History Main / MainliningTheMonster

* ''Franchise/BioShock'': The little sisters, creepy shells of the children they once were, are organic factories of ADAM, the substance that powers the gene-manipulating plasmids, drug of choice for the Splicers that inhabit Rapture. Even the player has a choice to harvest them for a bigger payday instead of rescuing them.

* One of the reasons Gargamel goes after TheSmurfs is because they are an ingredient in a formula for the Philosopher's Stone.

* One chapter of ''Manga/SilentMobius'' centers on the drug "Domel," a performance enhancer that has the unfortunate side effect of mutating users into monsters and then melting down when their bodies are no longer able to withstand the changes. It's extracted from a captive Lucifer Hawk, an interdimensional demon.

* In ''PerdidoStreetStation'', the slake-moths are a source for the highly addictive drug called dreamshit, and were being milked of this substance before their escape.
* In ''[[RepairmanJack All The Rage]]'', blood from Scar-lip the rakosh is the sole source of the PsychoSerum Berzerk.
* ''TheSookieStackhouseMysteries'', and [[TrueBlood the TV series based on them]], have vampire blood as a hot commodity. It's essentially treated like a very addictive drug.

* In "Andy Warhol's Dracula", part of KimNewman's ''AnnoDracula'' series, the central character is a drug dealer whose product uses vampire blood as its key ingredient.
* In Creator/AlastairReynolds' ''TerminalWorld'', the world has been divided up into differing areas of technology, where the laws of reality are literally different from one are to the next, limiting how advanced certain items can be in certain areas. For the people of this world, traveling ''between'' these areas involves suffering from the debilitating "Zone Sickness" that, in severe enough cases (or too fast of a transition between different zones) can kill. Fortunately, creatures called Carnivorgs can synthesize a medicine that alleviates the sickness...''un''fortunately, as their name would suggest, the Carnivorgs are vicious carnivorous cyborgs who [[BrainFood harvest the brain matter]] from the people they capture.

* One of the ''StarWarsExpandedUniverse'' novels had a spider monster that produced a spice called glitterstim, which needs to be harvested in complete darkness. The spider uses it to make its webs, while other creatures use it for some kind of mind reading.

* Dwarven settlements in the TabletopGame/ForgottenRealms sometimes keep captive [[MookMaker deepspawn]] as a food source, feeding them livestock so the aberrations will make numerous copies of meat animals. This can easily backfire on the deepspawn-keepers, if one of their captive monsters ever manages to sink its teeth into something more dangerous than cattle.

* On ''Disney/PetesDragon'', Doctor Terminus wants to get his hands on Elliot (the titular dragon) to be made into medicines.

* In ''{{Lexx}}'', Kai was animated by "protoblood", a secretion from the last of the Insects. Re-animated assassins like him were part of how His Divine Shadow maintained his tyrannical grip on power.
* On ''ForeverKnight'', a vampire doctor used injections of her own blood as a "miracle youth-restoring treatment" marketed to aging rich people.

* One ''{{Shadowrun}}'' supplement's shadowtalk includes posts by a sicko who'd kept an Awakened leopard with HealingFactor captive for years, periodically skinning it alive and selling the pelts. The same poster speculated about the possibility of catching a giant regenerating species of shark and selling its meat over and over again.
* The ''WorldOfDarkness'' game series treats vampire blood as a drug.
** Ashwood Abbey from ''HunterTheVigil'' sees monsters as good fun. One of their common reactions to meeting some new supernatural creature is, "Is there any way I can get high off of the internal processes of this being?"
* In the ''{{Ravenloft}}'' setting, vampires from the Kargat secret police dole out their blood to human minions, the Kargatane, as a means of increasing their strength and delaying their rate of aging.
* In ''AgeOfAquarius'', vampire saliva is used to make a LaserGuidedAmnesia inducing drug. No profit on it is made, though, since [[{{MIB}} the Institute]], who owns the technology, is a noncommercial organization, and it needs the drug itself to enforce TheMasquerade.
* Dwarven settlements in the ForgottenRealms sometimes keep captive [[MookMaker deepspawn]] as a food source, feeding them livestock so the aberrations will make numerous copies of meat animals. This can easily backfire on the deepspawn-keepers, if one of their captive monsters ever manages to sink its teeth into something more dangerous than cattle.
* In ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' the Imperium hates aliens and usually deals with them by a lasgun shot to the head. However some aliens have proven themselves useful and so certain Imperial factions have corralled them for their own benefit. One example are the Jokaero, a barely sentient species of orangutan-like aliens who are somehow master engineers and technologists. The Jokaero can be used to upgrade existing equipment or produce unique pieces of technology, such as rings that pack as much firepower as their pistol equivalents.
* Warhammer Fantasy also gets into the act with the Empire. Normally intolerant of monsters as they're seen as expressions of Chaos, they have discovered certain monstrous species like the griffin have stabilized and are fantastic for riding into battle. So the Empire either have them privately housed at a Lord's manor or they're kept in the Imperial Zoo (which even includes a dragon for the really desperate battles).

