October 15, Year of the Curtain+5
Guest column by behaviorist Grey Blanchard, appearing in the Washington Times
We tend to celebrate anniversaries in our culture. We mark the day on which people were born, people were married, people started a new job, people had their first date. We also mark the passing of years since tragedies – deaths, natural disasters, and disasters of the man-made variety. We still all pause on the eleventh of September to remember those lives lost, and not even the passing of nearly seven decades has dimmed the memory of December 7, D-Day, which we commemorate both for the lives lost and the victories won.
Today is such a day, although many in our world still try to deny it. Today is five years since the Curtain was pulled back and we realized we live in a world where the dark things exist, and are eager to come out and play.
We still don’t know how or why it happened, but it did. On Oct. 15, at 8 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, reports started coming in from all over the world about attacks by things from out of our nightmares – bloodsuckers and flesh-eaters, things big enough to knock down buildings or small enough to burrow in your ear. There was a thing that decimated the city of Kobe, Japan, something else matching the description of a Chupacabra that drained entire herds of Mexican cattle of their blood, the hiker in Nepal who died of a heart attack with pictures of what looked like a Yeti in his camera, and the tourist in Hawaii who was scorched to death when she approached a man that turned out to be made of living lava.
That was all in the first day. But still, some people didn’t believe. Tricks, they said. Hoaxes. Shams.
Then, a week later, we saw the proof that won the minds of millions of people, myself included: the security footage from the lot of Climax Studios that clearly showed the murders of LAPD detectives Tim Ferris and Casey King – slaughtered, it appeared, by supposedly child-friendly characters from the studio’s library. Not by people wearing the suits or controlling the puppets – but by the characters themselves, propelled to kill as if driven by a demon inside.
Still, some were unconvinced. A publicity stunt. Doctored footage. Someone is trying to promote their indie film.
But no film materialized, Ferris and King remained dead, and all over the world reports continued to appear. Vampires in Transylvania, mummies in Egypt, werewolves in the American south, giant monsters of all sorts terrifying different Pacific islands – it’s like every monster movie come to life at once. And perhaps that’s the reason, even now, that so many people still deny we face a true danger. It does feel like a movie. In fact, we still make movies about all these things, although many of us now view them through the same eye as we do war movies.
Just last year nearly 200 people were killed at Climax Studios – this time the theme park – when a zombie outbreak started to spread. Only a few quick-witted civilians managed to stop the plague from spreading into Los Angeles, and maybe the world. The deniers can call it a publicity stunt if they want, but this many? Over five years? Either we will soon be met with the greatest motion picture saga of all time, or we are at war.
Fortunately, there are those willing to do what the authorities have refused to: fight back. For every five monster sightings, there is at least one story of someone armed and capable standing up and killing a beast. A nameless young woman has appeared across the American southwest, amateur militias have popped up in all 50 states full of young men and women training to fight, and the controversial “Hunter Academy” located in the international waters of the Atlantic continues to draw wealthy students from around the world. There were even rumors, during the Climax Studios zombie outbreak, that Dead Detectives Ferris and King were among those fighting the undead.
And why not? We live in a world now where our departed loved ones can rise up to try to consume our flesh. Is it such a stretch to think that maybe, just maybe, some of them may return to save the day?
I hope not. I sincerely hope not. Because we now live in a world where the curtain has been pulled back to reveal every bad dream any of us ever had, all very real. And we need all the help we can get.
