Infection, directed by Masayuki Ochiai, was one of a series of Japanese horror movies made in the 2000s to capitalize on the success of Ringu. It begins and ends with a rusty swing set swaying in the breeze. The first time around, it feels like classic ghost story stuff, from the movement of an inanimate object to the creepy recontextualization of childhood imagery. By the time the image returns at the end of the film, it feels like a gasp of fresh air: a final escape from the oppressive walls that have been bearing down on us for an hour and a half.
The rest of Infection is claustrophobic. It takes place in a hospital, but unlike the propulsive and brightly lit just-controlled crises of most hospital dramas, Infection’s hospital is dark, dank, understaffed, and under-resourced. It seems like an abandoned place, forgotten by the Department of Health and by God in one fell swoop. They’re running out of syringes and surgical masks. Dr. Akiba (Kōichi Satō) says he hasn’t seen the hospital manager or been paid this week. A young nurse (Mari Hoshino) is so bad at finding the vein with a needle that she leaves her patients’ arms covered in bruises.
You can feel how stale the air is. Medical sterility has broken down, but it doesn’t make way for new growth, just decay. It’s a bigger crisis than you’d ever see Dr. House face, but the kind that plays out in slow motion. Ambulances bring patients to the emergency room, but they don’t have the space or the time for the patients they already have.
Amped up just a tad, it could be a razor-sharp medical satire about bureaucracy and mismanagement. At a faster pace, it could work as black comedy. But Infection plays it straight. It reminds me of the titular show-within-a-show in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace — a parody of cheap 1980’s television, set in Darkplace Hospital over the gates of Hell — yet is somehow both serious and sincerely scary. When a patient accidentally dies, either because a doctor misspoke or a nurse misheard the name of a drug, they scramble to deny, deflect, and absolve themselves – individually and collectively – of blame. They put the body in a room full of heaters to speed up the dissipation of the offending chemical, eliminating the evidence. It makes the line between medicine and horror feel disconcertingly blurry.
Then, in the next room, a patient’s organs liquify, leaving nothing behind but a smear of gooey green blood. This is the end stage of an infection that has been quietly spreading through the hospital. The illness evokes zombies without fitting neatly into the millennial zombie revival. The early signs, like the infected having a grey pallor and seeming to disengage from reality, feel zombie-adjacent, but instead of the undead shuffling along feeding on others, the infected remain alive while their whole body dissolves from the inside out.
Dr. Akai (Shirō Sano), with his penetrating stare and ominous stillness, wants to examine the patients, insisting that discovering this illness will lead to grant money. The other doctors reluctantly go along, worried that Akai might have overheard their decision to cover up medical malpractice. More and more of the doctors, nurses, and patients become infected: brains dribbling out their ears, blood spilling from their eyes — all bright green. Dr. Akiba begins to suspect that Akai manufactured the virus.
In Infection’s final act, body horror gives way to psychological horror. In a series of reveals, we are made to question the reality of what’s happening. An unskilled doctor who has been practicing sutures discovers he hasn’t been crookedly sewing up a slab, but a man’s stomach. The bodies of nurses we saw melt into green gunk lie on the ground, intact but dead, bleeding red from stab and slash wounds. Akiba looks at Akai and sees himself in a mirror.
But it’s not as simple as a reveal that the whole movie was in a character’s head. In Infection, psychological and body horror are one and the same. Traditionally, body horror plays on our fears about the breakdown of our fragile, fleshy bodies, and psychological horror plays on our fears about the breakdown of our ability to perceive and make sense of the world around us. But the division of body and mind is artificial: the “mind” is a chunk of meat inside your body, and equally, all “bodily” sensations are perceptions of your mind. And so psychological and body horror are intimately intertwined: they are different ways of conceptualising an elemental fear about the fragility of the individual. Not just any individual specifically, but the very idea that there is such a thing as “me” or “you.”
Early in Infection, a psychologist explains that you interpret red as the same color under different lighting—that your mind is producing the color, not your eyes neutrally observing an objective reality. By the same token, all horror is psychological. The events of Infection weren’t one big hallucination: something terrible happened, but we didn’t perceive it correctly. There was an infection in the hospital, but seeing people dissolve into green goo isn’t witnessing the end result, it’s experiencing a symptom. Akai tells Akiba that the virus spreads through the consciousness. Again we see the scene in which a patient was given the wrong drug and died, but this time, Akiba is the patient. He tries to speak when they are going to give him the wrong drug, but no words escape. A newscaster says that Akiba massacred the hospital staff then disappeared. The psychologist is the lone survivor—but when she cuts her hand, the blood runs green.
There can be something comforting in a reveal that a movie was playing out in a character’s head. It’s the kind of detachment from reality that most of us haven’t experienced, and so it makes it easier to locate your discomfort out there somewhere far away. The idea that Akiba massacred the staff and disappeared does exactly that: positions Infection as the story of one guy going crazy. But when the psychologist’s blood runs green, you’re denied that comfortable distance. A title like Infection reminds you of the vulnerability of our bodies, our helplessness in the face of tiny microbes. But in the end, our minds are no less helpless.
