The Splinter Monster Explained | Dangers of invasive species on local fauna | Lore and Physiology

how prepared is the human race for an extinction level event well we'd like to think that we could overcome most things that would threaten our survival of our species but really the reality of the situation is we can barely handle the naturally occurring diseases on our planet when an outbreak does happen everything is all panic really we break down to our most basic instincts however that said there is still cooperation at least concerning small groups of people when faced with a scenario like this due to human socialization in the movie splinter both these ideas would come together on a group of four showing just how underprepared a human actually is for something that we don't understand deep within the backwoods of oklahoma a creature likely originating from outside of earth's biosphere touched on and immediately began infecting animals within the woods the creature however didn't think it didn't really plot it was just better adapted at taking over our meat suits and influencing earth's squishy fauna than those bodies were at controlling the infection so in today's episode we will discuss what this creature is what exactly it does to the body of an animal it infects as well as its main mode of transference so as per usual which per usual i say every time there'll be a time stamp up on screen jump to that point if you want to skip the summary of the movie if you've actually seen it already or you just don't want it spoiled the movie was actually pretty good for like a low budget flick so in case you haven't seen it and would want to go do that i would actually recommend it you know though i'm no film critic i'm just a dude with a youtube channel anyhow head there and we'll meet back up otherwise let's drop into this movie opens on a gas station where our boy here is about to get a bad case of splinters as he sits he hears a noise from behind and heads out to find out what it was seeing an animal he attempts to shoot away but then is attacked instead assuming it to be rabid it begins to tear into him infecting him quickly with this mystery disease we see his body begin to contort and twist and then we immediately cut to a couple camping on their anniversary they agree to head out in the woods and do some camping together the one appears much more adept at dealing with the environment and the guy is just a biology nerd i mean honestly who chooses a biology degree anyways after showing how good he is at breaking tents they decide that they will have to stay at a hotel as they can't sleep outside they load back up and head towards the road while driving a woman exits the woods and then flags them down for help they pass her but then decide that they should probably figure out what she needs while discussing in the car what to do a man approaches the car and then asks them to roll down the window they don't immediately do it so he brandishes a handheld which they oblige to follow the lead on this one alright so like here's my favorite part it's the uh old adage of smart people have no common sense but dumb people survive purely off of common sense sometimes seth is given orders multiple times to do things that he just doesn't know how to do being told to drive he can't drive stick told not to make a move he tries to grab an axe i mean i get it don't get me wrong but i'm relating like ridiculously hardcore to seth it's kind of disturbing and i will continue to relate as the movie goes along with seth unable to drive stick it's up to polly to drive her car while cruising down the road with the convict known as dennis and his drug addict girlfriend lacey it's pretty clear that lacy is starting to suffer some heavy withdrawal from whatever she's been taking and has been hooked on while moving along they end up running over an animal this blows out their tire in the process dennis orders seth to change the tire but again he doesn't know how to to which dennis remarks that he suffers from a severe case of cds can't do crap vindication as i do in fact know how to change a tire i've done it many times in my life anyhow lacey believes it to be ginger which i guess appears to have been her puppy and her and seth walk over and look at it running over this animal has caused them to get a flat tire so paulie did us change the tire where dennis is then stuck in the finger at what appears to be a black splinter thinking nothing of it they continue to work on changing that tire while checking the animal out lacey freaks out telling seth to save it because he's a doctor to which he expertly surmises yeah that thing's not living as soon as he does however the body begins to rise somewhat a little shocked at this they stand there as the creature lunges at them but its body is so severely broken by the hit it misses lacey takes off in her withdrawal scrambled brains screaming dennis freaks out thinking seth tried something and then they all get back in the car and take off leaving the tire with the splinters and the creature still behind the animal didn't just blow out the tire though it also sliced straight through the radiator with collet completely depleted in the engine it begins to overheat forcing them to stop at a gas station only a few miles down the road dennis asked seth if he actually knows how to pump gas or not while he and polly head inside lacey takes off to use the bathroom for other purposes than probably actually just using the bathroom while seth pumps gas as lacey tries to enter the bathroom the door appears to be wedged shut inside paulie dennis cannot find the person running the gas station so dennis decides to start stealing food eventually lacey gets the door open and reveals the attendant who had been infected earlier he pleased for her to basically end him before getting up and attacking her she runs away with the attendant on her heels dennis comes out and fires a shot at the attendant but it does nothing and the attendant ends up attacking