Mouldy Matriarchs and Dangerous Daughters

The Resident Evil video game series is especially notable for engaging with uncanny nature and monstrous reproduction, often facilitated through viral contamination. These third-person games usually feature an outbreak of some kind, instigated by a shadowy organisation, and star a member of law enforcement or the military as the protagonist. However, the seventh and eighth games of the franchise were different. While they explored many of the same themes and conventions as their predecessors, the technologies by which they evoked fear and suspense had become further immersed in the survival horror genre and ecoGothic affect. Survival horror video games, which often exploit anxieties surrounding uncanny motherhood to produce feelings of dread, use the processes and spectacle of reproduction, gestation, and childbirth as the locus of player fear. The ecoGothic, that is the non-human ecology rendered uncanny, monstrous, and sublime, permeates survival horror spaces and has the potential to empower these malevolent matriarchs. In Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (Nakanishi) and Resident Evil VIII: Village (Sato), player-protagonist Ethan Winters is under constant attack from female antagonists. From unexpected onslaughts from his rapidly transforming wife Mia at the beginning of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, to his heart being wrenched from his body by the overarching villain Mother Miranda in Resident Evil VIII: Village, Ethan’s life is under constant threat from women and girls infected by a parasitic fungus. These monstrous females, through their corporeal forms and means of control, blur the boundaries between the human and the non-human. Furthermore, they represent the perceived degradation of the human form and delegitimisation of man's dominion over nature. These women—who have merged with the non-human ecosystem—have become creatures that challenge our conception of what it is to be human. It is this intersection of ecophobia and the perceived transgression of gender roles that make up the anatomy of the female and non-cis-masculine presenting videoludic monster. Using Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil VIII: Village as my primary examples, in this article I unpack the implications of these fungus-infested women, and explore how family and trauma play a role in their narratives. EcoGothic Origins In defining the ecoGothic it is important to acknowledge its origins as a response to the idealised ecologies of the nature writing of the Romantic period (Smith and Hughes 2). Rather than sweeping through the green pastoral valleys of the Romantic novel, the ecoGothic lurks in the shadows of labyrinthine forests and stands awestruck before sublime wonders. The ecoGothic shatters the illusion of human control, confronting the audience with their fears and anxieties. The ecoGothic monsters of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (referred to here as Resident Evil 7) and Resident Evil VIII: Village (referred to here as Village) represent deep-seated anxieties about the boundaries between the human and the non-human. Whilst Gothic narratives have traditionally expressed fears about the loss of control to nature, Estok notes that this loss of control is a real and present threat in the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene (Estok 29), lending these modern ecoGothic monsters additional relevance and potency. The ecoGothic challenges human corporeality through transformation, hybridity, and invasion, destabilising our ideas of the human as separate from, and superior to, the greater ecology. It is vital to interrogate assumptions associated with the false dichotomy between humans and nature to demonstrate the anxieties at play within these manifestations of female eco-monstrosity. As Tidwell notes, ecohorror narratives are “fundamentally predicated upon a relationship between humanity and nature that does not allow for their interconnectedness” (539). These games, through the compromised, infected form of the protagonist, problematise the dichotomy between the good of humanity and the evil of the non-human. However, they still weaponise anxieties about human specificity and depict hybridity as monstrous and unstable. The patriarchal fear of transgressive female power is similarly weaponised through the female antagonists. These monstrous female antagonists are used to police boundaries of acceptable womanhood and their fates demonstrate the dangers of transgressing those boundaries. Through an ecofeminist lens we can examine the interplay between anxieties surrounding gender and anxieties surrounding the wildness and unpredictability of the ecology. As the intersection between ecocriticism, which is interested in the interconnectedness of ecologies, and feminism, which is interested in the “social analysis” of power structures and systems of domination (Carr 160), ecofeminism allows us to analyse the subjugation, exploitation, and demonisation of