Ten Days of Terror!: Infection

Film: Infection (Kansen)
Format: DVD from Stockton Township Public Library on gigantic television.

I like a good horror movie, and sometimes I like a bad one, evidenced by just how much of the They Shoot Zombies list I have watched. And while I don’t seek out gore, I’m not someone who tends to shy away from it very often. The horror stuff that bothers me isn’t blood or the supernatural or even home invasions. It’s medical stuff. For whatever reason, horror that happens in hospitals, or things happening badly in a medical setting affect me a great deal. Why else would it have taken me a decade to get to Infection (or Kansen if you prefer)?

This is a horror movie that takes place in a hospital. It’s also a film that moves very slowly in terms of the infection in the title. But don’t worry—there’s plenty that is upsetting before we get there. We’re going to be centered in a run-down, underfunded and understaffed hospital. Everyone is overworked, patients are being ignored, and the staff is desperate to keep the hospital open if only to save their own jobs. Two things happen at the same time. One, an ambulance brings in a patient with a strange black rash, but Dr. Akiba (Kōichi Satō) refuses entry to the patient. Second, a patient suffering from severe burns is given the wrong medication and dies on the table. (

That death naturally becomes the significant problem of the staff. Should the death and the mistake that caused it be reported? Is there a way to gloss over it? If the story gets out, the hospital will likely be closed and the people who work there blacklisted from working in medicine. The two doctors and four nurses in the room make the agreement that they will put the dead patient in an abandoned room and, for lack of a better way to put it, heat him up to break down the presence of the wrong medication.

So why does all of this matter in a film that is supposed to be about an infection? Because once this dead patient has been at least temporarily dealt with, the doctors discover that the patient with the black rash that Dr. Akiba denied entry was left at the hospital anyway. This is because the patient has been accepted by Dr. Akai (Shirō Sano), who sees what is happening to the patient as an opportunity to make his mark on the medical field. If they can figure out what is going on and isolate it, whatever is happening will be named after the doctors who work on the patient.

What is happening, though, is that the patient is essentially dissolving into a green goo. He seems to be conscious while he is essentially liquifying, and doesn’t even seem to be in that much distress, although we never really see him. Most distressing is that when the staff goes to check on them, they find the patient missing, and the green liquefaction that is on the table is not nearly enough to account for the entire body, meaning that the patient with a potentially infectious and horrifying illness is now loose in the hospital. And, naturally, people around the hospital start acting strangely and start bleeding the green goo from their eyes and ears.

What’s most interesting about Infection is that in a lot of ways, the spreading infection is the least disturbing part of the story. The goo is clearly artificial, but no less nasty and disturbing, and what is happening is horrifying—basically people’s organs disintegrate into the goo. But it’s other things around the hospital that are much more terrible. One of the nurses (Mari Hoshino) struggles with needles and finding veins for injections, and once things start going to hell, she starts practicing on herself. One of the doctors, struggling with being told that he should no longer be allowed to practice, begins practicing suturing.

Infection is a sort of dark nightmare; once the slide into worse and worse problems begins, things are going to continually compound and accelerate. The hospital is clearly on the skids and the death of the burn patient is what tips the entire thing into the abyss; the spreading infection is just there to speed things along.

The biggest issue I have with Infection is, in large part, the infection itself. The green goo looks fake. It wouldn’t be that difficult to create a disease/infection that looked like something real. I wasn’t a fan of Cabin Fever, but it’s two years older than Infection and the disease looked like the real thing. Give me something that isn’t just goopy and looks like a slightly darker version of a PG-13 movie and I’m going to be a lot more disturbed.

Why to watch Infection: A hospital going to hell is naturally compelling.
Why not to watch: Goopy green nastiness that genuinely looks fake.