Summer is for Survival
The hottest season has become a hunting ground where the audience is the prey.
There are some cyclical traditions regarding our consumption habits. It’s only logical that we eat the seasonal fruits we have at our disposal when the time comes, or that we prefer some indoor activities instead of going outside because inclement weather dictates so. With movies, it’s still the same.
I don’t have to tell you about Christmas movies or Specials, or how with All Hallows’ Eve, it would be a crime if it doesn’t come with a good serving of thrilling paranormal flicks or grand-guignolesque splatters. But beyond all those festivity-flavored movies, sometimes new trends appear seemingly from nowhere which mix a particular season with an unexpected type of movie. And in the last few years, that’s what happened with creature-featured Survival movies.
Open Water, The Shallows, Crawl, 47 Meters Down, Beast… It’s interesting because most of these movies usually fall in the aforementioned horror genre, but there’s something unique about these stories: first, it’s indispensable that they have the main villain in the form of an animal or beast, avoiding the supernatural origin; and second, they usually are set in natural landscapes or everyday places, avoiding the dark, scary places like haunted mansions or remote villages. Some even prefer a setting of paradisiacal beauty or a holiday destination, which could be one of the specific reasons these movies work so well in the summertime.
Having that in mind, I think it’s easy to know where it all began: the seminal work of director Steven Spielberg that changed the rules of the game in Hollywood, Jaws.
Beyond being considered the first film that kickstarted the “blockbuster era”, the movie about a man-eating shark became the blueprint for creature features. Titles like Orca, Piranha, Barracuda, or Tintorera were many of what we call today the “Jawsplotation films”; and they had different degrees of success. They were basically “water park slashers”, with their fair share of bloody deaths. But what these movies lacked was the adventurous tone mixed with an authentic sense of character drama that the Spielberg film had in spades. Jaws had real people with very understandable motivations, instead of being a bunch of bird-brained teens waiting the be the next redshirt.
Nevertheless, even when Jaws transformed cinema forever and it’s still a good example of how you should do a monster movie, I think that’s not the kind of tense, raw, nerve-racking experience that now we identify with the summer creature survival film; the movie that marked this subgenre the most is probably Cujo.
Where Jaws was epic, Cujo was claustrophobic. Where Jaws was entertaining and sometimes funny, Cujo was bleak and despairing. The horror movie based on the Stephen King book starring a snarling Saint Bernard was a perfect high concept: a mother and her son are trapped inside a car and must escape before the rabid dog and the heat outside kill them. Cujo didn’t have the best critical response at the time, but it became a pop culture icon and had a similar impact regarding its premise to what Die Hard achieved with a guy trapped in a building.
And here’s the thing: even when it is its most memorable element, the story of Cujo was not about an angry pooch, but a disintegrating marriage. A premise shouldn’t be the totality of the story (that’s obvious), and curious enough, the new batch of survival thrillers understand this very well: they all share characters that are hurting in the present due to an event from the past, so they travel to a different place to leave that pain behind. The protagonists of these movies have a desire to heal and make peace with their traumas, but somehow, that pain awaits for them as an inescapable new kind of animal.
So then, what do all that have to do with Summer?
Summer holidays are perfect to take time for ourselves so we can forget about our jobs and other social anxieties. We can relax, at last, go to placid and beautiful places and have a mojito. However, deep inside we know those issues are still there. Stalking. Waiting. Poised before they pounce on us. And they always get us just when the holidays are over. That’s why we have the dreaded Post-Vacation Blues. We expect summertime to fix everything, but that never happens. Even when we travel to the most remote place in the world, like the characters of these survival movies do, our problems don’t volatilize when we put distance in between.
We have to face them.
Survival movies are here to remind us that the struggle is necessary to be happy, that we must choose our fights and be ready to beat our enemy instead of running away. Another thing these stories also have in common is that the protagonists never have any kind of supernatural gift because they are like us. And like them, we don’t need superpowers to endure, because we are stronger than we think we are. Yes, it’s not going to be a harmless experience, but all scars tell stories that remind us of those fierce battles.
Because the experience we learn from Survival movies, be it against a hungry shark or an angry lion, is that Summer can be a time to think “We’ve made it this far. We can fight what it’s ahead of us”.
