Part of being human is trying to understand the reality around us. A bit like that image of a duck madly paddling beneath a smooth pond surface, we’re constantly processing and interpreting and trying to make sense of everything. Our brains are working hard, and there’s a lot going on below the surface.
It’s probably not that surprising, then, that the pandemic triggered a mass event. A global existential crisis. We humans are the only species that question the meaning of life and some strange things (or maybe not-so-strange) things have happened.
The BBC has a cool story about escapism and how it helps human process the big stuff of life. Apparently, people like to see the things they’re facing mirrored back to them either as entertainment or in the media. It helps them to process new, confronting things and ticks the relatability box.
Humans want to see characters facing the same challenges or going through the same things that are happening in real life. We’ve all fallen victim to listening to sad music after a break up. We like to validate our feelings.
So the trend in watching pandemic movies isn’t a new thing. And it’s not unique, it just started happening on a global scale.
In March 2020, the 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion started trending in the US across Amazon Prime Video, iTunes and other on-demand platforms. As the pandemic hit, people were suddenly in very unfamiliar territory. It was an unprecedented situation. The director of Denmark’s Recreational Fear Lab (yes, that’s actually a thing), researches the psychology of horror media.
His explanation? “No one alive had never seen anything like the pandemic”.
We just needed to see it up on the big (or small) screen to help us understand our new Covid reality.