What is your biggest fear? Spiders? That’s a classic. Deranged clowns? Sure! Maybe you prefer the more existential variety? How about never fully realizing your potential or dying alone? All of the above? Similar to the What superpower would you choose? question, it is hard for me to select only one. I am a fearful person. I have a way of collecting fears as I go about my life. Alpha-gal, something I did not know existed until two days ago, is the flavor of the week. But my fear of dying alone is more like a longtime, trusted companion.
The world is a scary place. At any moment, our identities could be hacked. Our phones could ring with dreadful news. Our brains could suffer an aneurysm. Swimming in a bottomless sea of insecurity, we are meagerly equipped with our basic survival instincts: fight, flight, freeze, and appease. These impulses may help keep us safe from spiders and clowns (answer for both: flight!), but what do we make of the dangers that are harder to pin down? What if the dangers are not only without but within?
Leave it to this year’s hit TV series to explore these questions. If you’re looking for a spooky show to get into this weekend, it’s Widow’s Bay. The Emmy-sweeping, genre-bending, horror-comedic series is a triumph for a number of reasons. For starters, it muddles the black-and-white worlds Hollywood has created (e.g., horror movies without humor, comedies without any depth), reminding us that life can be both scary and funny. The show has all the irresistible horror tropes (the harbinger who warns everyone of impending doom, the suspenseful music, the jump scares) but, along with its crowd-pleasing antics, it dives deeper than surface-level fears. Its anthropology is refreshingly low. This is not a match between good people and evil monsters.
Yes, sometimes the enemy is a chainsaw-wielding fiend. Much scarier, however, is when the enemy is yourself.
Take Tom Loftis, for instance, the ambitious new mayor who wants to transform the cursed island town of Widow’s Bay into the next Martha’s Vineyard. He is, from every angle, a secular man. For Tom, God is no more real than ghosts. The only higher power that exists is the one you achieve by climbing the ladder. He resents how the locals tolerate the town’s haunted reputation. For too long, people have been resigned to the rumors that the hotel is haunted, the church is cursed, and the bay isn’t safe for a swim. For Tom, the only thing to fear is fear itself. Like any mayor with a messiah complex, he sets out to do something about it.
As Loftis sees things, the real problem with the place is not that it is demonically possessed. The real problem is bad branding. In his eyes, Widow’s Bay is simply misunderstood. When visiting Widow’s Bay to write a piece for the New York Times travel section, a reporter asks Loftis about a framed article in the historical society titled “Cannibalism in God’s House.” Loftis tries to water it down. “These stories get so exaggerated over time,” he says. “Was there a deadly storm in 1786? Yes. Did a group of people get trapped inside a church? Apparently so. Did they immediately turn to cannibalism? No, that took four days!” See? That’s not so bad, right?
Loftis’ PR campaign is like slapping new siding on a haunted mansion. He is convinced that the plight of Widow’s Bay can be solved by installing a proper cappuccino machine in the local coffee shop. Cappuccino machines are great at making a proper latte but pretty useless when up against the occult. Before long, Loftis’ denial of the curse over the island town is just as dangerous as the curse itself. The first step to keeping the forces at bay is to admit they exist.
There is a scene in which Loftis speaks to another character about the Trolley Problem, an ethical thought experiment in which there is a runaway trolley barreling down the tracks toward a crowd of people. In this hypothetical setup, there is a lever that would switch the trolley to a different track with only one person on it. Pull the lever and you kill the one person. Do nothing and a crowd of people dies. The inevitable question: Would you accept responsibility to kill one person in order to save that many more people?
For Loftis, the Trolley Problem is a no-brainer. Do something! Pull the lever! Save the people! But the other character begs to differ. To Loftis’ horror, she says she wouldn’t pull the lever. “The runaway trolley is life,” she says. “The lever is me. You can’t control the bad things that happen in life, Tom.” When Loftis protests, arguing that Widow’s Bay is a house of horrors, she responds, “Life is a house of horrors! In all its ugly, beautiful, terrible glory. You just have to accept it.” Of all the responses to fear, acceptance is an option that Tom Loftis has never considered. Surprisingly, once all the other options have failed, it is the only thing to do.
The entire scene revolves around a quote by Tennessee Williams that has been squeezed onto a framed needlepoint screen:
The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
The real horror in this terrifying world — the one that we are most afraid to admit — is that we have absolutely no control. We may do everything we can do to distract us from that reality, but no amount of fighting, fleeing, freezing, or appeasing will keep life from having its way with us. The runaway trolley comes for us all.
As it barrels down the tracks toward us, however, something happens. The lever gets pulled. The trolley switches tracks. The world is spared at the expense of a single individual. One life sacrificed for many.
There is much to be afraid of these days: an uncertain future, social instability, all kinds of epidemics running rampant (not to mention spiders). And yet, our fears are no match for one thing. The only thing that can banish our fears altogether: the love of God.