lacy who then falls to the ground after hitting her head and she pretty much met her in there and then turns to attack seth it misses seth and then hits the car dennis paulie and seth all run inside and then lock the door dennis has a freak out seeing lacy laying on the ground outside to which they come up with a plan dennis and polly will watch the monitors to see if the creature on the car moves or not and warn dennis if it does while he checks on lacy dennis makes his way outside and then begins to see lacey's arm move assuming she's still alive he tells her to stay still while he drags her inside in the process of dragging her he is attacked and has to move back inside barely being let in by the couple as he enters he turns to see lacey is back up and attacking the glass they shut the door on her arm in the process which causes her hand to be severed the hand gets up thing style and begins i guess you caught looking around dennis drops a bag of charcoal on it and completely breaks it after determining the pieces have the capability to attack on their own after picking up the bag seth then inspects it and notices something new nothing like this exists on earth the hand was being metabolized actively to which a black goo was the metabolic waste or at least that's what they think it is because usually uh preliminary ideas can be wrong while determining what the crap is happening a sheriff arrives and attempts to arrest dennis the trio yell at her to get back in her car and call it in as something is out there believing the couple to actually just be suffering from a severe form of stockholm syndrome she assures them that they are okay and denise will be arrested and he won't try to do anything now after attempting to call in but being too far out in the woods to get a signal she ends up seeing something jump across the roof too quick to spot it eventually jumps down on her and uses its spikes to cut into her midsection upon doing so the weight of her legs and the severing of her spine as well as most of the tissue causes her to bisect and then be pulled up to the roof while up there the creature joins her flesh to its via the spikes to become an even larger beast the trio then devises a plan to get help now it's time for the big brainy brain guy to have an idea so paulie and dennis decide that a forest fire is the best way to get help even though they are literally sitting on thousands of gallons of fuel seth convinces them that's not the way to go as they continue to dump lighter fluid out the door and instead he tries to get the sheriff's radio that has been left on the ground and attached to her lower half upon doing so the creature attacks once more and then shoves its arm through a small opening in the window to which it becomes dismembered the arm then begins hunting all of them inside the store attempting to infect everyone dennis opens the door to the fridge and they hide from the arm as it moves away and breaks off its attack while in the fridge dennis's arm begins to hurt earlier he had one finger break as a result but now the whole arm is beginning to turn bad in an evil dead farewell to arms moment they decide to amputate the turning limb and save him from completely changing okay so this part made me cringe like horribly bad so they start to cut into the bicep and then cut around the bone ah have you ever been pinched on your inner arm before really hurts then the bone just the bone break with oh god anyways good lord i can feel it after taking off the arm they presumably dispose of it so that it can't get up and then attack if they weren't careful after seth continues to inspect the creatures in terms that due to the infection pattern and how it spreads then it must actually be a fungus or mold taking control of corpses as well as the living as it does it consumes the blood of the person because it attacks animals he figures out that it must be hunting by some form of temperature sensing which is why at the beginning of all this the creature attacked the overheating car rather than seth as it was the hottest thing around they still need to call for help so a plan is hatched considering it's 93 degrees outside seth says to lower his body temperature to ambient levels so he can actually walk outside and call for help in the squad car which is actually a pretty ingenious plan as long as you don't pass out they lower his body temperature successfully and he begins to walk outside in relative safety however as he walks his core temperature begins to slowly rise as he is walking paulie dennis attempt to distract the creature with fireworks it works momentarily but eventually it breaks off with seth's body's temperature rising he is stuck in the car while the thing is outside trying to get in eventually it leaves as it is able to enter the store dennis and paulie hide once more in the freezer to avoid detection when the creature left the car seth was able to grab the boomstick and then head into the building he ends up helping dennis and paulie escape as the lighter fluid trail was set ablaze by fireworks dennis decides that he's done running at this point he offers to keep the creature contained while polly and seth make a run for it due to him being heavily infected around the neck in the process meaning you're not really going to cut that out as the creature exits the building dennis then shoots a gas pump igniting it and the creature and ending it for good however dennis is still infected dennis gets paulie and set the key to a bank account and tells it to give it to the wife of the man that he shot that he ended up in jail for dennis then blows the propane tanks incinerating himself the station and any of the bodies that were left infected around the building as we see in the end however it's not over many native fauna in the area were infected and we're still laying dormant in the woods waiting for other animals to happen by to spread the infection further so getting a good look at this creature the first thing is it's fairly easy