Good Fathers in Horror Stories

NB - THERE ARE SOME SPOILERS IN THIS ENTRY. If you want to read Parasite Eve or play the video game Silent Hill and don't want to know the storylines, read no further!!!

Reading Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena, and surprised to find that among many subtexts, I found one concerning good fathers. Good fathers of mysterious daughters, in particular. One father in the book is a single man trying to bring up a teenage daughter who is in need of a kidney transplant. This father feels he has failed his daughter because her body rejected the kidney he donated to try and save her. The daughter, Mariko, feels a premonition of evil when she discovers that a suitable donor has been found. Her father is frightened and confused by this, but doesn't know what to do to comfort Mariko.

Another father in the story is the unwilling sperm donor to the eponymous Parasite Eve. His name is Toshiaki. Eve rapes him for the sole purpose of obtaining a sperm sample, because she still carries the memories, though twisted and self-centered ones, of Toshiaki's dead wife who loved him. Eve was sleeping inside the body of Toshiaki's wife, a conciousness controlled by ESP-lke communications within her mitochondria, and now she wants to create a perfect and demonically powerful daughter with the aid of Toshiaki's sperm.

Toshiaki took a cell culture from his wife's liver so that she could, in a sense, live forever. The goulish act was inspired by the mitochondria in Toshiaki's brain cells, also controlled by Eve. In fact, Eve (yes of the very real Mitochondrial Eve) has controlled all of our mitochondria ever since they first entered our cells and created eukaryotic life.

In real life, all plant and animal cells contain modular organelles including the once-autonomous mitochondria. The theory (called the Endosymbiont Theory) is that mitochondria were once bacteria-like prokaryotes that were eventually incorporated into our cellular progenitors. All mitochondria in plants and animals are derived matrilineally, from our mothers' ova. We all contain highly a similar genetic code within these mitochondria, and Mitochondrial Eve is the theoretical human ancestor female to whom we owe that genetic signature.

Parasite Eve in the book is a hypothetical collective conciousness connecting the mitochondria in our cells within our bodies and even between individuals.

Back to fathers: Toshiaki becomes the unwitting father of a daughter with incredible destructive capabilities and a drive to obliterate eukaryotic life so she can free the mitochondria she controls from ``cellular slavery''. He defeats this Eve Daughter's intentions with an expression of fatherly love. As it turns out (and I didn't quite get this part) because Toshiaki's sperm did not unite with Eve's egg in the usual way, some of his mitochondria, over which he has some control, are now a part of his Eve Daughter. This makes her unstable, and she shifts constantly and painfully between male and female, perfectly formed and formless...and Toshiaki in the end tells her that he understands how conflicted she is.
``Share your pain with me...I am your father...I understand''. When she runs to him for comfort, he fuses with her, causing her cells to self-destruct and killing himself in the process.

Another horror story, this time in the form of a PC game that I am too chicken to play, concerns good fathers of daughters that they try to understand and protect through impossible circumstances. In the Silent Hill game series, Harry Mason is the adoptive father of Cheryl, a baby that he and his wife found abandoned in a graveyard. Years later, after the death of Harry's wife, Cheryl disappears into the mysterious and monster-ridden town of Silent Hill. Harry soon learns that his daughter is not at all who she seemed to be, and that she may even have something to do with the horrors that have swallowed the town and turned its residents into monsters. Driven by a love for his daughter that overcomes his fear, he pursues Cheryl in an attempt to save her (quite literally) from herself.

The only thing that I dislike about all this is that these good fathers all have to get embroiled in such terrifying circumstances! I want to find good fathers in books I can share with my own father, and horror is really not his thing. If you can think of a good book with a good father - Les Miserables for example...there's one, please share it in the comments below!

Dad, if you're reading this, I love you!