OK, so...
..I guess I've been feeling a bit lost ever since the accident.
Not knowing what to do with myself, you know.
When I can't sleep, I wind up just trawling through stuff online,
reading books I forgot I even had...
and watching horror movies...
PULSATING HEARTBEAT
..night after night.
I'm not sure why.
HEARTBEAT CONTINUES
And the more I sit there and watch,
the more I start to feel a bit used.
I know it's all part of the fun or whatever,
and it's not that I can't suspend my disbelief...
..but I just keep thinking about the way these films are made...
WOMAN SCREAMS
..the way they're built to take advantage of who we are...
Kill all the effects, except for the scream.
..how we work.
WOMAN SCREAMS
Every second, they're poking you,
prodding you.
Trying to get you to look in a certain direction
or feel a certain way.
Before long, they have you exactly where they want you.
You can tell yourself it isn't real,
tell yourself it's all just manipulation.
But it's no use.
As you sit there
and take it all in,
you feel the fear they want you to feel.
WIND HOWLS
Over time, you'd think some kind of immunity would
start to build up.
But the effect is still just as strong as it ever was.
I can still get a fair way into a film and not know
when the fear will come or where from.
I'm not sure why I never learn,
why, time after time,
I never see fear coming till it swallows me whole.
Fear never even occurs to you...
..until you're faced with that first hint of danger...
..some barely perceptible signal that all is not right with the world.
A flicker in the distance...
..or a whisper through the trees.
These things tell us barely anything.
But they count for a lot
when you don't have much to go on.
They make you wonder what else is out there just beyond your grasp...
..by giving you just enough sound to hear the silence...
..and just enough light to realise how dark it really is.
I mean, silence and darkness.
They're just names we give to the moments when our eyes
and ears let us down.
If I look out into the night and can't see anything, it doesn't mean
there's nothing there, just nothing I can make out.
When something breaks through that void, it can feel like a sign,
but really it's just some tiny detail coming within reach of my senses.
Each night, with the lights off,
my room fades into a world of deep blue.
That space is so familiar to me,
but still...it feels strange.
SHE GASPS
Most of the time, I at least try to get some sleep.
But I end up just lying there,
letting my thoughts wash over me.
I stare so hard at the walls that I start to see shapes
emerging from the gloom.
And I squint to try and make them out, but they keep shifting.
And when you can't see clearly,
the world's a more frightening place...
..pared down to a few vague signals.
You watch old films and they get that feeling exactly right.
All the grain starts to work in their favour,
limiting how much you can really make out.
They paint a muted picture of the world,
where any signal that cuts through the haze
seizes your attention like a lighthouse through fog.
CLACKING
In those moments,
everything is intensified.
The darkness stretches out endlessly...
THUNDER RUMBLES
..so you put a lot of faith in what you can see.
Too much faith.
Tiny specks of light become spirits.
The smallest hint of movement is an intruder
edging through the darkness.
THUNDER RUMBLES
I know it's impossible, but sometimes I even think I see her...
..in the corner of my eye, turning away.
In that instant, it doesn't matter what you know about the world.
THUNDER BOOMS
All that matters is what appears before you.
CHILD SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE
GHOSTLY SCREAMING
Oh!
Ohhh!
Ohh!
SHE BREATHES HEAVILY
And then fear.
It overwhelms you, coursing through your body
and exaggerating every tiny feeling.
Throwing you into chaos.
But it's a chaos that's familiar.
You know it right away.
You can even recognise it in other people.
Little things - eyes widening, pupils dilating - feel huge.
They're enough to spark that same fear in you.
TRANSLATION:
As a kid, sometimes all it took was a look of fear on my sister's face
to make me feel the same way.
We always had that link between us.
It's not a conscious thing.
You feel the fear long before you can make sense of it.
It's like flicking a switch and turning on a lamp.
You don't think about how it works,
all the intricate little processes that happen in that moment.
You just see light, flooding into your eyes.
Mark, what a beautiful little boy!
Who is he?
Me.
Course it is!
Fear works the same way.
It strikes in an instant,
giving you no chance to make sense of the forces inside you...
that make it all possible.
So he was a scientist?
What kind of a scientist, Mark?
- Biologist. - What was he trying to do to you?
Mark, what was he trying to do to you?