to surmise that it's not from this planet in the immortalized words of seth this is something new and seeing as it's new what can we draw from its infection ability as well as what it does to the body well first thing i would like to cover is what may be its intended prey what do we know about molds well they're usually found in dark damp areas they tend to flourish away from sunlight preferably seeing as this material was found in the woods this would at least be somewhat palatable for the mold growth but i would imagine it's completely possible it prefers to exist underground or within caves but what may be found in those caves or underground that's right potentially armored animals looking throughout earth's history there have been many examples of armored creatures and still are but considering what the splinter is able to do to a pressurized tire or more importantly to a radiator which is metal nothing on earth would have enough armor to resist this thing likely the animal that would be infected by this creature would have to be something that dwells under the ground and is armored with much more thick lading perhaps likely consuming either metallic substances or rocky material to give you the best idea this would likely be sort of like the rock worms from gears of war 2. why do i believe this to be the case well really life is nothing but adaptations and reactions when you get down to it because of this it's not hard to imagine seeing that this mold would likely have to overcome some pretty blunt and stout armor in order to infect whatever creature it intends to digest with that said infecting isn't enough if the creature falls too quickly which may suggest the low dosage rate being a slower infection a much slower infection actually and even with the infection completely taking over the body it is still able to move creatures so with this just quick likely summary of the mold it would clearly hail from another planet the fauna there may be much more heavily armored than anything located on earth and when the armor is pierced by the mold the infection proceeds as normal although there may be actually some adaptations making this creature not completely infected but who can really know that then something happened likely a meteor or asteroid impact that shot out a chunk of rock from the surface containing this mold into space where we find it in the oklahoma forest after impact after landing in oklahoma we see though the absolute power of invasive species sometimes with invasive species in their native environment they are pretty low on the totem pole things around them have adapted to their presence and then they to them when entering a new area however these adaptations make them more greatly adept at annihilating the local populace of creatures take fire ants for instance they are an invasive species and have a propensity towards wiping out giant populations of insects in the u.s as a result they even pretty much war with the black ants that have been here forever on a daily basis to which the black ants have actually had to adapt to deal with them or even the lionfish in the caribbean compared to the local fish they out eat and out hunt them leading to a possible extinction level event for some species in the water or even something that's closer to home for me uh pythons and the everglades they have been known to not just destroy bird populations but also eat other alligators down there and it's really becoming an issue but the last example is a pretty important one alligators are pretty strong as we all know in the everglades and they used to be top dog but now another apex predator around is causing issues to the balance of this ecosystem this is essentially the mold and the humans because even though we are more mobile than the mold the mold has a way to make itself mobile that humans cannot overcome except through fire so let's take a look at what happens to the body as the mold begins to take hold it's pretty clear that the mold's control over the meat suit is absolutely an evolutionary trait again as mentioned earlier in the hypothetical scenario where it comes from when a creature becomes infected it may either a take a while to spread because the creature is adapted i mean it can even be imagined that they could lose a section of their body sort of like how lizards lose tails or b it progresses the same way as on our planet either way with this section of the body or whole body it would likely be prudent to spread outwards sort of like how seeds spread away from the parent plant so the mold controls the functioning of the body to move itself out of the area towards new hunting areas or it progresses slow enough that the host moves to new areas which is exactly what we see with the gas station attendant and with dennis when the gas station attendant is infected we are not shown the dosage we aren't really shown anything about the attack all we know is that the other animal was infected and judging by the aggressive nature shown by the attendant later we can only assume that the animal gave him a large dosage of the mold regardless of the dosage the ending is an absolute assurance when lacy goes to open the door he is laying on the ground with many spikes exiting his face arms body basically everywhere what i find interesting however is that he's still alive despite this heavy infection he tells her to end him except i can't say what he actually says because then i'll get spotted by the overlords but this implies that his brain is still functional he then gets up and proceeds to attack we see later with dennis as his infection progresses it starts with pain in his ligaments and fingers specifically the affection is small as he was just pricked in the finger a few hours ago but as seth discovers later the creature is actually eating his blood and the mold continues to grow within his hand as a result after breaking several of his fingers eventually it begins to take hold of the muscle within the forearm itself and it is determined