Recap / Masters of Horror S2E7 "The Screwfly Solution"

Directed by Joe Dante and based on a short story by James Tiptree Jr.. A Michigan family tries to survive while a pandemic of unknown origin takes over the world turning the male population into female-hating psychopaths.

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Tropes:

• Aliens Are Bastards: They never give us a warning, chance, quarter, nothing. They see us as a plague to exterminate, and they manipulate our nature so we do it ourselves and spare them the trouble. It isn't even completely settled if they do it because they find us repulsive or if it is purely utilitarian, they want our planet and we are on the way. They don't have a problem with dogs, at least.
• Alien Invasion: It is revealed in the end that the plague was engineered by glowing aliens as part of a plan to take over Earth without having to fight for it.
• Alliterative Name: The focus family is named Alan, Anne, and Amy Alstein.
• All Men Are Perverts: The plague switches the men's sexual urges to violent ones. The only way for men to resist is by different types of castration (chemical or physical). They start with women they feel more sexually attracted to, and then widen their scope until they also murder the elderly, young, even infants. Once all females are dead they turn their attention to the younger boys, with a man shrugging off the fact that he just murdered his teenage son.
• All Women Are Lustful: The infected men who turn religious believe this.
• Angelic Aliens: The aliens that engineered the plague are glowing beings made of light, with vaguely humanoid figures, but much taller than us. Anne encounters them while fleeing from hunters in the woods. They kill the men by shooting jets of fire from their hands, in a manner similar to a Bible passage quoted by a hunter, and are referred to throughout the segment as "angels". Although they appear to be hostile to humans, it's implied that they decided to wipe us out as punishment for our immoral nature.
• Apathetic Citizens: Perhaps one of the most unsettling effects of the Plague is that even when men don't become noticeably violent against women, they do become apathetic to violence against them. We see men acting nonchalantly after murdering their families, running over women at traffic stops without looking back... and others who look at this and shrug it off, or sympathize with the killers.
• The Bad Guy Wins: The humans fail to find a way to fight back or even properly realize they should do it, leading to the extinction of humanity.
• Brand X: Plenty of examples, like "East Coast Airlines" and "Flazzle Cola" (in a red can, no less). In the shop scenes they make sure to keep the camera zoomed out, though a Budweiser sign comes up in the edge of the shot. They also have nameless "Kidney Beans" cans and an internet search engine with no marker at all.
• Cerebus Call-Back: Early in the episode, the Alsteins see a shooting star and tell Amy to make a wish. At the end, Anne sees a identical shooting star now implied to be part of the alien invasion, like the first one and she says "make a wish" to herself.
• Daddy's Girl: Amy prefers her father Alan over her mother, Anne, and thinks she is overly concerned for her.
• Daydream Surprise: Alan heads home on a flight, arriving at night. He and his wife Anne put their daughter to sleep, then have sex. Alan becomes violent, starts strangling Anne, and pulls a knife on her. Then he wakes up back on the plane.
• Death of a Child: Anne's daughter is killed by her infected husband.
• Dirty Old Man: The first sign that the Plague has arrived in Michigan is a white-haired construction worker cat-calling Anne and Amy.
• Disproportionate Retribution: As the plague expands, men start murdering women in road rage incidents, for access to the bathroom or because they find their screams annoying, until they finally do it just because they exist.
• Does Not Like Men: Early in the episode, Bella semi-seriously argues that most men are mysoginists, Alan being "one of the few exceptions" and "a better feminist" than Anne.
• Downer Ending: The episode ends with Anne, one of the last women on Earth, freezing to death next to a fading campfire while thinking back to her happy memories.
• Dying as Yourself: Alan realizes he's been infected in the midst of groping his teenage daughter and tells Anne to shoot him. Unfortunately, she can't bring herself to finish him off and only shoots him in the legs, allowing him to kill their daughter when she goes back to him.
• Family Theme Naming: The main family all have names beginning with A: Alan, Anne, and Amy.
• Fanservice: Being a married couple, Alan and Anne have sex, with Anne showing more skin as is typical of the series. An early instance of the plague takes the form of men killing a topless stripper in a club.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Firmly on its way by the end. By December all women on the planet are either dead or dying, leaving the men to either kill each other or being finished by the aliens.
• Energy Beings: The aliens look like made of bright light.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Subverted Trope. Bella brings up the trope at a dinner when she discusses how Nature could try to turn the tables on people who destroy damaging insects as a way to clear areas for colonization and exploitation. The Hate Plague is later identified by the main characters as such a concerted attack, and the authorities don't believe them because it is worldwide and would as a result be suicidal for any human group to do it. Everything seems set up for "Earth" being responsible, but then it turns out it is aliens taking over Earth who actually are.
• Gendercide: The result of the plague as the men kill increasing numbers of females.