He was interested in the reactions of the nervous system to...
to fear.
Fear?
Fear.
You're never aware of the anxieties lying dormant
within your mind, till they flare up like that...
..till you sense some sign of danger,
and your body tenses up.
Suddenly, those anxieties are right there in front of you...
..as if they came from nowhere.
We've met before, haven't we?
I don't think so.
Where was it you think we met?
At your house. Don't you remember?
No, no, I don't. Are you sure?
Of course.
As a matter of fact,
I'm there right now.
Whether we realise it or not,
our anxieties are always with us.
Some build up as we go through life.
Others are hard-wired...
..passed down from generation to generation,
like sense memories of some ancient past.
Together, they watch for the first signs of danger...
..the sound of a predator...
Oh, shit! Oh...
..or the sight of blood rising up through a wound.
Just the colour of blood is enough to send your mind reeling.
Like a premonition,
it warns of some imminent disaster.
What's the matter?
Nothing.
And that vivid red
stands out like nothing else,
sending your heart racing,
pumping blood through your veins in some kind of strange affinity.
And yet...
OK, you're going to feel some pressure here. Now, don't move.
..today, the sight of blood isn't so simple.
Agh!
Today, it can be a sign of harm...
..or a part of healing.
Either way, that fear remains.
A fear no longer fit for purpose.
You don't have to go back that far to find a world
nothing like our own.
It's not all that long since most humans lived at ground level.
Back then, I guess a fear of heights made perfect sense.
If only to steer you away from a cliff edge.
It would've been impossible to imagine the modern world, with
skyscrapers and tower blocks springing up all over the place.
These new heights aren't all that dangerous,
but sometimes they feel it.
Sometimes it's like every inch off the ground...
CAR HORN BLASTS
..is an inch away from safety.
DOOR CREAKS
Like that cliff edge isn't so far away after all.
CLATTERING
On some level, I think we'd just rather stay on the ground.
Down where we have nowhere to fall.
Ohh...
SHE BREATHES HEAVILY
I still remember the first time I ever went on a plane.
- This is bliss. - Mm.
Looking out at the tarmac as each aircraft rose up into the sky,
I just thought, "There's something wrong with this picture."
Didn't think it was going to be like this, but...
(Fuck!)
Agh!
- Grandad, help! - The ripcord!
Pull the ripcord!
All the comfort and security of air travel
can so easily come crashing down around you.
The moment you step on board
and realise the strange truth of it all...
..there you are, human, at one with the Earth.
About to be ripped from its surface.
And when we finally got up in the air, I just sat there,
not quite sure what to do.
Not even sure what I was allowed to do.
It was the first time I remember feeling
I had no control over my body.
Like I was just waiting it out until the plane landed
and I could start to make decisions for myself again.
It was the same when I woke up after the accident.
They wouldn't let me move,
so I just lay there and waited.
Even in that state, it felt wrong.
Can you help me?
You know they only want the best for you,
but you can't shake the feeling that giving in and letting them
take control of your body goes against some deeper impulse.
Imagine what our ancestors would see
if they walked into an operating room.
A torture chamber...
..filled with barbaric tools.
Weapons to mutilate and maim.
Sometimes I think we see it the same way.
I know they only cut bodies open to heal them,
but the thought still fills me with dread.
I know they only stick bits of metal inside of people to keep them
functional, but how could that not feel like a violation?
MAN GRUNTS
We can't ignore these instincts.
They're part of who we are.
But when we indulge them, we etch them further into ourselves.
We make them a little more real.
After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality.
Is there?
HE CHUCKLES
You can see that, can't you?
When we give in to our anxieties...
..we make them harder to shake.
Maybe that's why our anxieties are so persistent.
They have a memory.
Something black.
Something on its way to you.
Go on.
It's like your body is constantly learning new ways to be terrified...
Hey, chiquita! Want a lift?
..new things to worry about.
What's the matter?
Your car.
What colour is it?
Black.
Get out of here! Get away from me with that!
TV STATIC
Maybe when we indulge the things that scare us,
we stop being the innocent victims of fear and become co-conspirators.
SLOW, CONTINUOUS SCRAPING
TV STATIC
Maybe we're always moulding our own anxieties,
shaping the way we experience the world.
