The Girl With All The Gifts Fungal Infection & Hungries Explained

The Girl With All The Gifts: Fungal Infection & Hungries Explained

Contents

Colm McCarthy’s 2016 film The Girl with All the Gifts features a fungal infection that turns humans into “hungries,” this is what it all means.

You Are Reading :[thien_display_title]

The Girl With All The Gifts Fungal Infection & Hungries Explained

In the midst of the 2010s zombie horror film boom, Colm McCarthy’s 2016 film The Girl with All the Gifts featured a new type of virus, a fungal infection. The film focuses on a hybrid generation of children born from the “hungries.” These hybrids crave human flesh but are able to restrain themselves and even think, talk, and learn. McCarthy’s film pushes the limits of what a zombie film can be and completely subverts the classic tropes on how the virus manifests.

Starring Sennia Nanua as Melanie, a hybrid child, the film is set in the not so distant future. She and others like her are contained to a testing facility. When the base is breached by hundreds of hungries, Melanie escapes with her teacher Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton), Dr. Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close), and multiple security officers. The purposes of keeping Melanie over the other hybrids is to study her, as she shows skills that the others do not.

As the film continues, Melanie becomes increasingly aware that Dr. Caldwell wants to dissect her to discover a vaccine for the fungal infection that turns humans into hungries. With this knowledge, Melanie flees from the doctor and sets the end of the human race in motion. The entire world becomes infected with the fungus that turns them into blood-thirsty hungries.

See also  Lost In Space Season 2 10 Things From The Finale That Set Up Season 3

The Fungal Infection and Hungries Explained

The Girl with All the Gifts is the first time a zombie film has utilized a plant based fungus as a method of creating a legion of the undead. While some horror films have used the environment to bring on the end of days such as The Happening, none have made it the true source of the zombie virus. As Dr. Caldwell explains to Melanie in the film, the fungus is a mutation of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a pathogenic fungus that infects insects and causes alterations in their behavioral patterns. It wraps around the human brain like a vine and immediately transforms people into hungries. Except for the children born from the already infected.

It is believed that during the gestational period, the hybrids developed antibodies from their carrier to keep the fungal infection at bay. Despite eating through their mother’s abdomen, these hybrids are able to control themselves with their antibodies, making them the perfect test subjects to create a vaccine. They are the only individuals that are immune to becoming completely void of any human-like characteristics. The hungries are not hybrids and vice versa. Rather, the hungries are humans turned into zombies and the hybrids are their only hope. Except this film ends with no hope in sight.

Melanie defeats the human race by igniting the spores from a bundle of vines created by a mass group of hungries. These spores turn airborne and bring about the end of humanity. The fungal infection is nature fighting back and the hungries are the hopeless vessels under which it spreads. The Girl with All the Gifts is a complex zombie horror film that deeply considers environmental influences on the start of the apocalypse.

See also  Sonic & Tails Become Palico & Palamute In Monster Hunter Rise DLC

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/girl-all-gifts-fungal-infection-hungries-explained/

Movies -