Strange, Weird & Bizarre Medical Cases & Facts

We love horror movies.  Well, you might not, but I do.  For funsies, I decided to look into each of my favorite movie monsters and characters and find out what is actually medically wrong with them.  Keep in mind, this is pure speculation, and almost solely for my own benefit.  What?  Um.  No.  I mean, it’s totally for your benefit, because you’re the reader, and what you think matters.  So…you think this is fun, too.  Those other blog posts aren’t the blog posts you’re looking for…

Norman Bates

Ah, good old Norman.  He was a shy, mild-mannered boy who loved his mother more than anything.  Then his mother found a honey, and Norman decided that wasn’t OK.  He had some sort of psychotic break and killed his mother and her boyfriend, and then he was so overcome with guilt and craziness that his personality cleaved.  One part of Norman was left, but the rest of his widdle brain was overtaken by his dead mother.  Not in a possession kind of way, but more in a split-personality, totally nutso way.

The Diagnosis

Norman Bates suffered from split personality disorder, brought on by his too-close connection to his mother, and then  his guilt involving the brutal murder of said mother.  Who knows?  He might have had a little post-traumatic stress disorder as well.

Freddy Krueger

Freddy Krueger, he who terrorizes dreams, is actually the son of a nun who was shut into an asylum with a bunch of murderers and rapists, and they, ahem, took improper liberties with her, and Freddy was conceived.  So, he was the “bastard son of a hundred maniacs.”  He had an abusive stepfather, was endlessly tormented at school, and had a penchant for killing animals.  A budding psycho, his psychosis took full bloom when he went on a big killing spree, killing his wife and a bunch of kids in the neighborhood.  Later, the parents in the neighborhood burned him up, and his essence gained the ability to enter the dreams of poorly-dressed teenagers and kill them.

The Diagnosis

Well, we can’t really speak for the post-getting-burned-to-a-crisp Freddy, but the live and actively killing in the conscious world Freddy suffered from Psychopathy – a disorder that manifests in amoral conduct while the person seems normal on the outside.  Little Freddy killed the class pet and whipped himself with straps, but outwardly he was normal enough to get married, have a kid, and get a house in the suburbs.  After he died, all the psychosis and murderous rage came out.  Good times.

Michael Myers

If we go by the original film’s story, Michael was a little boy from a totally normal family who murdered his big sister on Halloween night.  He spent the next 15 years in a mental institution, not speaking a word, until he escaped to murder his (unknown to the audience) little sister, who had been adopted by another family.  If we believe Rob Zombie’s remake version of the film, little Mikey’s momma was a stripper, she had a totally skeezy and abusive boyfriend, and his sister was sort of  a skank.  The only person he loved was his little sister.  If that’s the case in the original film, we don’t see any indication of that, seeing he tries his best to kill her and all her friends.  In Zombie’s version, he actually drops the knife in the presence of his baby sister.  Bah.  We trust the original because…

The Diagnosis

Dude is the personification of evil.  Not according to Rob Zombie, but definitely according to John Carpenter, and we trust him more, because he conceived the character to begin with.  I realize there is some faulty logic involved with taking an explanation from a movie that Carpenter himself didn’t bless, but Halloween VI:  The Curse of Michael Myers, tells us that Micheal is a cog in the wheel of a Druid cult.  Apparently he’s the personification of evil, so he has to procreate with his own niece in order to create the perfect child to sacrifice when the constellation of Thorn appears in the sky.  Er.  Whatever.  Dude’s evil.

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In the world of crazy skin ailments, Blaschko’s Lines are certainly interesting.  Discovered by Alfred Blaschko in 1901, this condition is manifested by a V-shaped pattern of lesions over the back, with S-shaped swirls all over the front side of the trunk.  People can have the tendency toward this condition without it ever manifesting, until something like a pigment disorder or another problem manifests and BAM!  Stripey skin.

Funny enough, the condition is common in people who have Chimera.   The lines reportedly follow the “migration of embyronic cells” and can also be found in animals.

To reiterate, the disease is invisible, until the sufferer develops a skin condition that causes the patterns to manifest.  Some of the skin conditions that can make the disease manifest are focal dermal hyperplasia, CHILD syndrome, MIDAS syndrome, sebaceous naevus, McCune-Albright syndrome, Lichen striatus, linear morphoea, and a bunch of other skin disorders you may have never heard of.

Blaschko’s Lines are often talked about in relation to mosaicism, which is a condition similar to and related to chimerism.  In mosaicism, the person or animal has two distinct genetic populations of skin cells that live side by side with one another.  Blaschko’s Lines are the Type 1a and 1b forms of cutaneous mosaicism.  Not all sufferers of cutaneous mosaicism  have Blaschko’s Lines, and not all people who have Blaschko’s lines also have cutaneous mosaicism.

The general thought is that all skin has these stripes, but the conditions we talk about above are the ones who bring the stripes to light.

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A Chimera is a creature from Greek mythology – it had the body of a goat, a snake tail, and the head of a lion.  Obviously, if they had known about DNA in ancient Greece, they would have had a field day explaining how a creature like that could exist.

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