HE PLAYS PIANO
HE HITS A BAD NOTE
You suck.
I watched this film loosely based on the Columbine High School massacre,
and in it, you see the killers in the weeks leading up to the shooting.
You see all the things that might have influenced them,
and you start to wonder if they sought out those things,
if they allowed themselves to be influenced.
I was reading about it afterwards and I read about another high school
shooting where the killer had watched this film two weeks before.
People said it was his inspiration.
But he didn't watch it in the same way I did.
He skipped ahead to the violent scenes at the end,
allowing himself to be influenced...
..but only by the moments he picked out...
..closing a feedback loop.
'Let's go.'
VOICES ON TV
TAPE REWINDS
What're you doin'?
I want to see it again.
I think that's maybe why I find it hard to identify with
people who wind up in cults.
ALL SHOUT IN UNISON
I just can't believe they didn't play a part in their own manipulation.
I can't believe I'd let it happen to me.
Deep down,
I think I know I'm just as susceptible as anyone else...
Huh!
..but I want to think I'm responsible for my own actions.
See how mine floats?
You know the whole thing where people think Frankenstein is
the monster, when really he's the scientist?
Well, maybe there's a reason people make that mistake.
Maybe there's a reason it's Frankenstein's name that comes
to mind when his creation does something monstrous.
No, you're hurting me! No!
From him, we expect responsibility.
I'm astonishingly sane, Doctor.
You have created a monster and it will destroy you!
From him, we expect better.
Because, like us, he's capable of overcoming his instincts.
He's capable of reason.
The strength of mind to hear a strange sound at the window...
..and tell yourself it's just leaves blowing in the wind outside.
The strength of mind to step back and tell yourself...
CAT MEOWS
..there's nothing to fear.
Sometimes, all you need to soothe your beating heart
is a look at the bigger picture.
The night I came back from the hospital,
I didn't get home until late.
And as I came round the corner towards the flat, I saw
someone by the front door, hunched over, like they were waiting for me.
I kept walking, but slower.
It was only when I got a few doors down that
I realised it wasn't a person at all.
It was just a shadow.
A shape on the wall. Nothing to fear.
The sense of relief in that moment was overwhelming.
But to get there,
I had to go through fear first.
CLATTERING
I had to go on that journey.
I guess that's why we go to fairgrounds and theme parks -
to feel a fear we know will be followed by that same rush.
SCREAMING AND LAUGHTER
But even from the front of a roller-coaster,
you can only see so much of the track up ahead.
You still feel every twist and turn as strongly as the last.
You still feel like you're about to be flung off the track.
You OK?
Even as the ride comes to an end...
- What's wrong? - I don't know.
..some uncertainty lingers...
..and stays with you as your heartbeat begins to settle.
Cos when you stop to take in your surroundings...
Betty?
..you might not like what you find.
Betty?
And what if you look closer at the thing you're scared of
and find nothing to reassure you?
What if certainty is nowhere to be found?
I can understand why people obsess over old photographs
of ghostly shapes and apparitions.
Agh!
Cos no matter how close you look,
you'll never see them clearly.
Not through all that grain and dirt.
You'll never know for sure.
I was just, uh...
..looking at the picture.
Looks so much like you.
My Lord, it does!
- Yeah. - Weird.
What's the matter?
Nothing. It's just that, uh...
It does. It looks so very much like you.
It's an old print. Could look like anybody.
No.
However close we look...
..an image is only one window on a scene.
It can only tell us so much...
..before we yearn to know what's lying just outside the frame.
If we're denied the story that makes sense of what scares us,
we tell our own story.
Here's an old one.
The family in the movie Poltergeist
have three children.
- Did you think that sandwich up all by yourself? - No, Grandma helped!
By the sequel, they only have two.
Just one remains by part three...
..the absence of her siblings unexplained.
The story goes that a so-called Poltergeist Curse
took the lives of all three child stars,
taking one just after the release of each film in the trilogy.
Needless to say, the truth is more complicated.
Lives were lost, and tragedies were twisted to fit the myth,
but the details don't really add up.
Truth is, there is no Poltergeist Curse.
But we're all drawn to the idea that there might be...
..the idea that the films themselves might just be small chapters
in a much bigger story.
TRANSLATION:
We want to believe there's a story behind everything,
so we take whatever information we have and try to build on it,
filling in the wider picture.
