I know I’ve seen this before, but I can’t pinpoint it. A mysterious force/object/drug causes people to become violent and fight, but not like zombies or mutants or anything, just like adrenaline fighters or something.
I can think of a lot of examples in pop culture- alcohol in that episode of Family Guy :D, the turbo packs in Doom, the aliens arriving in Signs (made people kind of pissy and vulgar),
and some of you will make a joke about pms. So that’s out of the way now.
There was an episode of Star Trek that had Kirk and his guys stuck on a planet with a bunch of Klingons and an energy field that both fed off of inimical emotions and encouraged them through some kind of psychic feedback loop.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a few episodes of this sort of thing. In one, it was an entity that fed off anger and hatred and induced the same in the crew. In another it was a side effect of a condition that Lwaxana Troi was suffering. It was causing her telepathic powers to go haywire and change people’s personalities.
And there was the slime in Ghostbusters 2 that also fed off the hatred of the people- but it didn’t cause hatred in return.
I remember a Buffy the Vamire Slayer book in which an Indian statue demon? caused Buffy and Willow to fight.
A lot of fantasy shows surely had something like this, a spell that causes hatred. It’s a little bit of a vague meme, isn’t it? I know there were others but I can’t pinpoint…
From the Hawk and Fisher books, we have the drugs chacal and super chacal. Chacal creates a state of heightend state of strength/awareness, combined with a sense of invincibility. Super-chacal does the same thing, with angel-dust type berserk rage thrown in. Super-chacal was created as a chemical weapon BTW.
Hate-monger and Psycho-man from Marvel could create violent hatred over city-wide areas.
Empath could induce rage ( and other emotions ), but could be resisted by strong minds like Wolverine :
Wolverine : “OK bub, try your powers on me. Maybe it’ll work, and you’ll have yourself another slave…but if it doesn’t…” < SNICKT ! >
Empath : < faint >
Wolverine : “Just as I thought…no guts.”
Wikipedia doesn’t have a Hawk and Fisher page, fyi. If you ever have spare time…
Anyways, sounds like chacal is something the good guys use, but super-chacal is something to use on the bad guys to make them kill each other?
No, chacal is a nasty destructive drug that shut down the higher functions, and eventually burns out the nervous system. IIRC, it was sold to finance the development of the super-chacal weapon. Battle drugs exist in the Hawk and Fisher books, but chacal isn’t one of them.
There is also the Star Trek: Next Generation episode “Sarek” in season… uh, two or three where Sarek’s telepathic powers, haywire, anger, blah blah, etc.
It causes a few raised hackles between some of the crew and a full-blown bar fight in Ten Forward.
In another episode of Star Trek the crew and inhabitants of a planet had been zapped by the spores of an alien plant that made them all bland and happy – and unproductive. Kirk and Spock broadcast subsonic frequencies across the planet that eventually irritated everyone enough that they got angry, started fighting, and broke the effects of the spores.
Also in Star Trek, there was that planet controlled by Landru, where everyone went around grinning like idiots most of the time. At a certain time, everyone would just go berserk and attack everyone and everything.
Hey, that was just strength. There was no indication that it actually caused him to become aggressive; his psychological desire to save Olive Oil did that.
In 28 Days Later most of the world’s population becomes infected with something that I think they called “the Rage,” or something like that. It made them insanely, mindlessly murderous. Though the movie was marketed as a zombie movie, they were not zombies, they were jsut really, really ready to rumble.
Yeah, but it was a virus and they weren’t even themselves anymore- they were practically animals (just like in zombie movies). I’m talking about stuff that makes you an angry version of yourself, like you wanna stop but can’t.
Umm…would the Incredible Hulk count? I don’t remember; as the Hulk does Bruce Banner retain any aspects of his normal personality?
Arguably Dr Jekyl/Mr Hyde might fit into this category (since they were, after all, the same person, but I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for either.
It depends on what point in the continuity you’re looking at. At various times, he’s been 3rd-grader-on-massive-steroids-Hulk, Hulk-with-Banner’s-brain, Gray-mob-enforcer-Hulk-with-intelligence-but-totally-amoral-personality, Banner-with-Hulk’s-brain, Hulk-as-rational-king-of-the-molecular-size-people, separate-Banner-and-Hulk, etc.
In the novelette “The Screwfly Solution”, one biologically distinct subsection of the population begins violently attacking another such group. To reveal the agent(s) responsible for this behavior would spoil the story, but I believe it falls within the OP’s parameters. The Reference.com entry inludes a link to an online version.