I remember watching I Know What You Did Last Summer when I was 12 or 13. I Know What You Did Last Summer isn’t a particularly good movie, and as horror movies go, it’s not that scary or original or anything, but as a kid who had never been allowed to watch R-rated movies — and was still not allowed to watch R-rated movies but managed to sneak this one in on HBO, thank you to HBO — well, it sure had an effect on me. There could just be a guy with a fish hook waiting outside your door? To murder you???
I also remember watching Event Horizon. Now, I haven’t seen Event Horizon in decades, and it was a little confusing at the time, but I remember it being a much better, freakier movie, with a darker, more hopeless ending. But it didn’t have nearly as much of an effect on me; Event Horizon took place on a spaceship, and there was a black hole (I think), and alien monsters, and it was all very separated from my reality. I Know What You Did Last Summer had people in something like the real world. I’d never been on a spaceship, but I’d been near a fishhook. What if the next time I was near one somebody attacked me with it? Well now I have to think about that, which is just fucking great.
Even when the fantastical was, in any objective sense, much more effective, the mundane was scarier. It still is, at least to me. Which is what makes this such a damn effective horror movie:
People from all over are going to fly to all over for Thanksgiving this year, like every year. They’re going to hug their families and play with the kids and have a couple drinks, like every year. They’ll get in each other’s faces, and share laughs, and then fly home, like every year.
This isn’t every year. Hospitals are already at a breaking points. People are going to die because of this. A shitload of people are going to die because of this. It is avoidable. It is preventable. We, as a country, will neither avoid nor prevent it. We think we have the God-given right to do whatever the hell we want whenever the hell we want to do it, and anyone saying, “No, don’t do that” is doing tyranny on us, just like Stalin would.
How do you deal with something like this? Either this is a mass movement abjectly denying reality, or this is a mass movement saying that they don’t care if huge numbers of people die, possibly including their family members, and possibly including them. There are no other options.
From what I’ve seen, I think it’s Option A. I think people have been listening to hacks downplay COVID and spew lies all over the place. I think those lies have caught on because people want them to be true: I want there to not be a massive uncontrolled threat to this country, and I want the real villains here to be politicians who refuse to reopen the country, and I want to be able to live my life like I used to. That’s what I want, and this guy is saying I can have all of that as long as I point my ire at these few certain people. Why wouldn’t I try it? What do I have to lose?
What I have to lose, of course, is my life. Or some functionality in my lungs or heart or brain. Or the piece of my soul that dies when I send angry tweets to my state’s top public health official, telling them that they’re what’s wrong with America, and that they deserve to die. Or even just the basic threads that tether me to objective reality and allow me to experience the world in an honest way.
But the pull of people saying what I want to hear is too strong. This idea that the thing I want — and that I have had every year of my life with absolutely no problems, by the way — is within reach, that all I have to do is take it … that’s a tough message to counter. If all I have to do to justify my behavior is drop a little bit deeper down that rabbit hole, then down I go. Eventually I’ll drop down so far that there’s no way back up. Hopefully I’m not there yet. Hopefully this huge percentage of the country that’s flying this weekend isn’t there yet.
But you have to wonder. You have to consider that constantly choosing your own reality can change a person, that a lifetime of movies about evil cabals doing dastardly deeds can sink in. You have to allow that maybe people look for the sexy, exciting, farfetched threats instead of the boring ones, and that’s part of this too.
There’s no serial killer here. There’s no outer space black hole spaceship monster. There’s just a person on a plane. Can’t get any more mundane than that. And you can’t get much deadlier either.