But once your window opens up...
..there's no going back.
I think we all have things we'd rather never have known,
rather never have seen...
..but, at the time, we couldn't resist.
An image can sear itself into your eyes,
but it's the meaning behind it that takes hold of your mind.
I had a nightmare recently.
It was about a film I'd watched a few days before,
where a woman's held prisoner by a mysterious cult.
At the end, they cut off all her skin.
But that wasn't what stuck in my mind.
What stuck in my mind was their motive.
They think they're doing good.
They think each wound they inflict upon her will bring her closer
to some profound truth.
The secret of life after death.
So their methods are grim,
but to me, that cold, calculating logic is much, much worse.
TRANSLATION:
At the end, when they get what they want...
..it makes her pain worthwhile...
..in their eyes and perhaps...
..in ours.
It's comforting to think that horror
goes against the natural order of things.
So what happens when we see the logic in something monstrous?
Take cannibalism.
We think of it as this unbelievable atrocity...
..but to the cannibal, at least, it's logical.
Just another way to survive.
WOMAN WHIMPERS
Who knows, maybe in some other circumstance we'd see it
the same way.
TRANSLATION:
Listen, I got something to tell you.
There was that rugby team in the '70s whose plane
crashed in the Andes, leaving them stranded.
Half their group was already dead,
so they made the only logical choice.
Now, if the search has been called off,
then we're on our own to save our lives, and we've got to eat.
Eat what?
In the movie of their lives,
they were played by sympathetic character actors.
No...
And what they did was played for horror but also pity.
It's very difficult to cut.
The meat's almost frozen.
I'm going to eat this piece.
It's impossible to watch without wondering whether you'd do the same.
Without wondering where your limits really lie.
Somebody take this.
What's horrific to one person is logical to the next.
I read about this serial killer in Germany who strangled his victims
and bit through their Adam's apples in a kind of sexual trance.
They made a movie about him as well.
Later on, he admitted that the killings were crimes of passion,
and for all their gruesomeness, we can take some comfort
in the thought that he wasn't thinking clearly.
But what he did next - dismembering and disembowelling the bodies -
he thought was perfectly reasonable.
How else are you going to get rid of them?
And that's the part that seems most unnerving today.
The part that he saw as logical.
How can we pretend the real world lacks the cruelty of the movies,
when we're constantly reminded otherwise?
TRANSLATION:
You know, there's a man living in Tokyo
who once killed and ate a woman.
He got out of prison on a technicality
and found work as an actor.
You can still get ahold of his movies.
And when you watch them, it's like you're not just watching him,
you're watching the aftershocks of what he's done.
It's like an injection of reality into a nightmare,
blurring the line between the two.
When we were kids, I used to bug my sister with every question
I could possibly think up about the world.
I don't think I really cared what the answers were,
I just wanted to talk to her.
Eventually, I guess to shut me up,
she told me there were billions of people on the planet
and that pretty much anything I could imagine
was probably happening right at that moment, somewhere on the Earth.
I don't think she realised how scary a thought that was.
Suddenly my worst nightmares were real.
I just couldn't see them because they were happening somewhere else.
Suddenly every horror story I'd ever heard was no longer fiction.
I saw an interview with the medical examiner
who worked on the victims of Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer.
He said he can't watch horror movies any more,
that they are too real for him now.
The last one he saw was The Exorcist.
At the time, I thought it was weird that he'd be bothered
by a supernatural film after all the things he'd seen.
But now I think I get it.
Even the most surreal horror movies are rooted in some kind of reality.
Like I found out Dahmer himself was obsessed with the third Exorcist film
because he saw shades of himself in the villain...
HE GROANS
..a serial killer who tries to possess his victims
by mutilating their bodies.
That's more or less exactly what Dahmer had been trying to do.
What are these?
What are they? What's in them?
Father Dyer's entire blood supply.
Possession, mind control, these are just fantasies...
What?
..but they are fantasies that exist out in the real world.
All his blood?
And not a drop of it spilled.
All neat.
There's not even a smudge on the jars.
So, in one way or another, they are part of our reality.
Good afternoon, Doctor.
Maybe that's why so many horror films go on and on
about real events and true stories.
Maybe that's why they ground themselves
in the language of science, the language of the real world.
