Watching an episode this weekend of the old TV series, The Outer Limits, I was thrown back into memories of a much more terrifying production: 1998’s The Ring. When in the black-and-white show, the sixties-era, clunky-looking “galaxy being” got sucked through a TV monitor onto Earth, my brain reminded me of the locus of evil in the nineties film: a girl tossed decades ago into a well that was sealed up and had a cabin built over it. Because the girl’s spirit has managed to imprint itself on a video tape, she keeps herself and her story alive when people watch the footage, then pass it on. Unfortunately, viewing these weird scenes also means your life’s going to be over within seven days—when the horrifying spirit climbs out of the TV and scares you to death.
Unless, the film’s intrepid reporter discovers, you duplicate the tape and deliver it to someone else, getting a free pass from the vengeful spirit in acknowledgment of your help. Recognizing how to immunize herself from the slow-moving demonic contagion, the heroine gets her little boy to copy his own tape as well, and will most likely do the same with everyone she loves. Not quite an ethical procedure—but then, what are you supposed to do? People will die, anyway; why should it be you, or anyone you could protect?
A similar question, in more pressing form, came up in 2014’s brilliant film, It Follows, which puts a whole new spin on sexually transmitted disease. What you succumb to here isn’t anything biological; rather, as soon as your dreamy night or few rushed minutes of love are over, you’ll find yourself the target of some deadly evil that walks unceasingly in your direction until it catches and kills you—or until you pass the threat along to someone else by sleeping with them. The problem is, though, if that next target is killed, the demon-virus is coming back for you, and will continue moving retrogressively through the line of its transmitters. Here, too, we’re made to wonder what the victim is supposed to do. Accept a sacrificial role, hope the other victims do, too, and let this curse run its backward course until there’s nowhere left to go, and it disappears—if that’s indeed what would happen at the end of the line? Or pass it on, and hope the new recipient is wildly promiscuous, all the while knowing your reprieve is always shaky at best?
Arnold Böcklin, The Plague (1898). Public domain image courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel and Wikimedia Commons.
Two non-traditional viruses, limited in scope and loaded with ethical quandaries for their victims. Moral action in these situations should be so much more difficult to define than it would be in the face of, say, a plain old biology-based virus. Oh, but right. After months of instruction in simple, virtuous action, here so many of us still are, acting like we’re confronting some sort of satanic being that relishes the thought of our surrendering our pride and freedom by putting a piece of cloth over nose and mouth for part of our day. But we just—have to wear a mask when we step outside our front doors? And not stand too close to each other? You mean—I don’t have to choose who lives or dies, or be burdened with guilt about saving myself at the expense of others?
Correct! Unless, of course, you do make the decision to go about with face, or even just nose, on display for the entire world. Go ahead and breathe those droplets into everyone else’s air space; why should you have to be inconvenienced? You’ll be just fine, and medical staff got into the job knowing the schedules were crazy, so what’s the big deal? You have a right to your indoor dining.
It’s undoubtedly easier to see, in situations where our demons take visible shape, and their victims are laid directly at our feet, how our actions have wide-ranging implications. We can’t see COVID-carrying droplets traveling from our mouths into someone else’s nose. And all too many of us have the privilege of not having to face up to the scene inside pretty much any hospital right now, or to look on from another room as a loved one gives way to the invisible monster. But especially for healthcare staff, that killer is in full evidence every day—whether in a view of all the death, or of a general public or even admitted patients who insist this pandemic is a liberal hoax, and go after the very people who are trying to save them from it. I doubt, after what nurses and doctors and any other member of a healthcare team have been through, after all the ways they’ve seen humans welcome their own and others’ destruction, that they’ll ever again be remotely fazed by a little old horror movie.
What’s really the most terrifying, and simultaneously irritating, thing is the fact that I even feel the need to talk about any of this right now. The fact that the government has only egged on a widespread sense of entitlement made of up laziness, selfishness, and a whole lot of anger about the fact that the world changes, that we have to change along with it, and that we do, in fact, bear responsibility for each other. What feels like the real knife to the heart isn’t the result of an ogre hiding under the bed—but the knowledge that so many of us care so little about each other that we can’t do a ridiculously easy thing like wear a mask.
Watching that corny little TV show made almost fifty years ago, I was reminded that we’ve always been, and will certainly continue to be, a nitwit species. And so, even if (when, we hope) these particular pandemic-ruled circumstances change, we’ll still have all sorts of horrors to deal with, probably ones we’ve brought on ourselves. When I got to the end of The Outer Limits, it was laughable, seeing the town’s non-militarized police force just turn around and disperse, agreeing to the galaxy being’s recommendation that they stop being so violent, and go home and “give thought to the mysteries of the universe.” But it was also a little too apropos to hear the voiceover that ended the show: “Fear cannot save us. Rage cannot help us. We must see the stranger in a new light—the light of understanding.”
Thankfully, we don’t have to deal right now with hapless aliens spouting hokey koans. But it seems we still haven’t learned our lessons from even B-movie horror: that no matter how red-faced and blind—or dismissive and lazy—we let our various fears get us, we still won’t get anywhere unless we learn to understand that our actions matter—and that the world won’t get any less frightening until we get that reality lodged firmly inside our stubborn earthling skulls.
"Watching that corny little TV show made almost fifty years ago, I was reminded that we’ve always been, and will certainly continue to be, a nitwit species."
Have you watched Idiocracy? I've thought a lot about that film over the past four years.