A bit later on, the blockbuster action, horror, and sci-fi films of the late 60s and early 70s dramatically raised the stakes for special effects. Audiences certainly would've noticed that fake quicksand looked much less menacing in color. First, in the 1960's Hollywood gradually abandoned B&W for color. Two things rapidly precipitated the decline of quicksand. suburbs, and it's much easier to get a Z-list actor to pretend to be drowning in mud than to animate a monster or build a volcano. These movies and TV shows had to create the thrill of dangerous and faraway places without shooting anywhere more exotic than the L.A. You know, the kind that Lucas and Spielberg grew up with and affectionately recreated with the "Indiana Jones" franchise, which used quicksand to hilarious effect. A key trend during the postwar years - in which we see quicksand on the rapid rise - was the proliferation of low-budget adventure films. The important thing to know is that quicksand is a very cheap, easy special effect to produce on a soundstage. What really happened with quicksand as a feature has much more to do with changes in the cinema landscape. That's an amusing hypothesis, but as a film scholar, I have to disagree with the sociological angle here, and note that the data simply doesn't support it. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture a textbook about gender and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. ![]() ![]() What is it making us fear today? Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. In sociology, we call this the social construction of social problems: the fact that our fears don’t perfectly correlate with the hazards we face. I guess it’s fair to say that quicksand “jumped the shark.” ![]() Later, in discussions about plot lines for Lost, the idea of quicksand was dismissed as ridiculous. In the ’80s, quicksand even made it into My Little Pony and Perfect Strangers. But, after quicksand peaked, it became a joke. In quicksand’s early years, the movie scenes featured quicksand as a very serious threat. It rose in the ’40s, skyrocketed in the ’60s, and then fell out of favor.Įngber found a pattern in the data. Comparing this number to the total number of movies produced allowed him to show that quicksand had a lifecourse. He found a source of data - compiled by, of all things, quicksand sexual fetishists - that included every movie scene that involved quicksand from the 1900s to the 2000s. But they understood that it was something that people used to be afraid of: “My dad told me that when he was little his friends always said ‘look out that could be quicksand!'”Įngber became fascinated with what happened to quicksand. They were more afraid of things like aliens, zombies, ghosts, and dinosaurs. “I usually don’t think about it,” said one. Interviewing a class of fourth graders, writer Dan Engber discovered that most understood the concept, but didn’t find it particularly worrisome. But these days, quicksand can’t even scare an 8-year-old. ![]() It held a vise-grip on our imaginations, from childish sandbox games to grown-up anxieties about venturing into unknown lands. “For many of us, quicksand was once a real fear,” write the producers at Radio Lab:
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