The examination discloses one condition,
pressure upon certain parts of the brain.
People complain that they overexplain everything,
and there is definitely something to that.
During the period in which your reasoning processes
give way to self-hypnosis,
the glands which govern your metabolism get out of control,
like a steam engine without a balance wheel.
When this happens,
the glands generate an abnormal supply of certain hormones,
in your case
those which bring about the physical transformation which you experience.
Explaining it doesn't help!
What can you do about it? Operate?
But for every film that shatters the illusion of fear
by spelling things out,
there is another that taps into something undeniably real
and that's the moment you wait for,
when fear goes beyond your nerves and gets inside your head.
Nothing else really matters.
And rising up on all sides,
it blocks out everything else
till it's all you can feel.
No!
The last time I felt that kind of fear...
..I was watching a film with Liv Tyler in it.
DOOR RATTLES
She is alone in this cabin, out in the middle of nowhere...
James?
..and I don't know why, but the whole thing really got to me.
And watching her trapped inside that house,
not knowing what's lurking just outside,
was more than I could handle.
I felt my body tense up,
the need to flee rising inside me.
THUD
And through it all,
she just kept moving closer to what felt like certain death.
SCRAPING
THUDDING AT DOOR
It's frustrating, you just want her to run to the bedroom and hide,
but she won't.
DOOR RATTLES
SHE WHISPERS
And so, I know it's ridiculous, but I found myself covering my eyes,
fighting back the urge to peek out at the screen.
There was this thing I taught myself to do as a kid,
where if I breathe in in a certain way,
I can block out the sounds of the movie.
One gulp and the air rushes into my ears.
It's like cabin pressure dropping from within,
pulling me out of the film.
And in that moment, I don't think I wanted it to end, not exactly.
I just wanted the film to recognise how I felt.
I wanted her to share my urge, to run.
Ow!
Run far enough and you find what you're looking for.
Peace...
if not quite peace of mind.
# Once upon a time there was a pretty fly
# He had a pretty wife This pretty fly
# But one day she flew away
# Flew away
# She had two pretty children
# But one night these two pretty children
# Flew away
# Flew away into the sky
# Into the moon... #
Eventually, you convince yourself you're safe.
You push fear from your mind...
..leaving you in a strange kind of stillness.
CANS RATTLE
It's enough to make you think that calm will last for ever.
MUSIC: soaring classical version of Watercolour Of Brazil by Ary Barroso
And maybe that kind of optimism is to be admired.
There are two different endings of the movie Brazil.
In the one that the studio wanted,
there is a calm and it does last for ever.
The main character has escaped a bleak dystopia
and got out into this...paradise.
It's like something out of a painting, or a dream...
..but not reality.
MUSIC: soaring classical version of Watercolour Of Brazil by Ary Barroso
And when it comes to fear,
we know there is no such thing as a clean break.
We know that sanctuary is only temporary.
PSYCHO VIOLIN SCREECH
- He's got away from us, Jack. - I'm afraid you're right, Mr Helpmann.
He's gone.
Hmm.
QUIET HUMMING: Watercolour Of Brazil by Ary Barroso
HAMMER TAPS REPEATEDLY
As long as fear is still out there...
Give me another one, darling.
..sanctuary is just a sticking plaster...
..slowly peeling away.
How long have they been gathering there?
- NEWS REPORTER: - So far no word has come through
to show if there have been further attacks.
On the national scene today, in Washington...
Was that all?
You can't keep that stuff at bay for ever.
Sometimes I'll be halfway through a sentence
and suddenly the accident will come racing back into my head.
I try to push it from my mind, but it doesn't go very far.
I'm left there, waiting to remember this thing I can never really forget.
Numbing myself to an obvious truth.
Just think how many places we've built to help us do just that.
The other day I wound up in a shopping centre
without even really meaning to go in.
- We're in! - How the hell are we going to get back?!
Who the hell cares?! Let's go shopping first!
There is no natural light in there, no fresh air.
It's the perfect place to get lost
and maybe, at least for a little while,
forget all those things that are constantly weighing on you,
even when you know they're out there.
It feels like you could stay there for ever,
the aisles stretching out endlessly in every direction,
stocked with everything you'd ever need.
Honey never goes off,
ever.
You could stay there for the rest of your life.
