IMPORTANT MOMENTS IN HORROR VIDEO GAMES : RESIDENT EVIL 2, WILLIAM BIRKIN

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I  know, I know: we've been here before, right? Yes, we most certainly have: the Resident Evil franchise, despite its slightly hokey, B-movie stylings, is still a principle source of some of the most iconic distressing and disturbing moments in video game history, largely due to the time and climate in which the first few games originally occurred:
 
Like most of us that recall them fondly, video gaming itself was passing through a kind of adolescence, the transition from 16-bit, side-scrolling or top-down two dimensions to 32-bit and three dimensions often painful, ugly, far from perfect, but also wildly inspiring, inventive and allowing access to experiences we had never imagined.
 
As noted in previous entries, Resident Evil 2 is largely regarded as the most succesful in the franchise, certainly of the early titles, taking the basic formula of the original and expanding upon it enormously, flourishing the George A. Romero influences with a touch of John Carpenter, a pinch of David Cronenberg, more than a smattering of H.R. Giger, resulting in a much-expanded experience not only in terms of environment but also its horror.
 
For my money, one of the most iconic monstrosities ever created for the Resident Evil franchise, certainly my favourite in terms of design and sheer presence, is the constantly mutating, Lovecraftian body-horror abomination that is William Birkin.
 
In Resident Evil 2, William Birkin is one of the scientists responsible for the creation of the T-Virus pathogen which wreaked such calamity in the original game. Through a variety of logs, flashbacks and conversations, the game reveals that, not only was he responsible for that particular strain, but also a much-enhanced version known as the G-Virus.
 
Throughout the mid-to-late game, the player is hunted and harassed by a creature that roars and cries out as though in pain, that, when encountered, swells and mutates before the player's eyes. Initially, the creature appears to be a particularly tumorous form of zombie. However, that impression is soon put paid to as its original, human head becomes subsumed into its left shoulder, its right arm swelling beyond any natural proportions, sprouting bony, scythe-like talons and an immense, tertiary eye in the shoulder.
 

​This is what William Birkin has become: host and victim to his own creation, which, we learn, he injected himself with at the point of death to save his research from the villainous Umbrella Corporation.
 
Reduced to an undead bio-weapon of incredible strength, he hunts the player throughout the game, each encounter becoming more and more abominable as the G-Virus transforms and adapts him.
 
In one of the earliest encounters with the monster, it becomes apparent that Birkin has abilities far beyond any common or garden zombie: when we find the corrupt police chief of Raccoon City (whom, we learn, is on Umbrella's pay roll), he's already half dead, having become host to a parasitic worm that Birkin is capable of spawning and injecting into unwilling hosts. The result is an abortive, barely formed monstrosity that bursts out of the chief's body, tearing him apart, which then becomes an early boss-encounter.
 
This capacity is why Birkin is chasing the player: it's not us that he's after, but rather his daughter Sherry, who is biologically compatible with the parasites and may therefore spawn another, far more aggressive and adaptable species of bio-weapon.
 
This bizarre, incestuous urge renders the monster not only tragic but highly disturbing: Birkin has effectively -and unwittingly- made himself the ultimate biological weapon: a creature that endlessly evolves and adapts, that requires incineration of its every cell before it can be destroyed, capable of replicating wildly in any environment where there are potential hosts, spawning swarms of abominations.
 
The encounters with the creature in game are all effectively terrifying, from the first time we hear the creature bellowing, calling for its daughter, to the moment we encounter the once-man and realise that this is far, far more than a mere victim of the T-Virus. The fact that the creature hunts the player throughout the game leaves us to wonder where and when he'll pop up next, and what hideous tranformations he'll have suffered in the interim.
 
In latter encounters, the creature loses any and all semblance to the man it once was, save for a distorted, smeared semblance of Birkin's original face subsumed into its left-hand breast, what remains a many-limbed, bone-barbed, muscular monstrosity capable of taking apart an armoured carriage in its fury.
 
In most versions of the game, Birkin is the final encounter: his body finally surrendering to the influence of the G-Virus, resulting in something that is almost beyond description: an explosion of insane anatomy, immense talons, a maw that is little more than a mass of teeth, the creature acting like some wild and rabid beast until the player brings the heavy arms they have accumulated to bear and puts it down.
 
What makes Birkin so especial is not only the constantly changing nature of his design, all iterations of which are singularly, brilliantly distressing, but the humanity in the monster: the fact that this entity wasn't merely a man at one time, but a brilliant and inspired bio-chemist, reduced to near-mindless, instinctive abomination by his own genius. Not only that, but a doting and loving Father, whose dedication to his daughter becomes obscenely twisted within the monster he makes from himself, degenerating into an animal, incestuous need to procreate.
 
But even this isn't the end.
 
Should the player complete all scenarios within the game (A and B respectively for each character), they gain access to the true ending, which occurs AFTER the closing cinematic of the basic scenarios: 

​Escaping from the gigantic bio-weapons lab beneath Raccoon City on an automated train, protagonists Leon Kennedy and Clare Redfield find that Birkin is far from dead, having somehow snuck aboard the train in search of Sherry, his state now so degenerated that he resembles nothing less than the bubbling, amorphous mass of H.P. Lovecraft's Shoggoth, a creature without clear form or definition, that blisters endlessly with mismatched eyes, gaping, wound-like mouths and flailing tendrils.
 
The encounter is one of incredible tension, as the player is forced to back down the train as Birkin drags his mass from carriage to carriage, flailing out with bone-barbed tendrils to anchor himself. Should the player not defeat him in time, then they are pressed back against the far wall of the engine by his immensity and devoured whole.
 
Should they rain enough damage on the creature, however, it finally cannot sustain its mutating form and dissolves into a puddle of bubbling protoplasm, allowing Leon and Clare to finally escape the horrors of Raccoon City with Sherry in tow.
 
For my money, William Birkin was and remains one of the Resident Evil franchise's seminal monsters, a creature with tragically human origins, driven by a twisted form of parental connection, mindless yet just human enough to realise its own atrocity.
 
The fact that he'll be playing a central role in the up-and-coming sequel fills me with the most cruel and morbid glee.