Creature Feature: Halo's "The Flood"

Heather Lamb, Contributing Editor

Often, plants in video games tend to work as atmospheric elements or anthropomorphic nuisances that we need to bop on the head now and then. Plants are mostly useful in that they give you a sense of location. But one game that certainly goes against this norm is Halo: Combat Evolved (2001). Unlike the cutesy Whispy Woods, the Flood will be sure to scare you spineless.

In most video games, plants serve as static background material. For any game designer, plants signify place.

BUT—Every once in a while, you find a plant creature that is designed to be an aggressor. Perhaps the most famous plant monster in video game history is Petey Piranha, whose most famous feat is eating our favorite Italian plumber, Mario.

Two classic examples of anthropomorphic plants—plants with human-like features—are the Cactuar in Final Fantasy VI (1994) and Whispy Woods from Kirby’s Dreamland 3 (1997). While the Cactuar has a face and human-like legs to run, Whipsy Woods is simply a tree with a face who can lift himself up to chase Kirby or blow strong winds at the tiny pink protagonist.

Kirby’s Dreamland 3 (1997)

Even when looking at more modern games, like Plants vs. Zombies, you notice that we transform plants into monsters by giving them flesh-eating mouths, eyes, and pre-set goals. While these plant creatures are iconic, plants still are not seen as a significant threat. In fact, Whispy Woods is the first—and easiest—boss you fight in the Kirby game. From a design and gameplay standpoint, plants simply are just not threatening.

In light of the fact that games have cast off plants as environmental design or cute threats, Halo’s treatment of a plant-like threat becomes significant because the franchise does not anthropomorphize the Flood.

Rather, the Flood are microscopic organisms that become visible when they commandeer the human body. Suddenly, it is not the human-like rendering of plants that give them life or signify their existence. They demonstrate a kind of consciousness that is outside of human intervention. In Halo, the plants are, themselves, alive. They are their own beings without the human makeup or gimmicks.

When looking at the spectrum of host bodies, the Flood hosts all have a commonality: They all have characteristics of plant life. Most prominent are their root-like tendrils that can act as a trigger finger or slashing claws.

The roots even act as legs for the spores. While the name “spore” already points to the likeness of mushrooms and fungi, the root systems under the spore bulb solidify the plant-like nature of the parasite. Even more mushroom-like are the incubators, which explode and spout spores into the air if you get too close to one.

Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)

When playing, the root-like nature of the newly mutated hosts does not seem out of place. After Master Chief travels through a wooded swamp, he is rewarded with his introduction to the Flood. The flawless transition between dark, wooded swamp to root-like monsters is only separated by a single thematic sequence. It is difficult to separate the eerie swamp from the swamp-creatures in the building.

Yet the root-like mutation is not entirely what makes the Flood monstrous. The body horror of the root-like mutation makes the Flood monstrous enough, but the psychological horror of their unknown intelligence, which can only be known at the point of bodily intrusion or alternation, makes them truly terrifying. Their intelligence is not notable until they begin to move a body that is not theirs, and this unknown capability of alteration discomforts us.    

While Halo’s recasting of plant life is innovative, it does not fully commit to the idea of plants as threats. Instead, the franchise merges plant-like features with parasitism.

Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)

Instead of presenting plants as being without any seeming consciousness, pairing them with a parasite offers plants perceived sentience. They have the power to manipulate objects, and more importantly, they have the power to enact their will upon bodies to change and manipulate them. If the fear of the Flood altering Master Chief’s physical body is not enough to scare you, then the thought of a tiny spore taking over his consciousness surely will.

While it may seem strange to combine plant-life to fears of parasitism, the recognition of plants altering the body is not novel to Halo. In fact, such fear appears all the way back in Anglo-Saxon writing from the Middle Ages.

Particularly, psychotropic drugs were sometimes illustrated by combining elements of the plant with elements of the human body. In some manuscripts, the head of a man was often replaced by the top of a plant. The hands and feet were drawn with roots shooting from human wrists and ankles. The body was colored in a way to look plant-like. 

The mandrake, one such psychotropic, was often illustrated in this way. One well-known drawing of a mandrake, found in the Cotton Manuscript Vitellius C III, looks eerily similar to the plants, spores, and roots jutting out of the host bodies mutated by the Flood.  

From British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius C III, f. 57v

The legends that Anglo-Saxons write about in terms of psychotropics are not dissimilar to anxieties that the Flood evoke in the player, either. Many plants, like the mandrake, were deemed as magical by Anglo-Saxons. In some instances, they were categorized as “witch plants.” Not surprisingly, mushrooms were also deemed “witch plants,” because no “common” plant could spring up overnight after a heavy rain.

Anglo-Saxons were concerned about the effects of plants altering the mind, but Halo seems to take the Anglo-Saxon ideas a few steps further by making the plants actively seek out the human body. In this progression, the Flood give plant life a kind of intelligence that humans are more apt to acknowledge.

Plants are often deemed as non-threatening because we cannot measure their intelligence, nor do they show ill-intent. In their static nature we are able to dominate them. We can suppress them. We can manipulate them. We are in control of them. In many ways, we render plants lifeless, powerless, and meaningless. In doing so, we feel a sense of security.

By banking upon this sense of safety, the Flood become monstrous through their ability to undermine our security by seizing ultimate control—that of our own minds and bodies.

Without consciousness and without power to control the body, the Flood renders all intelligent creatures just simple biomatter. Their monstrosity lies in their ability to render us powerless and meaningless.