• Girls vs. Boys Plot: Played for Horror. Men all over the world find themselves slowly succumbing to a Hate Plague that causes them to become violent and murderous toward every woman they find—up to and including their own wives, mothers, and small children. After the initial purges, the episode plays out like a dark version of this type of plot: the women who avoid the first wave of attacks band together and do their best to survive on their own, only to be slowly hunted down by the men, who do gruesome things like mutilate their victims' bodies and turn them into trophies.
• Glamor Failure: Anne, disguised as a man, involuntarily reveals herself at a hunting shop when she can't hide her horror at looking at a bag made out of a woman's breast, and has to flee from the men there.
• Groin Attack: A street preacher attacks a stripper with a broken bottle. Shot by the bouncer but still alive, the man starts stabbing himself in the groin with the bottle.
• Hate Plague: One that eventually affects the entire human male population.
• Human Resources: The above mentioned "breast bag".
• Ignored Expert: Alan and Barney have a meeting in Washington D.C. with members of the government and military. They explain that the ongoing gendercide is a concerted attempt to exterminate the human race, that the women in the infected areas need to be evacuated, and that the men, specially those in important positions, need to take medication that will cause chemical castration to prevent them from turning into murderers. They find this over the top and only agree to evacuate women north, but the plague follows and soon overtakes them.
• Instant Marksman: Just Squeeze Trigger!: Used straight when Anne trains her daughter to fire a gun.
• Irony: The aliens are vaguely feminine looking themselves, with delicate features and prolongations that make them look like they have long hair and walk on stiletto shoes.
• Neck Snap: Used by an infected male flight assistant to "control" a scared woman on a flight.
• Not Himself: Anne's husband after he becomes infected. Defied with Barney, who, though gay, chemically castrated himself to prevent this.
• "Not So Different" Remark: The Hate Plague first catches the media's attention when there is a spike in female executions in Saudi Arabia and Iran for breaching Sharia Law. Amy makes an anti-Muslim slur and asks why they must hate women. Bella shushes her and says that such people also exist in their own country, then points to the reports of a male-only Christian cult protesting the arrests of two men for killing a stripper in Florida as her evidence. Though she doesn't realize it, she's right because both incidents are instances of the Plague. This is explicitly shown by the Sons of Adam painting a "niqab" over a bikini-clad woman in a billboard outside Jacksonville (pictured).
• No Woman's Land: The regions taken by the Hate Plague, which eventually cover the entire globe and become literal examples when the men outright exterminate the women.
• Offing the Offspring: Several men kill their own children including Joe in the prologue, Alan, and the man at the hunting shop.
• Persecution Flip: As referenced by the title and pointed out explicitly, the Hate Plague is caused by an enzyme that alters the men's behavior in order to exterminate the human race (and it only), not unlike how it is done to insects in the sterile insect technique (SIT) of biological pest control.
• Pet the Dog: After the aliens extract brain matter from the men they killed, they are shown playing fetch with the group's dogs.
• Religion of Evil: Some men succumbing to the disease manifest religious mania. In the United States and Canada they form the Sons of Adam, a fundamentalist Christian cult that claims to be dedicated to 'free' the world of females and restore the Garden of Eden as it was before God created Eve.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Bella unwittingly sums the plot when she ponders what would happen if Nature wished to get rid of humans like humans get rid of troublesome insects. Except it is not Nature who does it in the episode, but aliens. She also correctly equalizes the Sons of Adam and Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East, without realizing that both are results of the Plague.
• Sex Sells: A billboard outside Jacksonville uses a full drawing of a bikini-clad woman to advertize alcohol. Her figure is obscured by the Sons of Adam drawing a "niqab" over her.
• Shout-Out: In one scene, a group of test subjects is shown different types of porn to investigate the development of the disease. The most violent porn movie is actually footage from season one's "Imprint", an episode that was censored from broadcast in the US.
• Sinister Minister: A priest in a Canadian hospital kills female patients and newborn babies while preaching the "fundamentally evil" nature of women.
• Spreading Disaster Map Graphic: Barney realizes the spread of the plague when he draws instances of feminicide spikes in the Southern US and realizes that they are in a straight line along Horse Latitudes north, with the additional expected instances in Africa and Asia. From here the plague extends north and south at a regular pace, until the whole planet is covered.
• Sweet Polly Oliver: During the early stages of the pandemic, an increasing number of women go around dressed up as masculinely as possible in order to avoid unwanted male attention and attacks. Anne tries to talk her daughter into doing the same, and later fully disguises herself.
• Too Dumb to Live: Amy is oblivious to the situation from beginning to end, to the point of abandoning her mother in the forest to come back to her already deranged father, who promptly murders her.

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