Analyzing The Wendigo Spirit In Playing Through Until Dawn

Playing through Until Dawn, an interactive horror game, I remembered vividly one scene where Hannah and Beth, sisters of one of the main protagonists of the game, turned into Wendigos after eating human fleshes and ceased their hunting of the protagonists until dawn. It turns out that the Wendigos were not imaginary: they do exist as a culture-bound disorder in the modern medical narrative known as Wendigo psychosis. Derived from legends of the Algonquian native tribes, who lived in the Great Lakes of Canada and America, Wendigo psychosis compromises individuals who intensely craved human flesh and feared that they would turn into cannibals. One of the most famous cases of Wendigo psychosis reported took place in 1879 in Alberta, Canada,

In the Algonquian mythology, the Wendigo is normally associated with winter and famine. It is used to describe both the evil spirit who possessed the human and the creature that humans can become when possessed by the spirit. Through cannibalism, a human can overcome by these spirits and be transformed into one. Johnston (2001), an Ontario scholar, wrote, “The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tautly over its bones…Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decompositions, of death and corruption” (pg. 221). Whereas the Algonquians believe that the desire to eat human flesh is a result of sorcery by the Wendigo spirit, medical observes prove otherwise. According to Podruchny (2004), Wendigo psychosis could be a “mental disorder that is linked to depression, especially during times when the hunt was bad or when animals were being trapped out during the fur trade…or the result of a physiologic disorder and that fatty meat could be a cure” (pg. 683). Hence, a common medical claim to this disorder is that sufferers of Wendigo psychosis are simply starving beyond all capability for rational reasoning. Moreover, due to symptoms of depression, anorexia and hallucinations, Wendigo psychosis could be label as schizophrenia or paranoia. Treatment for Wendigo psychosis would be similar to that of treatment for

Since monstrous individuals were interpreted as deliberate messages and signs of displeasure of the God, it could be that God purposely create Wendigos to punish people who commit sins. Moreover, the account of Wendigo would become more credible in this religious framework because for medieval readers and writers “truth could exist on various levels, both literal and figurative” (Daston & Park, pg. 60). Conversely, because of the widespread of Wendigo psychosis among Algonquians, the Wendigo phenomenon might present itself in a different light, as it resembles the witch hunting in the Middle Ages in which the victims of aggression or abnormality are redefined as aggressors. Just as witches are accused of being possessed by devil, people with Wendigo psychosis could also be framed as being possessed by evil spirit. Since witch hunts served to eradicate a specific class in the churches’ narratives, Wendigo psychosis could also serve as the same effect to remove those who are sinful. As Ehrenreich and English (1970) describes, another psychiatric interpretation of those who were against the church were that they are insane to begin with. If this interpretation was correct, then this would be our first trace of the origin of the medical interpretation of Wendigo psychosis that persists in the world