the feminine and the broader ecology. Part of what makes a female monster so threatening is that she transgresses two societal modes of categorisation. She is a predator rather than prey, no longer fitting the submissive female archetype, and she has become a hybrid form closely associated with the animal. Krzywinska highlights the role of this altered power relationship as being a potent manifestation of the Gothic in video games (33). This common expression of transgressive and monstrous female power draws on the traditional role of the Gothic in facilitating the male experience of fear and vulnerability with impunity (Krzywinska 33). Resident Evil as a video game series has an inconsistent history of depicting women and female-presenting entities, both antagonists and protagonists alike. MacCallum-Stewart asserts that the series’ shift towards more problematic and monstrous female representation coincides with a move from action-adventure to survival horror (170). The series has long been preoccupied with monstrous inheritance and legacy, but Resident Evil 7 and Village represent a new move towards female villains, abandoning patriarchal dynasties like the Weskers. The female ecoGothic monsters of Resident Evil 7 and Village transgress gender and species norms, signifying a move further into the ecoGothic realm of the uncanny. The Technology of Ecohorror The Resident Evil series uses science fiction conventions to explain the mystery that lies at the centre of its horrific spectacles. Despite the distinctly ecoGothic affect of Resident Evil 7 and Village, the ’scientific’ explanation provided in-game for these supernatural occurrences is a mutated fungus with psychotropic and self-replicating properties. The Cadou (Romanian for “gift”) is a fictional fungus developed from a fungal root under the village, and altered to create bioweapons by a shadowy organisation, The Connections. Known as the megamycete in the English script (not used in the Japanese script), the fungus has various effects including controlling its host, retaining and replicating genetic information, and rapid growths capable of focussed movement. A second fungal root was established in Louisiana, under the Baker House of Resident Evil 7. As a locus of human anxiety, fungal bodies are inherently unstable and defy characterisation, thus queering ideas of the corporeal body (Bishop et al. 220). Bishop posits that in the human consciousness fungus is closely linked to the animal as they live on “dead or decomposing matter”. Some fungal species reproduce asexually “through the release of spores that produces new organisms that are genetically identical to the parent organism” (Bishop et al. 204). This asexual reproduction means that fictional fungal bodies are representative of a reproductive process that runs contrary to the human-sanctioned sexual reproduction and established gendered power dynamics. Reproduction through tiny spores allows the site of reproduction to go undetected, opening the possibility within the human imagination for the invasion and violation of the human form. Bishop also notes that fungal bodies “are hardly contained organisms; they form complex systems of mycorrhizae, symbiotic underground relationships with other fungal and vegetal life” (Bishop et al. 204). It is this resistance to categorisation is an emergent theme as we define the parameters of these female eco-monsters. Whilst the fungal properties of the Cadou are behind the malevolent forces at work within Resident Evil 7 and Village, the mould and associated slime are a looming presence in the bulk of the gameplay. It clings to the walls in the Baker house and lurks in the shadows of the Village. It exists within the interior and exterior of the human body, threatening to control, corrupt, and engulf. The invasive presence of the mould in the Old House places the phenomenon firmly in the domestic sphere, in the space to which the matriarch of the family, Marguerite, is bound (McGreevy et al. 254). Hurley notes that slime “constitutes a threat to the integrity of the human subject” (35), due to its lack of fixed identity and form. Slime represents a challenge to the human understanding of the body as a closed system that is impenetrable and self-contained. Estok posits that slime’s resistance to categorisation and refusal to fit within male delineated boundaries creates an association with the feminine (33). Slime is unstable and resists control, making it a culturally pervasive expression of fears about the loss of established systems of power that reinforce sexism and misogyny (Estok 31). This theory of the gendered significance of slime brings new meaning to use of the mould and slime forms of the Cadou for the purposes of unnatural reproduction and the exercising of psychological control. The abhuman, or not-quite-human (Hurley 3), spectacles of Resident Evil’s Cadou infected antagonists are able to be at once tragic and disposable. While the player is required to kill vast hordes of amorphous “molded”, emaciated “thral