SYSTEM: ANY
I have to admit, I was always a big fan of Morbius. The whole vampire-but-not-a-vampire schtick appealed to me, plus I used to own the original Spider-Man appearances. The generic field of "scientific monsters" is generally intriguing to me but can be hit or miss; I was not interested in Man-Wolf, for instance. The Moore retcon of Swamp Thing made it more mystical and less scientific, even though it walked in through a very scientific door, the flawed flatworm research of the 1970s. (Side note: has anyone preserved the issues of Worm Runners Digest from those days? I should check; I know that "Hygiene Habits Among the Nacirema" was preserved.)
In fiction, I certainly liked "The De-Mythologized Werewolf" and Green Eyes, which tackle werewolves and zombies, and I Am Legend has a different take on vampires (no, not the Will Smith movie...the book by Richard Matheson).
The scientific veneer gives the monster a hook into the Silver-Age-and-later superhero world that makes it square more with the can-do attitude of those stories.
And horror stories don't have to be non-scientific: I think Blood Music is a fine horror story, and so is "Sandkings" (and that one is structured very much like an EC horror comic: "You sharpen the pencils, the pencils sharpen you.")
Science and monsters don't have to conflict, is what I'm saying: in its day, Dracula was a technothriller, and Frankenstein is all about science.
So when I was casting about for some monster to put a scientific gloss on, I ran across a number of examples, drawn here from comics:
- Vampires—well, there we have Morbius.
- Frankenstein's Adam—is your scientific flesh golem (well, technically, flesh golems were invented to take advantage of his legend, but I digress)
- Werewolves—there's Man-Wolf, of course. The implication in some stories is that lycanthropy is a heck of a disease (and in fact, I can see a story where it was meant to be a magical cure for cancer, but it ends up channelling that rampant cell growth into metabolic changes). Both the Thing and the Hulk are kind-of werewolves, too, but not enough to make my heart sing.
- Witches—in fiction, the gods of several of Roger Zelazny's books are people with highly advanced science. I think nanotechnology has been used as the varnish to put witchery on a couple of characters, but I can't think of an example off-hand. Still, the basic cosmic character is so close to a witch (and the imagery of the Green Goblin) that I don't think anyone has tried.
- Demons—have been aliens in a number of places; in one version of DC's history, the bespoke demons were other-dimensional inhabitants who moved into Hell, but were taken over by the renegade angels.
- Zombies—have been a disease but haven't been given any other rationale that I know of. (Ghouls are rather the same.)
- Anything from Lovecraft has its scientific gleam backed in.
I can't think of any others, which is rather my problem: coming up with a monster to "science-ize" is difficult. Lots of monsters can be made scary but aren't creatures of horror, really. They're monsters, sure, scary but not necessarily horrifying.
(Having said this, you will now come up with three dozen I have myopically underlooked.)
