that thing where you read a random quote and decide it's a metaphor for the state of the world

I had a giant freak-out yesterday afternoon. And then I watched The Wailing (2016) with my mom in the evening.

My mom is like a shark in that she’s always moving and will likely rip a chunk out of anyone who gets in her way. Like a shark in a tank, she's become increasingly restless from being cooped up in the apartment lately. She’ll mope around while I’m working, complaining to the dogs that I won’t watch a movie or play cards with her.

I signed up for Shudder last week with the ‘rona promo code, and my mom loves horror, so after I logged off from work yesterday I asked if she wanted to watch something with me. She was ecstatic and immediately ushered me in to hook my laptop to the TV. I had seen recommendations for The Wailing, so I put that on and kicked back with a beer for some Quality Mom Time. After a few minutes of confusion because the subtitles were simultaneously translating both the dialogue and the opening credits, she started to get invested in the comedic bits that happen in the first half-hour or so. Eventually she was yelling, “You’re missing it!!” any time I stepped away to grab something from the fridge.

One of the strange things about my mom is that she’s in her sixties and has some cognitive decline, but she’s weirdly good at predicting twists in movies. It’s like the part of her brain that picks up on tiny clues and foreshadowing is compensating for the part that’s supposed to remember my friend’s names. Everyone scoffs when she says the friendly neighbor is the killer or the mother-in-law is in on it, but she inevitably gets to gloat when it turns out she’s right. When it came to The Wailing she had some solid theories, but the thing about this movie in particular is that it constantly makes you second (triple? quadruple?) guess yourself, in a way I don’t think I’ve felt from a movie in a while.

I looked at the Wikipedia page for the movie after watching (as I am wont to do) and I was genuinely struck by a few lines in the ‘critical response’ section:

Maggie Lee of Variety noted "There’s nothing scarier than not knowing what you should be scared of. “The Wailing” erupts with a string of gruesome deaths in an insular village, but the investigation unleashes a greater terror — that of the paranoid imagination."

I think part of why this hit me so hard is because I had spent most of the day prior to watching the movie stuck in endless loops of my own paranoid imagination. My boss had sent an email to everyone with that 13 minute video of the guy talking about how to lysol your groceries. For reasons unknown even to me, I watched the entire thing, even though I know extreme measures like that aren’t necessary.*

My OCD has been mostly under control for around a decade, but now there’s a constant, seemingly inescapable stream of comics about people boiling their clothes, videos of proper hand-washing, tweets about the To Wear or Not To Wear mask debates, and more, more, more!! Suddenly the germ paranoia I’ve stifled for so long is en vogue. My obsessive brain worms have started to thaw from their frozen slumber and boy, are they wrigglin’.

I ended up crying and frantically texting my girlfriend about how anxiety-inducing all the disinfecting talk is for me. Decommissioned thought processes are reactivating: I’m getting caught up in terrible hypothetical loops about how and when to touch anything in between hand-washing. What if I miss a single spot when I’m wiping down my desk? What if my dog is shedding virus everywhere while she traipses around on my bed? What if I wash my hands and the little germy bastards crawl down from my arms?? People are joking about OCD finally coming in handy and I’m crunching numbers on approximately how long I could just live in my bathtub.

Anyway, this whole thing we’re collectively going through right now feels a lot like that review of The Wailing. There truly is nothing scarier than not knowing what to be scared of. We can’t see viruses, which is what makes a pandemic such an effective premise for horror. We can’t just run screaming from the haunted house of corona, or keep the lights turned on all night to ward it away. It could be lurking in the places we feel safest, replicating in the bodies of the people we love. Everyone is gloving up and clearing the shelves of lysol, screaming at masked strangers who drift too close, leaving groceries in the garage, lying awake at night running through mental inventories of surfaces to wipe down. We're living in the world of our paranoid imaginations.


*Lots of reliable sources (including my mom’s own medical team) have said not to panic yourself to death, and that the normal precautions (hand-washing, no face touching, etc) are enough. Obviously if you have a compromised immune system etc, or if you just feel better when you do it, de-germ to your heart’s content. I’m not a microbiologist, man, I just read a lot of medical journals for fun and am generally stressed about cleanliness.