But it would be a life stripped of any colour.
NEWS REPORT ON RADIO
There's nothing there to threaten you
and nothing there to bring you any real joy.
Your stay is open-ended,
but always the same.
It's like a purgatory,
but purgatory has to end some time.
At least that's what all the holy books say.
You can't hold back the tide for ever.
Eventually, it will break through.
CLOCK TICKS
SHE WHIMPERS
We are going on, aren't we?
There's nothing to go on to, Jessica.
The Sanctuary! There is!
You want there to be one, but that doesn't...
There has to be! I know it exists! It has to.
No, it doesn't, not really, just...
Just so many people want it to exist,
so many people who don't want to die, they want it so much
that a place called Sanctuary becomes real, but...
but it doesn't exist! It never existed, just...
just the hope.
- You're wrong! It has to be! - Oh, Jessica! - It has to be!
And what's the point in shutting yourself off from the world
and pretending your fears don't exist?
LIFT PINGS
When you turn away from the things that scare you...
..you really just give them more power over your life.
Soon they are all you think about.
SHE GASPS
Hm?
You can't overcome anxiety by pushing it away...
..any more than you can overcome tiredness by denying yourself sleep.
In the end...
it all catches up with you.
As we edge away from our fears...
we really get closer to them.
As we turn to run...
they give chase.
Please! Please, somebody help me!
CAR HORN BLARES
Those five minutes in the waiting room...
before they led me in...
..they were endless.
There was a doctor there with me and he was telling me what to expect.
But I didn't take any of it in.
I just sat there, numb.
He led me down this long corridor in the basement of the hospital
and, halfway along, I saw this little blue sign with an arrow on it
and it said mortuary.
I don't why, but...
for the first time,
that made it real.
Finally, we reached the room and he said a few words
and kind of touched my shoulder
then let me step inside.
And there she was.
At least, something like her.
I took one look and then turned away.
And though that sight is etched into my memory...
..I'm still glad I made it that far.
An incomplete picture would be so much worse.
BIRDS TWITTER
It's a strange thing
and when you face the thing that scares you,
you finally see it clearly.
It shows you what it's made of...
VAMPIRE GASPS
..for better or worse.
LABOURED BREATHING
And whatever terrible things seemed so overwhelming in darkness...
..can seem vulnerable...
..when brought into the light.
Fear can mutate into sympathy,
even pity,
when you see things as they really are.
When you only have so much to go on...
you tell yourself the worst story you can possibly imagine.
We all do.
Take off the mask.
It's like we're giving our fears the benefit of the doubt,
agonising over what MIGHT be.
The reality is usually less spectacular.
What did you expect, a monster?
And newspapers,
when they write about crimes committed against children,
they always seem to pick pictures of lost toys and old shoes,
stuff belonging to the kid it happened to...
..I guess partly because those things drive home
what we cherish about our childhood, the innocence of it all.
But also I think we can't bear
to face the reality of what's happened...
..so it's easier to see child victims as the things they left behind...
..and imagine their attackers as pantomime villains.
Aren't you going to say hello?
Oh, come on, bucko!
I guess that's how we've learned to cope with it all,
in the same way nursery rhymes take the horrors of the real world
and turn them into something more manageable.
THE PLAYGROUND CHANT CONTINUES
We know the truth is probably more complicated,
but we still cling to the image of a shadowy, sinister figure...
..shrouded in mystery.
I guess it's either that
or admit that people capable of such things are human...
..with their own fears, their own vulnerabilities.
They might be as horrified by their crimes as we are.
WOMAN SCREAMS
But if we accept that, we have to wonder what else we have in common.
To really understand the so-called monster...
..we'd have to understand how little separates us
from everything we are scared of.
Maybe that's why we are so fond of the idea of evil,
some supernatural force
that explains everything that's wrong with the world.
We can't bear the thought of what humanity might be capable of,
so we put it down to evil instead.
The alternative is far too painful.
The alternative says we are at the mercy of people.
We like to think of horror as a kind of mechanical force,
unleashing chaos according to some invisible formula.
But it's not.
Real horror is the hand behind the machine.
Human, fallible...
..and just like us.
And that means horror is never far away.
It's in all those other people we share the world with.
And maybe if we're honest...
it is in us as well.
