Comfort Viewings #2: My Life As a Horror Movie
This piece is part of our essay series called Comfort Viewings, where we ask filmmakers, fans, and writers to talk about what they're finding comfort in right now, while we live through a real-life horror film. The second one comes from one half of The Final Girls and self-confessed paranoid android, Olivia Howe.
In the week prior to the official “lockdown” in the UK, I was picking up some groceries from the local cornershop when I heard a familiar sound coming toward me from a car, driving at hast, down the street. Two men cruised past - top down, tops off (it was more than 12 degrees celsius, so they were of course obeying the English sunshine uniform) - blasting out the siren from The Purge (2013). My eyes rolled so far back into my head, I’m not sure they will ever fully recover.
Later that night, whilst channel-hopping on the TV, I came across Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011). A beautiful bit of TV programming, I thought, so I tucked myself in and began watching...for the whole of twenty minutes.
Before I go on, it would be helpful to understand a bit of background about me - I’m not the best in the face of a natural disaster. I spent my entire childhood assuming the tree outside my room would fall directly onto my bed as I slept, because I had seen it happen to someone on BBC news. That’s the kind of person I am. So, the idea of a global pandemic...yeahhhh, not ideal. That said, the thing that actually forced me to channel flip away from Contagion was not Jennifer Ehle explaining the morphing genetics of her own virus. Nor was it her self-injecting the untested vaccine and running off to hospital to see her father. It was the ripple of the virus throughout the world and the behaviour of those living through it: people fighting in the pharmacy over a pack of paracetamol? Honestly, it was not far from (or if not the actual) truth. I didn’t need to see images of looting, arson, or violence on my TV screen, nor did I need two topless men playing The Purge siren to all of Enfield Town - I’ve got my own real-life horror film right here, thank you. In fact, I think I’ve ruled out the entire apocalyptic genre for the short-term. Please save us, Jennifer Ehle.
After my short-lived Contagion moment, I don’t think I watched a film until deep into the lockdown. It wasn’t that it had put me off entirely, it was that watching a feature-length film seemed like quite a daunting task whilst also trying to navigate my way around what the fuck was going on. When living through a moment in time where a daily push notification to let us know how many people have died has been normalised, I wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to switch off from that to complete the home retrospective I had recently started. I needed comfort.
For the first few weeks, I watched nothing but Girls (2012-2017). Not one for keeping up with television, I’ve made a recent habit of hot-taking episodic content a mere eight years after anyone actually cared. As you all probably concluded years ago, Hannah Hovarth and her band of friends are the absolute worst. Particularly Marnie - can she just not? (Justice for Ray though!) But, despite their backstabbing, ridiculous ability to make rent in their Greenpoint apartments whilst constantly quitting jobs (sure, Jan), and Hannah’s (and my own) obsession with Jessa’s mermaid hair, there was something quite comforting and timely about spending my days in their company. Like many, I’ve found respite in my friends at this time; I’ve shared every waking thought with my various WhatsApp groups, I’ve reconnected with people I haven’t spoken to in years and I’ve missed getting drunk in the pub on a Sunday. Living vicariously through Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna was the medicine I needed to try and forget the chaos outside. Even if I hope to never be like them.
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