that the arm has to be cut off to stop it from progressing as far as the gas station attendant did and this is only after it starts snapping bones in his arm so clearly this thing would have a localized influence over the neural tissue at the beginning but i believe it progresses past that point eventually so you know what this almost reminds me of if you really look at this stuff a ferrofluid we see when the hand is broken by the charcoal bag that it leaks this fluid that appears almost like waves like it's being influenced by something unseen but we also see that the splinters are very much so solid and this would lead me to believe that this mold may actually have extreme magnetic properties and as a result how it influences your nerves is by the same magnetism so the generalized thought is that a magnetic field really doesn't affect humans too much after all we live in one and we can go get a powerful magnet right now and put it up to your arm and nothing happens right well this is true but if the magnetic field does get strong enough it can actually begin to affect the ion balance within nerves themselves when this does happen this can cause the nerves to fire more aggressively or not at all and everything in between magnetism absolutely can affect the nerves if it's at a high enough level which this may explain why this creature goes after the blood of animals on earth it seems likely to me that animals or material it originally grew on likely had an element that could be magnetized quite easily as found in ferrofluid and as a result it chose to attach and grow on this stuff and this would be used for nutrients and the magnetism could just be an off product and of course it's iron iron is one of those elements that is massively important and luckily for earth or really us i guess it's also relatively abundant but also abundant in animals our blood contains iron and seeing as this mold is drawn to that iron it would make sense for it to feast on that specifically within an animal with a mold going after the blood rather than just the tissue of a person it would also make complete sense as to why the gas station attendant was still alive after his grievous infection it's not really consuming him it's just consuming his blood but as it spreads the magnetic properties would cause him to lose control of his body as he literally loses control of his neurons again the same thing with dennis's arms snapping like a chicken wing with parts of the body already deceased however we see that with lacy her arm quickly begins to be taken over and twitch and even when sever the hand is able to get up and move so surely the neurons would probably be destroyed when they're deprived of blood and i do believe this happens eventually especially considering at the end of the movie we see basically stationary animals they're no longer moving but have you ever seen that video where somebody puts uh basically salt on the muscle of a fish and it begins to move again even though it's been hours since they've become just a piece of meat with the ionic level changes the body can still move which is likely what the mold is doing to the hand meat and body meat of others my last point towards magnetism being the culprit and the feral fluid thinking is what happens to the sheriff after she is bisected it's easy to think oh well alien mold combine to make big alien mold but i don't think so the way the splinters actually reach out to one another after part of her body is already infected it looks completely like a magnetic embrace rather than just some thinking creature to me this may also be how it moves using these splinters it can move a limb and even has enough power to snap bone if it turns a certain way so now let's discuss hunting as we know the mold is alive and not just an amalgamation of magnetism and feral fluid as a result it naturally has a desire to grow thrive and survive it is said that in the movie it hunts by body heat or at least senses body heat this would mean that animals of the planet that it's native to are organisms that contain heat and i'm about to have a vsauce moment but does it really mean that considering this stuff would likely be underground and how the material is not able to determine the difference between body heat and say the heat of an overheated car what is it really sensing so it consumes presumably iron it's looking for heat and it's underground what does that say to you well it should be telling you that likely this creature is looking for iron reserves underneath the ground or animals that consume those iron reserves and produce heat the clues are all there as to what its food source is you just have to separate them out so what do i think is going on the animals of earth are just sort of an unfortunate media to be used the mold likely desires to consume iron which is why it goes for blood it looks for heat because the deeper underground you get that's where iron is found and it's also way warmer and there may be differences in heat in certain areas indicating what is edible and what is not when it hit earth animals nearby mimic the heat it looks for and upon attaching itself it did find iron which it consumes to continue the infection too much heat does destroy it though which means it's looking for a specific range and through this interaction with the bodies of animals is able to influence the nervous tissue gradient and move limbs but even after they are severed

Channel: Roanoke Gaming

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Keywords: Splinter movie monster, Splinter movie, Splinter movie arm, Splinter movie spikes, Splinter movie ending, Roanoke Gaming, Splinter alien, Splinter Movie explained, Splinter movie 2008, Splinter dog movie, Splinter alien humans, Splinter movie sherrif, splinter movie ending explained, Splinter movie gas station, Splinter movie Arm running, Splinter movie clips, Biology of Splinter movie

Id: zyY_xr02mUQ

Length: 19min 1sec (1141 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020