When 9/11 happened, I'd just taken several college courses with Bill Clinton's counterterrorism advisor, reading the most current work on effective prevention and responses to political violence, and I was like, "Oh, I know this one! Surely there are experts in the government who will not allow the US to respond on the basis of gut-level emotions or mass panic." Little did I know that the rest of my life would be watching governments respond on the basis of gut-level emotions and mass panic!
Both Terrified and When Evil Lurks have an older woman character who shows up with an elaborate pseudoscientific-looking instrument that can be used to contain the spreading evil, but, like, it takes a really long time to set up and actually everyone has to kind of get out of the way while it's being prepared and there's no way to explain why it works to people with no relevant knowledge, and, um, yeah, that's vaccines. That's counterterrorism measures. That's climate science.
As Chaw suggests, it's a great metaphor for all kinds of global horrors (pandemic, climate change, fascism, genocide), in that each generation tries to pass on warnings about what to do or not to do to stop the spread, but, if the previous attempts were successful at all, the next generation starts to view that received knowledge as outdated folksy superstition that doesn't apply to us, not now. Maybe the threat isn't even real, OK? Or maybe we can just do obvious simple things to stop it?
Walter Chaw's review of When Evil Lurks makes me want to watch it again, but I don't think it would be any less frightening the second time. I don't generally care about horror movies because I don't often get frightened by them. But When Evil Lurks is so gruelingly, constantly dreadful that I am in awe. (Rugna's earlier Terrified was full of freaky scenes but didn't plunge me into unshakeable nightmares.) https://filmfreakcentral.net/2023/10/when-evil-lurks/
It's super annoying that "the terrorists have already won" became a cliché by October of 2001 because actually, they have, and apparently in the 21st century, they always do. It would be really neat and cool to see just one government respond to terrorism without creating an emotion-pumping machine of propaganda to justify satisfying every single wish of the terrorists.
@tokyo_0 The single most important thing to understand about terrorism is that the goal is to create an alibi for genocidal violence. If a government acts with the force and direction of the emotions of the people following the attack, the terrorists got exactly what they wanted. It couldn't be more effective if they sent a wishlist. Racist dehumanization? Mission creep? Civilian deaths? Check check check, just as planned.