Scary Stories

For a story to be scary, there has to be something hidden and unknown. There have to be darkness, empty voids and plenty of places for evil to lurk. There has to be room for our imagination to fill in the blanks, because the most scary part of any story is the bits we fill in ourselves.

This recipe was used with great success in the movie Alien. Things were dark, mysterious and set in the cold environment of space. However, they made one mistake. They revealed the monster in its entirety at the end of the film. What had been a vague and ubiquitous danger was in the end revealed to be specific and well defined. Suddenly, the monster was merely a well armored humanoid.

Something similar is now likely to happen to the narrative spun around the virus. Once people come in direct contact with it, it will become evident that the virus is but a variant of the flu. It's nothing to be worried about, and everybody will be wondering what the fuss was all about.

We're not there yet, but it will happen once the flu season starts in earnest. Faced with the disease, people will notice that children don't get very ill from it, that most adults weather it like a regular flu, and that few end up in hospitals. The monster will be revealed to be largely harmless.

Taking my son to song lessons at his school today was interesting in this respect. Most of the children were there, despite the option to stay away from the school because of the cases of infection discovered on Thursday. Few of the parents were so concerned that they kept their children home. There was more mask wearing, and some parents were keeping more of a distance than before, but apart from that, there was little sign of concern.

My guess is that the current level of anxiety will be as bad as it gets this time around, which is a great deal less than was the case during the height of anxiety a year ago. From here on, it will be down hill as far as the official narrative is concerned. Once the infected children are back to school in a little over a week, we'll be able to talk to their parents, and we'll learn from them that the kids were hardly bothered by the disease.

The only reason the virus has been scary is that its nature has been hidden in a haze of media rumors. Once actual cases emerge, the haze lifts and reveals to us a relatively harmless virus. However, this will not be the end of the story. It will be its beginning, because a lot of people have injected themselves with something truly obscure and mysterious.

We're about to witness a plot twist. What was imagined to be protection against an unknown evil is itself an unknown. For the people injected with it, there's no escaping it, and there are no certainties, only rumors.

We hear that people are dropping dead for no apparent reason. There's also cancer and heart disease, and overall mortality rates are up. The official narrative is that this has nothing to do with the vaccine, which is safe and effective. But this won't sooth anyone's anxieties for much longer. On the contrary, official denials will heighten anxiety, because once people start questioning the narrative, they will find plenty of unknowns where imagination can run wild. For those who took the vaccine, the horror story is just getting started.

Mask of the beast