Kids Today Don't Understand Every Millennial's Greatest Fear

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 47 seconds ago

In the age of social media, generational gaps have never been more pronounced, from thinking of Jim Carrey as Ace Ventura, The Grinch, or Dr. Robotnik to “When you hear the name Rizzo, who do you think of?” It’s the same with quicksand: once a constant fear among Gen X and millennials, it’s nowhere to be found today.

For decades, especially during the 80s, Movies and TV shows would toss in a quicksand segment as if it were the most common way to die in the jungle, the desert, or the Swamp of Sadness (a bog is wet quicksand). Did Hollywood realize nothing could top The Princess Bride? 

Quicksand Terrified Suburban Kids

Quicksand has been in movies since the beginning. It was a cheap special effect that typically involved a star kneeling in mud. The threat of a slow, agonizing death by way of suffocation added a built-in clock to the scene; after all, we can see them sink lower and lower into the ground. Water, dirt, and room to kneel are all you need to add a terrifying sequence to any western or jungle adventure. 

One of the most memorable quicksand scenes is found in 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia. While a sandstorm is starting to engulf the desert, a young boy stumbles into quicksand, and our heroes run over to attempt a rescue using a strip of cloth. It’s a short scene, which makes it all the more terrifying when the boy can’t hold on and is sucked under the sand, never to be seen again. This is the scene that filmmakers spent years trying to emulate to add tension to their films. 

The 60s were filled with quicksand, and when those kids grew up and started working in Hollywood, they brought their childhood fear and fascination of quicksand with them. By then, Blazing Saddles had already parodied the trope and few serious films were using it, but that didn’t matter, because the biggest fantasy and sci-fi films of the 80s: Krull, Beastmaster, The Princess Bride, The Neverending Story, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, even Enemy Mine tossed one in. 

That’s not counting the cartoons of the 80s, which feel contractually obligated to include quicksand. G.I. Joe has some of the worst (or best) scenes, thanks to butterscotch quicksand that looks more like water (this is why Rick and Morty included a sign with the quicksand gun). For some reason, Cobra Commander getting stuck wasn’t the end of the trope; it appeared in the 90s in an episode of Baywatch. 

Real Quicksand Is Annoying But Not Deadly

Oddly, it’s Baywatch that’s close to how quicksand is commonly found out in the real world – sinkholes. A guy is messing around on the beach, partially buried, when the tide starts coming in, and he realizes he can’t get up because of the water coming in from underneath. It doesn’t create a suction effect; rather, the liquid and solid sand mix together, alternating between being solid and porous enough that any bit of pressure causes them to part. Hence, the sinking, and why the best advice when stuck in quicksand is to remain calm and keep movements to the absolute minimum. 

There’s something terrifying about the thought of being stuck in quicksand, unable to move, as any action on your part will only hasten your own death. It sounds like it would be great for a horror movie, except that real quicksand, which again, doesn’t have its own suction, is more of an annoyance than a deathtrap. Your knee might be dislocated from having to pull it out, but you won’t go low enough to drown, and it’s usually narrow enough that you can reach an edge and apply the bit of leverage needed to walk out. That’s where the generational gap comes in, because the science is clear and the reality of quicksand isn’t terrifying at all, but if you’re a millennial or Gen X, you can’t shake that feeling in the back of your head that there’s nothing more terrifying. 

The use of quicksand in Hollywood has dropped to the point that kids today have no fear of the extreme danger that quicksand poses in their everyday lives. If they ever wander off into the desert or try to navigate the jungle, they won’t be prepared. Not like millennials, we’ve trained our whole lives for this moment, we’ve had countless nightmares about quicksand, and we’ll know exactly what to do to survive. 

Lift your knee, step out.