
will return. As always, thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this entry, please lend your
support by liking, subscribing, and hitting the notification icon to stay up to date on
all things Curious. See you in the next video.
Comments
This concept has always terrified me, even the part in Spy Kids where the antagonist turns people into cartoony characters for his show used to creep me out
I always have classified this as a fusion of Cosmic Horror and Body Horror. Body Horror was always the scariest thing for me.
You’ve done it. You’ve defined my favorite non-existent genre in media that I am obsessed with, that I can barely enjoy any other horror anymore
In The Last of Us, there is an area where two runners are eating another human. If you observe them for a while, they can be heard crying and even uttering phrases like "I don't want to", which is arguably more terrifying of a concept than just being chased by them.
All Tomorrows is a fantastic example of Evolutionary horror. Listening through the story for the first time shook me to my core. The fear of knowing that the Qu could return at any moment to further twist and distort the already twisted stage of humanity.
If "that bear scene" in Annihilation didn't terrify you to your core, you must have an iron will, man. I'm not spooked by horror often, but that particular scene was the fuel of nightmares. It's so relatable to life, and yet, so horrific and foreign.
I love how in “I have no mouth and I must scream” AM is just a human made in it’s image. A human with a computer for a body and no physical way of expressing it in human form. Any human stuck in such a ‘body’ or lack there of could react the same with such malicious, petty, and downright insane intent.
The scene in Annihilation when the bear screams is so brilliant - absolutely unforgettable.
District 9 also had a great take on the scifi body horror theme. Much like the Mantelope creatures, the Wikus character losing his physical humanity as he slowly transforms into an alien 'prawn' was disturbing and heart wrenching. The psychological isolation his character goes through, knowing no one can help him as he slowly becomes another species and will eventually lose his humanity entirely freaked me out more than Aliens or The Thing, which are two my favourite scifi films of all time.
Another good example of this that I’m surprised you didn’t mention, The Flood in the Halo series. Not so much how it molds you into whatever it wants and keeps you aware. But it takes away your individuality, it takes away your memories until you can’t remember who you are and makes you indistinguishable from other flood forms around you.
In an incredibly surprising turn, we purchased the Nicholas Cage movie "Color Out Of Space", fully intending to launch our asses off. Instead it was good--competent, well-paced, good effects and surprisingly good acting. It was insanely creepy and unsettling and, per the person who'd actually read Lovecraft, very well done. It fits right in with this framing, too.
Resident Evil as a series is such a good example of this. In almost every game, somebody gets mutated into an inhuman monster, but the best example is William Birkin from the second game. He was a scientist who injected himself with a virus he himself developed, but he lost control and got horrifically mutated. In every encounter you have with him, he mutates further and becomes less and less human, and it isn't so much him forgetting how to be human as it is his humanity being taken over. The scary thing of it is that the changes just happen. They aren't inflicted, they don't come with warning. Birkin just uncontrollably changes at random points, just constantly getting new body parts, new eyeballs, and literally morphing every second. It all sums up with him, by the end of the game, being an enormous, slimy blob of inhuman flesh just dragging itself along the floor, just trying to find a host for its own virus. It's body horror at its finest; Birkin remains conscious (for most of the game) to watch and feel himself CONSTANTLY changing, becoming less and less human every second, and being biologically immortal, so he relies entirely on you, the player character, to kill him before he becomes unstoppable
You mentioned All Tomorrows but you did not mention the Colonials, I understand that they eventually evolved into a more suitable form before they were wiped out by the Gravitals, but being reduced to an interconnected fleshy carpet that has full awareness of what they were and what they have become... to quote the Think Tank: "Vivisect me!"
When I was 11 years old I was a very easily scared child. I didn't watch a lot of horror and the Wikipedia article for the human centipede gave me nightmares. My favorite show at the time, though, was gravity falls. (spoiler warning though even though it's a ten year old show) there is this one episode featuring a shape-shifting monster in an underground bunker and when they do finally trap it, the monster dies in the shape of one of the main characters- looking him directly in the face and tellinng him it's how he'll look when he dies. A lot of parts of that show shook me as an eleven year old but that one did especially. it's that scene that still does despite its cartoonishness. The concept of seeing your own mortality through an imitiation of yourself just heebies my jeebies. The scarier part is that the prediction almost comes true- in a later episode- he gets frozen into a wooden statue making the exact same facial expression as the shape-shifter did in his shape. Excuse that I am writing this comment at 4 am so I'm not very articulate right now- but I find this concept so scary. The idea that a shapeshifter, a mockery of the human form, can mimic a human expression of fear so well, is terrifying. I would express it better but again it's 4 am. Naturally, being older now and having seen some really depraved stuff, a kids cartoon is pretty much nothing but some things still stick with me, especially the possession episode. Much possession horror I've seen has focused on the act of possesion- but gravity falls made it a point that a character watches his own body be self-harmed whilst possesed. Kind of messed up when you think about even though it's played for laughs. "Watches" is the key word here- the horror lies half in the injury and half in the knowing you have no control whilst the injury happens. Gravity Falls had a lot of cool horror concepts that I sometimes wish weren't in a kids show so they could be explored better. I think directly watching rather than the "jumpscares" or lack of awareness is what makes "evolutionar" horror so freaky. Watching is a very passive act which is always scary.
All Tomorrows is one of my favorite pieces of Science Fiction ever. Glad to see it mentioned here.
Body horror has always terrified me. I've watched the trailers for Tusk and The Human Centipede, and both made me incredibly nauseated and unsettled for days
I have always just said that i am a fan of body horror, but this sub genre you've created is definitely a better way to explain what makes me uncomfortable in the best way. i have no mouth and i must scream has always been a favorite of mine even since just hearing the title because the first time it by itself gave me chills. i highly recommend the book "The Call" by Peadar O'Guilin. it involves people getting their bodies twisted into the forms of animals or other things and either that kills them straight out or forces them to live that way for the rest of their existence.
the deleted scene in alien when you see dallas on the wall mutating/transforming into whatever hes becoming is one of the most unsettling things ive ever seen. i cant forget it. i am not easily creeped out but that one gets me. i still half look away at that part whenever i watch the movie.
'But in general, take my advice: when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn’t yet, or used to be Human once and isn’t now, or ought to be Human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.' This particular species of horror always puts me in mind of that quote from Prof. Lewis. I don't think there's anything more profoundly unsettling that something that's almost - but not quite - human. Often I suspect you'd be feeling for your hatchet to put it out of its misery.
i think something that really scares me about zombie stuff (more specifically the walking dead) is the absolute hopelessness of fighting so hard to survive while knowing the whole time that you’re eventually doomed to become exactly what you’re fighting