The Horde

As the name should imply, the Horde is not a single Villain, but rather a multitude of them, all posing a danger to our Hero and friends. I don't know if I want to say how many monsters you need to really qualify as a Horde, but as a generalization I'd say that a Horde has a large, undefined number. The absence of an exact number is often part of what makes the Horde so scary, cause you don't know how many you need to kill in order to be safe. That's more overwhelming than a "4 down, 3 to go" kind of reassurance.

A Horde is different from what I'd call a Pack, which is similar in concept to a Clan (see Slasher chapter), only they don't need to be humans. In a movie like Feast (2005) we have, if I recall correctly, three Monsters. That's a Pack. Packs function as a team. Hordes may have a shared goal, such as eating all humans, but they function on a more fluid, subjective level.

What makes the Horde a compelling Monster is twofold. On a suspense level it's great because in theory our Hero isn't safe anywhere. The reason so many Slasher movies take place in an abandoned-whatever-out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere is because it's easy to run away from a single Monster if you have the chance. But how can you escape hundreds and hundreds of Monsters?

The other great thing about Hordes is that we don't need to prolong Hero/Monster combat. As we discuss in the Solo Hero chapter, Slasher movies need to wait until Act III before our Hero combats the Monster, cause if the Hero dies that means he/she clearly isn't the Hero and if the Slasher dies, well then the movie's fucking over. With a Horde the Hero can constantly be doing away with Monsters left-and-right. There's plenty more! Really ratchets up the action.

There are three basic types of Hordes: the Legion, Crazed Animals and the Infected.

A Legion - as in the Biblical "My name is Legion: for we are many. - is, I suppose, a much larger version of a Pack. The difference being that while the Pack functions like a regular family /gang, where members can still have individual goals, a Legion is a hive-mind, a mass of Monsters all serving a higher purpose. Legions are usually aliens, I guess because we as humans, being innately self-serving creatures, find the idea of Borg-like groupthink just so... well, alien. So these movies can tap into that uncertainty and play with our fears.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (any of the countless versions), originally tapping into the 50's hyper-paranoia, is a stellar example of a creepy Legion. Since the Legion is a hive-mind, sometimes they literally are a hive, with a queen and all, like in the Alien series, or more recently, Slither (2006) - though it does seem weird to call Michael Rooker a queen.

Presumably growing out of the burgeoning Environmental movement in the 70's and our latent worries that Earth was going to start fighting back at some point, Crazed Animal movies were briefly all the rage. We had plenty of single rouge animal pics, such as in Grizzly (1976), but most filmmakers seemed more interested in what would happen if entire species decided to turn on us.

Think of pretty much any species of animal that could form a deadly Horde and I'll bet they made a movie out of it: be it something genuinely spooky like killer bees out to get Michael Caine (The Swarm, 1978) or tarantulas after William Shatner (Kingdom of the Spiders, 1977); to something a little less inherently scary but still gross, like killer worms (Squirm, 1976); to something as ridiculous as a whole island of creatures that can only kill you if you fall down and don't move for a while (Frogs, 1972). Then there's always one of my personal favorite sets ups: a mountain where the depletion of Earth's ozone layer has caused all animals above the altitude of 5000 feet to go batshit homicidal (Day of the Animals, 1977.) Hah! We fixed the ozone layer! Take that nature, you bloodthirsty lunatic!

Crazed Animal movies interestingly wag the idea that, as Yoda might phrase it - impetus a Monster does not make! In most of these movies we are informed by the Guy Who Knows Things that the animals are attacking because of something bad we humans did. So in a way, we're the Monsters here. Really, we shouldn't even be fighting back. Yet, of course we do. If the fact that I don't recycle plastic bags causes a mountain lion to attack me, I'm still going to try to kill the mountain lion. Though that victory isn't going to make me the most sympathetic Hero. That's why a good portion of Crazed Animal movies make the wise decision to have the animal problem caused by the ever useful, all-purpose baddie, secret government/military testing! That way our Heroes can be 100% blameless and can concentrate, guilt free, on killing all those deranged creatures.

Moving a little further into this whole impetus conundrum, we reach what I find the most interesting type of Horde, the Infected. One could make the argument (which I guess is just a roundabout stupid way of saying "I'm making this argument") that "killing motivation" is a key part of what separates Hero from Monster. Normally if I just up and killed a mountain lion, I'd be arrested (they're endangered,) but if that mountain lion was trying to eat me because of my rampant lack of plastic bag recycling, well then, I'd wind up on the news talking about my brave ordeal. It was self-defense after all. But there is still that level of tragedy here. I really didn't want to have to kill the mountain lion.

The Infected are always people. Infected animals go into the Crazed Animals section. So we take the unpleasantness of having to kill things we really don't want to one step further. Killing some kind of bog monster would no doubt be a traumatic experience, but you wouldn't cry "what have I done?" for days afterwards. But what if the thing you just chopped to bits had previously been your best friend or spouse?

Most Infected movies are zombie movies. And be they the classic slow roving, unexplained-act-of-God zombies from the Romero films, or the post Return of the Living Dead (1985), fast, experiment-gone-wrong zombies on display in the Resident Evil and 28 ___ Later films, the rules of the zombie remain the same. They still eat the flesh of the living and most importantly for our talk here - if they bite you, you will eventually become a zombie yourself. Thus is the nature of the Infected.

The Infected also poses a cool puzzle: is our Monster the Infected or is it the Infection itself? Well, we have to ask – what is our Hero's direct threat? Is he more afraid of the Infected killing him or of being infected himself? Tricky question, since really the answer is always a little of both.

Let's take two non-zombie Infection movies: George Romero's The Crazies (1973), a slow at times, but fun nonetheless no-budgeter from the 70's and Eli Roth's Cabin Fever (2002), a messy, bordering on incompetent, but fun in its way, no-budgeter from our time. The Crazies features a town whose water supply is contaminated by a spilt bio-weapon that turns the inhabitants into homicidal loonies. Cabin Fever features a cabin full of stupid kids who come in contact with a deadly virus (which also ends up contaminating their water supply) that causes you to start falling apart and makes your friends want to kill you to stop you from infecting them. Plot-wise the movies couldn't be more dissimilar, but they help illustrate a point.

In The Crazies the Infection consumes almost all its victims before anyone has a chance to realize what's going on. From that moment on our Heroes mainly need to worry about being killed by the deranged Infected, who try and stab or shoot you rather than pass on the infection zombie-style. In Cabin Fever, the Infected don't become outwardly aggressive at all. In fact, unlike in most Infection movies, I don't think a single one of the Infected kills anyone, other than by accidentally infecting them. Here the real danger is the Infection itself. But this is a rare case. Most of the time the danger with the Infected is twofold.

Another fun recent Horde conundrum is The Ruins (2008). Technically the Monster is a single entity, a man-eating plant, yet we never get to see the nerve center, and all its vines, like tentacles on an octopus, certainly give the movie a classic oh-shit-we're-surrounded Legion framework. Maybe there is no nerve center, the vines being a perfect Legion, hundreds of little blood-sucking plants, all interconnected. Then, to confuse classification further, also added to the mix is the fact that the vines apparently spread and grow on anything they touch, so we have a second villain in the form of Mayan natives who refuses to let our Heroes leave the titular ruins, for fear of spreading the killer vines. So we also have the framework of an Infected movie. If only the ruins were also in with killer bugs we could have a perfect Horde hat trick.