HE LAUGHS
LAUGHTER CONTINUES
DOG BARKS
Why is it, when you ask someone what they'd do if they were invisible,
they always say things that they think of as immoral?
Spying on their friends,
robbing a bank,
or worse.
Is the only thing stopping us from doing that stuff
the thought that other people might see?
Is our sense of self really that fragile?
Are we that scared of who we really are?
There was a woman at the funeral who I had never met before.
And she wouldn't stop talking to me,
trying to console me.
She kept on telling me what my sister would have wanted
and how she would have felt and all this...
bullshit.
I stood there, trying to be polite,
but inside I was about to explode.
It was just...
She wasn't there.
She didn't know.
And before I knew it, I was screaming at her.
Everyone else went silent.
I could barely tell the words that were coming out of my mouth.
But I couldn't stop them either.
And she was just...frozen.
I felt even worse.
Afterwards, someone said it was like another me.
But it wasn't.
It was just another part of who I am,
a part I didn't even know was there.
Maybe it's ordinary people we really have to worry about.
Ordinary people, capable of ordinary horrors.
GUNSHOT
Because the extremes that keep us up at night,
they are the least of our worries.
They are just the focal points
of something that exists all around us.
Horror in its simplest, dullest form.
You read about violence all the time,
but you don't think it will happen to you.
You drive past car accidents but never imagine you might be in one,
not until another car veers into your path.
It's only then you realise how close that horror always was.
In the US, they announce child abductions on traffic signs.
- That's sad, an amber alert. - What's an amber alert?
It's when a creepy dude puts you in the back of his truck
and tries to tickle your wiener.
People think nothing of it.
- Hey, wait, hang on a second with that. - Next question is...
- Wait just one second. - What?
- OK. - I'm not... - OK. - That's a grey Honda, right?
- It looks more...blackish? - OK.
Steel, maybe. Steel?
- OK, I'm pretty sure that is probably a grey Honda up there. - OK.
- That is a grey Honda. - What reality show contestant do you relate with?
- That's a grey Honda. - OK, good job.
OK, well, on the thing, on the sign thing, it said grey Honda.
- Are you trying to get out of these questions? - Yes, I am.
- We are almost done! - I definitely am trying to get out of the questions.
Stay focused. What reality show contestant do you relate to?
- I don't relate... - Come on! - I don't relate to reality...
First of all, reality shows are
the furthest thing away from reality you could possibly get,
there's nothing about reality on those shows.
- OK. - Sh, listen! - We've come so far, we've come so far.
- If this is the car, then you have to stop asking me these questions. - OK.
- If this is the car, you can... - OK. - I will throw these out the window.
You will throw them out the window! Yes!
OK, if this is the grey Honda in the sign...
OK, but until then, we have to stay focused.
- OK, well, look at the sign. - If another team drops...
- That is the car. - That's the car.
- Wait... - ENGINE REVS LOUDLY
What do you want... What should I do? Don't get too close to it.
You never see fear coming
until it swallows you whole...
but you should.
It was there all along.
Can we even try to overcome a force so resilient?
Or do we just take our fears
and release them back into the atmosphere?
Out of sight and out of mind,
but still out there...somewhere.
They say films are desensitising,
that after a while they cease to have the same impact they once did.
But why would they let that happen?
Films have a lot invested in us staying scared,
staying sensitised.
Maybe that's why, when the film is over and the credits roll,
we are always left hanging...
..left looking for answers within.
You really like the dark, don't you, Michael?
You can be yourself in the dark.
But you know...
..there is one dark place that we have to be very careful in.
Do you know where that is?
Because if horror movies are built to take advantage of who we are
and how we work...
..then what does that say about us?
# When the leaves of summer turn red and gold
# And the football games bring a hint of the cold
# Time to get away
# Empty cottage sitting on the shore
# Tourists all left about a month before
- # And we're gonna have a good time - Gonna have a good time
# Yeah, we're gonna have a good time
# We are going on a fall break
# Walking hand in hand in the moonlight
# In the moonlight
# We breathe the sweet salt air
# I swear we'll never part
# We're going on a fall break
# Running in the sand, feeling all right
# Feeling all right
# When you fall into my arms
# I'll break into your heart
# Gonna break, gonna break
# Gonna break right into your heart... #