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You probably wouldn’t guess by its recent use in popular culture, but one of the most common stories in horror and science fiction works throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century was called a “Ghost Ship”. Not in the sense of a ship being a ghost, but rather ships that are hypothecated to be discovered as abandoned or with all crewmembers dead in the middle of the sea for unknown reasons. These stories were all based on the actual finding of the ship named Mary Celeste in the year 1872.
There are actual details to the case that are not as strange as many conspiracy theorists would have you believe. This has not, however, stopped popular culture from coming up with uncountable fictitious reasons for the ship or ships, which was presumably based on the Mary Celeste, being found abandoned. Arthur Conan Doyle provided us with a racially motivated madman cast in his short story, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.” William Outerson, “A Fire in the Galley Stove,” proposed fantastically that while being the culprits, the ‘giant octopuses’ managed to kidnap unsuspecting sailors to build underwater empires. The 1933 film “Terror Aboard” had the discoverers of the ship actually coming across bodies and Hammer’s first horror film 1935’s “Mystery of the Marie Celeste,” pointed the finger at a vengeful crewman portrayed by Bela Lugosi. What do you think was the first case that came to mind when UFO theorists began their search for mysterious disappearances to pin the blame on aliens?
While such applications of the plot were somewhat common, these occasions have been nearly extinct in modern cinema. One would suspect that Natural Born Killers styled Found footage films would be the exception.
Strangely enough, that exception is not more popular today than the short stories and movies mentioned above, but for some time, it was the source of a big budget action film starring A-list actors and had a successful action figure line that still sells on e-Bay.
It all started with a comic book limited series produced by Dark Horse, Chuck Pfarrer’s Virus, which he co-wrote with the Darkman co-writer Howard Cobb in 1992.
Pfarrer first pitched Virus as a movie but eventually decided to sell it as a comic because he felt there were not enough effects to bring his vision to life. The executives at Dark Horse seem to have liked the series, since they published it in TPB format twice, one with an introduction by Robert Sheckley and the copyright info presented in scrambled computer code, long before the property had even been greenlit for a movie. So, was it worth it? Let’s examine. While expecting a techno-thriller, Virus certainly started showing right from the title its debt towards the classical ghost ship tale by opening with a Dark Stormy Night.
A tugboat towing a massive barge was struggling to stay afloat in the turbulent waves. But the captain of the boat, Powell, ordered his crew to move the ship ahead at full power. To his dismay, one of his crew members, a first mate by the name of Averil, refused to follow his command. Averil was convinced the ship would capsize at some point. Calling Powell daft, she said the only way to move forward would be to abandon the barge, which she knew was worth $10 million.
Powell lost the argument after being almost washed away by a tidal wave. Averill together with the ship’s navigator, Colleen Foster, were free to exhibit their Implausible Action Movie Hero Chops by igniting the barge flare in the pouring rain, drenched waters, and on a screeching stormy sea. Okaaay you’d already know this was written as a movie script.
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