Cordyceps Fungus
A mutated pathogen that rewrote human history by turning victims into relentless predators.
The Cordyceps brain infection is a mutated strain of fungus that serves as the central antagonist of this post-apocalyptic world. The video game series The Last of Us (2013–2021) and its television adaptation proceeds from the premise that a new species of Cordyceps manages to jump the species barrier to infect humans, resulting in a zombie apocalypse. Reflecting real Cordyceps biology, the fictional fungi's human hosts initially become violent before turning into blind zombies with fungal growths emerging from their heads, then seek out a dark place in which to die and release the fungal spores, enabling the parasite to complete its life cycle.
Reader's Guide
The catastrophe began when a new species of Cordyceps managed to jump the species barrier to infect humans, resulting in a zombie apocalypse. Reflecting real Cordyceps biology, the fictional fungi's human hosts initially become violent before turning into blind zombies with fungal growths emerging from their heads. Scientific American notes that some species in the genus "are indeed body snatchers–they have been making real zombies for millions of years," though of ants or tarantulas, not of humans. In the 2014 postapocalyptic novel The Girl with All the Gifts and its 2016 film adaptation, the human-infecting fungus is a mutated form of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (a group of species now split off from Cordyceps) which alters the behaviour of infected insects.
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Elsewhere in The Last of Us
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