
Venom Superman
Steve Ludwin has been injecting himself with snake venom for two decades, and this VICE profile watches him do it: milking rattlesnakes, monocled cobras, and tree vipers, then loading the extract into a syringe. The math on his hobby is blunt, a tree viper's hemotoxins can kill a person in under thirty minutes, a cobra's neurotoxins in half that, and Ludwin has been running fatal-strength doses through his own bloodstream since the late 1980s. His method traces back to Bill Haast, the herpetologist who claimed decades of venom exposure built him immunity and who died at 100, and Ludwin argues the same repeated exposure has made him not just resistant but sharper, stronger, and more resilient for days after each injection. The film does not pretend to referee the science; it sits with a man performing an experiment on himself in his own kitchen, and lets his claims about immortality and performance stand next to the raw toxicology of what he is putting in the needle.