* In WorldOfWarcraft, the Undercity has an engorged Blight Worm chained up that periodically vomits out some green goop, which is collected and used by the Apothacarium in developing Blight and maybe other useful concoctions.
* VideoGames/CityOfHeroes has the island of Cap au Diable, named for an oddly-shaped mountain which resembles a pair of horns. Local legend claims that a holy man sealed a demon under the mountain centuries ago. When the resident MadScientist goes to sink a geothermal tap, he discovers that the legends are true... and runs the tap right into the bound demon, producing vast quantities of cheap electricity. What could possibly go wrong?

* In ''VideoGame/FiveNightsAtFreddys3'', the managers of "Fazbear's Frights" are former Freddy Fazbear fans who decided to create a nostalgic horror museum based upon the now-dead Freddy Fazbear pizzeria. [[spoiler: Up to and including digging up, restoring and redeploying one of the killer animatronics from the ''original'' games.]]

[[folder:General]]
* Vampire blood has often been depicted as having the power to extend the natural lifespan of ordinary humans, allowing them to bribe mortals to their service with drops of blood.
* In real life, the venom of snakes is often extracted, both because it's required to make the antidotes to the venom and because it may actually have other medicinal uses in very small quantities.
[[/folder]]

* In ''{{Futurama}}'' the favorite soft drink is Slurm, which is secretly 100% slug juice. As in, it comes from a queen slug. She and her underlings have built a powerhouse corporation by marketing this highly-addictive beverage.

* ''WesternAnimation/BatmanBeyond'': Bane's blood is used as a steroid (after so many years of use, he'd become a wheelchair-bound cripple).

* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'': The Venber are a sentient race with unusual physical properties, chief among them that if they are brought to a temperature above freezing, they melt. The resulting liquid is apparently an excellent coolant fluid for supercomputers, and the Venber were hunted to extinction for it.

* ''{{Dune}}'''s sandworms are the source of the invaluable Spice, without which galactic civilization would collapse. While keeping them captive is unfeasible to say the least, the need to preserve their species runs at odds with the Fremen drive to make Arrakis more liveable for humans, making it a ''major'' political issue.

* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'': The Venber are a sentient race with unusual physical properties, chief among them that if they are brought to a temperature above freezing, they melt. The resulting liquid is apparently an excellent coolant fluid for supercomputers, and the Venber were hunted to the brink of extinction for it.

* In ''VideoGame/FiveNightsAtFreddys3'', the managers of "Fazbear's Frights" are former Freddy Fazbear fans who decided to create a nostalgic horror museum based upon the now-dead Freddy Fazbear pizzeria. [[spoiler: Up to and including digging up, restoring and redeploying on of the killer animatronics from the ''original'' games.]]

* In ''Film/PacificRim'', there's a lucrative black market selling body parts harvested from dead kaiju, and Hannibal Chau is its king. Aside from the kaiju brains (which have too much ammonia), every part of the kaiju is useful (or at least, Chau has convinced his customer base of this fact), even their feces and skin parasites.

* If they weren't a ''massively''-profitable source of marketable food for humans, the B-Ms of ''BioMeatNectar'' would've surely been written off as a bad design and destroyed as soon as their appetite for people was noticed. Instead, the CorruptCorporateExecutive whose company created them writes off one catastrophic BM escape after another, and is perfectly content to slaughter innocents [[spoiler: and his own son]] to protect his "product"'s public image.

* VideoGames/CityOfHeroes has a city with a demon chained underneath. A MadScientist turned it into a Geothermal Power Plant with free energy (and electric demons) for all of the Rogue Isles!

* [[VideoGames/CityOfHeroes]] has a city with a demon chained underneath. A MadScientist turned it into a Geothermal Power Plant with free energy (and electric demons) for all of the Rogue Isles!