- [Voiceover] Are you plagued by feelings
of cosmic isolation or existential dread?
Do you feel yourself just another empty vessel in a...
(interrupting static)
(door creaking)
(screaming)
(static)
- Hello there.
My name is Dr. Anton Jessup,
curator of Monster Studies
here at the university.
I've just returned from an unexpected vacation of sorts,
a stay at, I suppose you'd call it a monastic spa retreat.
Lots of skin peels.
I'm still recovering but I'm making excellent progress
thanks to several drums of discontinued pharmaceuticals
that I discovered here in the university basement.
Oh, this stuff's far too concentrated
for direct consumption,
but by introducing it into the university water supply,
I've managed to achieve the perfect balance.
Ah, pungent yet palatable.
I've also added a little fungus to my diet.
This variety comes to me
from the islands of the South Pacific,
a region known for its natural wonders
as well as more than a few unnatural ones.
Oh, certainly Monster Island tends to take all the headlines
with its rampaging kaiju,
but the isle of Matango
offers an even more insidious horror.
You may call them the mushroom people
or the fungus of terror,
but the denizens of Matango
pay no heed to human languages.
These endoparasites swiftly colonize
any animal that consumes its fungal bait,
hijacking the host behavior so that the individual
then encourages others to partake of tainted shrooms.
Then, madness ensues as the fungus consumes the host,
transforming it into a shambling humanoid fungus
with flesh-rending claws.
There are other monstrous fungus among us, to be sure.
They shamble through wasted cities,
attack our folk singers,
infest best-selling authors,
and occasionally turn Russo-Finnish heroes into bears.
They're all real fun-guys.
But the mindless mushrooms of Matango
also have their parallels in the world of terrestrial fungi.
First let's consider the Matango's ravenous hunger for flesh
an appetite very much in keeping
with their natural world kin.
Why, just consider the edible oyster mushroom,
yes, the one from your stirfry.
These devilish little delicacies
actually hunt and consume roundworms and spiders.
Perhaps to supplement low levels of nitrogen
available in wood.
According to a 2015 study published in PLOS Biology,
the shrooms employ special proteins
to punch deadly holes in the cells of its prey,
the very tactic that human immune cells use
against bacterial invaders.
It's quite understandable, really.
Fungi serve as our planet's primary decomposers.
Are they overstepping their boundaries
to digest something that's still alive and kicking?
I think not.
Ah, but what of the Matango's insidious ability
to hijack a host's brain and alter its behavior?
The fungus rewires a host
to further its monstrous agenda
and we see eerily similar behavior
in the fungi of the Cordyceps and Ophiocordyceps genuses.
These endoparasites prey on anthropods,
each species specializing in a particular victim.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis targets bullet ants,
compelling the unfortunate host to climb a tree
attach to a leaf, and grow a spore-fruiting tube
out of its head.
Naturally this eruption kills the ant,
but the emitted spores will infect
an entire new generation.
As a result the ants fear and shun
a fungi-infected compatriot,
just as humans have come to fear and shun
the horrors of Matango.
So think to Matango the next time
you indulge in a little shroomery.
What's tasting you back?
What's altering your behavior?
You can try to think for yourself,
but you may already be a pawn
in some alien force's monstrous agenda.
Keep drinking the water and end transmission.
(static)