Corona Diary: Day 12 – the future of horror

One thing that’s going to have to change when all this is over is how disaster movies work. It’s all very well showing tumbleweed filled streets while everyone cowers inside in fear, but now we know how it really works, future end of the world movies are also going to have to feature people making videos of themselves as dancing elephants, or playing hungry hungry hippos with mops and wheelie chairs.

Horror movies are going to have to change too. Previously, what was considered scary was being trapped in the haunted mansion while a crazed killer slowly tracks you down. Now, the definition of terror will be being trapped in the mansion while hunted down by the crazed killer and you’ve run out of toilet paper.

What these films seem to get wrong is that, when faced with adversity, we don’t fight it with bravery, or stoicism, or gun toting heroics. We fight it with mundanity. This evening, at dinner we started playing ‘I went to the shops’. As anyone who has played this childhood classic will know, this game is a fun test of memory. In this case the memory it was testing was ‘what the hell does a shop look like’.

All over the world, people are settling in to an existence of having a bit of tea, watching a bit of telly, maybe playing a board game. For some of us, this has been the definition of a wild night out for years, but a fair number of people are discovering that the world doesn’t just have to consist of crazy nights down the pub or going out clubbing. Alright, watching Jimmy Carr host the Little Tiny Quiz of the Lockdown doesn’t quite have the adrenaline rush of tequila slammers and all back to Malcolm’s, but the options at the moment its not a bad substitute. Its also pretty good preparation for when you settle down and have kids. When I was younger, I always used to wonder why my parents didn’t go out more, while I was desperate to go out on a Saturday night but didn’t have the money for it. Now I’m older, I realise they would also have loved to go out on a Saturday night, but couldn’t because they had to stay in and look after me. After a while, you tend to get used to it as well. Nights down the pub, that seem such a definition of living the high life when you’re young and single, start to pall when you realise that the stories are all the same, the hilarious jokes lacking in substance or punchline, and the only thing that makes it tolerable is the vague hope that you might meet someone who can take you away from it all, so you can settle down to raise kids and watch episodes of Pointless together.

Maybe that’s what lockdown is – an enforced middle age. I prefer to think of it as an enforced childhood. When I was growing up, there was no internet, no mobile phones and the only telly worth watching came on between 5pm and 6pm on a Saturday. As a result, we were forced to make our own entertainment. Perhaps that’s why my generation has an endless fascination with board games, or climbing trees, or making dens out of grass and driftwood. When you don’t have Grand Theft Auto, you have to make do with what you can get.

Now, though, we’re all back in that same boat. The world has become an endless wet weekend, with nowhere to go and nothing to rely upon except our own wits and the wits of those we’ve been confined with. It’ll take a while to get into this. We’ll get there though. They say that, when quarantined during the Great Plague, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, King Lear and Anthony and Cleopatra. I don’t promise we’ll all live up to that. But I’ve been watching a lot of Home Taskmaster, and believe me, there’s a lot of creativity out there. We may not write King Lear. We may not pen Macbeth. But given enough time, given enough motivation, given a video camera and an old grey bedsheet… I’m sure that each and every one of us can make one hell of a dancing elephant.