Fear Itself

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Mask? A lot of people, it turns out

There’s a feeling when you leave a movie theater, especially in the middle of the day, especially if the movie was particularly dark, strange, or frightening. You emerge from pitch blackness into sunlight, blinking, half-dazed and confused, your mind lingering in the eerie places you’ve just visited.

If a film is especially compelling, you might feel suspended between realities a bit longer. In the grocery store an hour later, watching people pick apples from among apples, you may feel like you’ve returned from Another Place, that you are not so much Of this world, but merely Watching it.

I haven’t been in a movie theater since 2019, but I have that same feeling quite often nowadays. The horror movie I can’t dislodge from my mind is the pandemic; the limbo between theater and reality is this strange interlude we call “Back to Normal”.