Jack MacReady is a supporting protagonist in Slither.
Biography[]
MacReady was the douchey, foul-mouthed mayor of the town of Wheelsy, South Carolina. One night, however, the town was invaded by parasitic alien organisms, and a local, Grant Grant, was infected by one of these parasites. The infection caused him to slowly transform into a grotesque, tentacled monstrosity, and when the police came to his house to stop him from killing his wife Starla, Grant escaped.
The police thus form a search party to track down Grant, in which MacReady gets involved. During their search, the group chase Grant into a barn, where they discover a local woman called Brenda, whom Grant had infected earlier, and whose body has been inhumanly bloated from the larvae impregnated inside her. The group suddenly realize that Grant lured them to the barn as a trap, but before they can escape, Brenda bursts into a wave of slug-like larva, which infect nearly everyone in the barn (except for Starla, Bill, and MacReady), before the larva leave the barn and make their way towards town.
After the larva has left the barn, the non-infected survivors gather up the unconscious bodies of the officers and drag them outside. Bill, meanwhile, heads off to town to radio for help. Upon the deputies regaining consciousness, Starla discovers that those infected by the larvae become part of a hive mind controlled by Grant (with those infected obtaining Grant's personality in the process), who intends to consume all lifeforms until only his consciousness remains.
Starla then kills the infected Whale when he tries to threaten her, but, having run out of bullets, she flees alongside MacReady into the woods, and is pursued by the infected Deputy Carpenter. Whilst preparing to drive back to the barn, Bill sees Starla and MacReady being chased, and quickly runs Carpenter over, knocking him down, where Starla finishes Carpenter off by stabbing him in the neck with a sign post.
Bill picks up Starla and MacReady in his car, and the three drive away alongside Kylie Strutemyer, a teenager whom Bill had saved earlier. Bill radios his police dispatcher Shelby, asking her to call the CDC for help. Shelby agrees but gets infected before she can do so, and the survivors get into a car accident that knocks them out, with the unconscious Starla and MacReady bein dragged away by the infected folk.
Death[]
MacReady being shot.
MacReady later wakes up in the basement of Grant's house, where he finds himself surrounded by numerous infected folk, whom are bloated from having chowed down on huge amounts of meat as a result of the infection. He quickly goes upstairs and tries to make an escape, only to be attacked by the tentacles of the further mutated Grant. Despite his best efforts to resist the infection, it overcomes him, and he starts consuming a handful of dead corpses in the basement. Later, after Bill and Kylie make their way inside the house, they find the infected MacReady, who begs Bill to put him out of his misery. Bill does so by shooting MacReady in the head.
Trivia[]
- MacReady is played by Gregg Henry, who also played The Voice in The Belko Experiment.
- He is named after both Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China and R.J. MacReady from The Thing (1982).