Demon in the Freezer, a Documart pitch planned as a commercial one-hour with a budget of $350,000 from Dugald Maudsley’s Toronto-based company Infield Fly Productions and Atlantic Television in the U.S., has its origins in another project.

‘The idea came out of the first film we made for Discovery Channel called Breaking the Code, about the race to decode the human genome,’ says producer Maudsley. ‘What we learned in that was the bright side of what genetics can do. What we decided to do [in Demon in the Freezer] was focus on the other side of genetics, because it is a double-edged sword. We want to look at the dark side of technololgy. Science has evolved so much, science can now use the same technology to turn the flu into a killer.’

Rural Australians suffering from a plague of rabbits and mice enlisted the help of scientists to use the new technology of genomics to offer some respite.

‘It came to the point where scientists used genomics to in essence see whether they could sterilize a mouse. They were going to use a virus, which is a delivery vehicle, and a gene that they hoped to deliver into the mouse’s body. What happened is a combination of the virus and the gene caused the gene to mutate madly and within two days the mouse was dead,’ Maudsley explains.

‘They realized they had created a killer virus out of mousepox. Mousepox would not normally kill a mouse, but combined with the gene they had turned mousepox into a killer virus. What scared them was that mousepox is close to smallpox and if we can do this anyone can take genomics and make [viruses] more virulent and nasty.

‘The same goes for other viruses that are benign but offer very good opportunities for being turned into killers. These bio weapons represent a greater threat than nuclear weapons ever did.’

And bio weapons are more accessible than nuclear weapons. With the only ingredients required being a lab, someone with scientific knowledge of the field and access to a stock of a virus like, say, smallpox (eradicated in 1977) against which most people have not been inoculated, a lot of damage could be done.

‘What scared the hell out of everyone is the realization that if [a terrorist group] could get their hands on smallpox, there was a fear that they might soup it up and release it,’ says Maudsley. ‘Smallpox is invisible and odorless and if it were released upwind of a city no one would know there had been an attack. Doctors might recognize the symptoms, but no one’s immune to this anymore.

‘What’s extraordinary about genomics is that once you begin to understand how genes in the body function, you can tell everything – our body functions on messages it gets from its genes.

‘Our story would explore the reality that it’s been done, and that’s frightening as hell.’ *