Horror is more delicious when it comes with an existential crisis
I just saw an advertisement on BBC for some kind of horror serial episode coming up on Monday. The conceit, far as I could make out, is that a character has fallen into a coma or other unconscius state of some sort, but he's having a bad dream, and all the other characters find that they are living out his bad dream for him.
This actually strikes me as really an ingenious twist on the usual dreaming/awake/nightmare horror plot, because of course in most such plots, it's the same character undergoing the horror and doing the dreaming. Whether the character's dreams start coming supernaturally true, or whether s/he can't tell whether s/he's dreaming and when, the point is, it all focuses on that one character.
But this--depending on how they'll deal with it--theoretically raises so many questions, in addition to the simple "Oh no, what's going on and how?" After the usual "this can't be happening," the characters could be faced with a really good existential crisis, which they'd have to struggle with at the same time as trying to get out of their living nightmare. The solution would seem to be to wake the dreamer, but as Alice wondered, what would that mean? Is the dreamer some kind of supernatural being who can psychically control world events? Boring answer. Or are the characters really only figments of his imagination, and always were? Would their existence end along with the dreamer's nightmare, were he to awaken? Is his dreaming channeling some sort of larger reality, and are they all within some greater dream? If there's a risk of all the characters really being made up by the dreamer, do they really want to wake him at the risk of ending their own existence? Is the nightmare he's putting them through worse than the possibility of extinction? Or are they all having a collective dream, and what does that mean? Or perhaps there's only one person doing the dreaming, but it's not the one in the coma--it's someone else in the cast? (Another boring answer.)
I really doubt the movie advertised is going to go there, but I'm kind of excited by the possibility.
This actually strikes me as really an ingenious twist on the usual dreaming/awake/nightmare horror plot, because of course in most such plots, it's the same character undergoing the horror and doing the dreaming. Whether the character's dreams start coming supernaturally true, or whether s/he can't tell whether s/he's dreaming and when, the point is, it all focuses on that one character.
But this--depending on how they'll deal with it--theoretically raises so many questions, in addition to the simple "Oh no, what's going on and how?" After the usual "this can't be happening," the characters could be faced with a really good existential crisis, which they'd have to struggle with at the same time as trying to get out of their living nightmare. The solution would seem to be to wake the dreamer, but as Alice wondered, what would that mean? Is the dreamer some kind of supernatural being who can psychically control world events? Boring answer. Or are the characters really only figments of his imagination, and always were? Would their existence end along with the dreamer's nightmare, were he to awaken? Is his dreaming channeling some sort of larger reality, and are they all within some greater dream? If there's a risk of all the characters really being made up by the dreamer, do they really want to wake him at the risk of ending their own existence? Is the nightmare he's putting them through worse than the possibility of extinction? Or are they all having a collective dream, and what does that mean? Or perhaps there's only one person doing the dreaming, but it's not the one in the coma--it's someone else in the cast? (Another boring answer.)
I really doubt the movie advertised is going to go there, but I'm kind of excited by the possibility.