For the first 20 minutes that 34-year-old hiker Ryan Osmun was stuck in quicksand, he thought everything would be all right. “I pretty much thought it was mud,” Osmun says now, six months after he sank in a freezing puddle at Utah’s Zion National Park on February 17, 2019. Fifty minutes after sinking, Osmun still felt optimistic. “It was sunny out, at first it wasn’t too bad,” he says. But after 11 hours, with no sign of rescue, his clothes frozen solid, and his body aching from exhaustion, he wasn’t certain he would survive.
As a child of the ’80s and ’90s, Osmun was no stranger to the perils of quicksand before his ordeal. From Flash Gordon’s narrow escape from a swamp in 1980, to Artax’s harrowing death in The NeverEnding Story in 1984, quicksand was once a pop culture staple. It was so prominent in children’s entertainment that roughly two people every single day now tweet a variation of the comic John Mulaney’s gag: “As a kid, I always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be.”
For Osmun, quicksand turned out to be a very big problem, but, as with most things, it wasn’t quite like the movies. The Arizona photographer wasn’t sucked under the sand in seconds as Buttercup was in 1987’s The Princess Bride. Nor did he sink up to his chin as Robin Williams did in 1995’s Jumanji. Instead, his right leg sank up to his thigh and he found himself unable to pull it out. He waited through the night for rescuers during a snowstorm, his life endangered not by suffocation but by exposure. Yet if Osmun’s experiences are so different from what we see on screen, why is it that quicksand was once such a popular trope? And why has the plotline now sunk out of sight?
Arguably, God started it. Quicksand was first a crucial plot device in the Bible. In Jeremiah 38, the eponymous prophet is thrown into a well where he “[sinks] down into the mud” before being rescued with ropes. In 1909, quicksand first appeared on screen in a 12-minute melodrama, Saved from the Quicksand, in which a young woman is rescued by hooded monks. According to Vice, in the ’40s and ’50s quicksand became an easy way to generate sexual tension in a conservative era, as hunky heroes grabbed on to damsels in distress. Slate journalist Daniel Engber, who in 2010 chronicled the rise and fall of quicksand in movies, found the trope was most popular in the ’60s, with one in every 35 films portraying the sinking stuff.
Engber found that by 2010, quicksand was past it, appearing in less than 0.5 percent of movies in the ’00s. The journalist offered a compelling variety of sociological reasons for quicksand’s rise, including colonialism and the Vietnam War, as well as its later demise, including the decline of public sandboxes and the trope’s oversaturation of movies.
Yet things may have been more simple than that. In the ’70s, Hollywood underwent a special effects revolution, with George Lucas’ new company, Industrial Light & Magic, pioneering previously unimaginable digital effects. Could it be that quicksand scenes, which often involved submerging actors in a building material known as vermiculite, were suddenly less impressive?
“I built the set piece in workshop and we tested it, and it worked really well,” says Nick Allder, special effects supervisor on The Princess Bride. The movie’s quicksand scene is a parody, mocking heroes of old, but that hardly mattered when it came to sorting out the SFX. Allder built a tall platform with a hole in the middle that the actors could jump through. To stop the quicksand falling through the hole, Allder used a piece of rubber six inches thick and “sliced like a cake” to seal everything in place. Actors could push through (with the help of baby powder as lubrication), but the vermiculite “sand” stayed put on top. “That was the most difficult bit — getting the foam rubber the thickness that I wanted, and trying to find it in a beige color instead of pink.”
Charlie Keil, a professor of cinema studies and history at the University of Toronto, says quicksand is traditionally “a very simple way of visualizing endangerment,” and that because of its “very basicness” quicksand didn’t really gain anything from the advancement of digital effects. (For proof, compare Jumanji’s quicksand scene to The Princess Bride’s nearly ten years earlier.) Yet Keil has another theory when faced with the quicksand question.
“Quicksand is a mode of danger that depends upon duration,” he says. “For it to be really effective, it has to be slow.” The professor argues that modern action cinema now works on the opposite principle. Thrilling CGI action sequences means “everything has to happen so fast.” Keil notes that our very idea of a hero has changed. While quicksand relies on our main character using ingenuity to escape, modern superheroes have “enlarged, expanded powers where they’re able to engage in elaborate encounters that involve hurling things or smashing buildings.”
Allder, whose special effects career has spanned more than 50 years, says it’s not just characters who have changed but actors, too. He has a more unusual theory about why quicksand fell out of favor. “What I think has happened is you’ve got actors that have become too precious — I’m being honest, I’m being serious,” he says. Actor Cary Elwes was supposed to jump through Allder’s quicksand platform feet-first, but instead convinced the team to let him dive headfirst, despite health and safety concerns. “In the days when I first started, you were working with the Richard Burtons and the Richard Harrises, just bloody great people,” Allder says. “But now, it’s ‘Who’s got the biggest Winnebago,’ and ‘Oh, you mustn’t speak to him.’”
Plenty of other changes possibly contributed to quicksand’s downfall. Not only did plot lines begin to pivot toward technological dangers and away from nature’s perils, but in 2005, scientists finally proved quicksand wasn’t as dangerous as we all thought. Daniel Bonn, a professor of natural sciences at the University of Amsterdam, took a sample of quicksand from Iran after he heard rumors that camels had been swallowed whole. After a series of tests in his lab, he found humans weren’t dense enough to sink completely, and instead, like Osmun, we simply get stuck.
“People do die in quicksand,” Bonn explains, “but it’s not the way depicted in the Sherlock Holmes movie.” Bonn says that because quicksand is most commonly found by bodies of water, people often die from drowning, exposure, or hypothermia. Bonn also debunks quicksand’s most common savior: the humble vine. The force required to pull a human body out of quicksand “is equivalent to the force of lifting a small car.” Osmun was rescued by a team of men using a pulley system. “It felt like my leg was being pulled out of my hip,” he says.
Yet the fact that quicksand scenes are unrealistic doesn’t really explain why they fell out of favor so quickly or why we look upon them with such nostalgia. Other unrealistic tropes from our childhoods, such as our heroes getting lost in the Bermuda Triangle or a classic alien abduction, don’t seem to have the same special place in our hearts. Dr. Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at Le Moyne College who invented the Nostalgia Inventory Test, a measure for how deeply you feel nostalgic, offers an explanation.
“Quicksand scenes are events that can be stored in a relatively simple image,” she explains. “Cognitive research has shown that imagery is very durable in memory and readily retrieved from memory.” Batcho adds that emotion also aids our recollection, so that the horror at the notion of dying a slow, lonely death remained with us.
Age and the advancement of film technology, Batcho says, have left us largely desensitized to film techniques that rely heavily on psychological dynamics. “The infamous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho is a good example,” she says. “Originally, the scene terrified a generation of viewers. Today, many young people consider the original scene lame or bordering on comical.”
Finally, Batcho adds, it’s the absence of quicksand’s comeback that makes us look upon the scenes so fondly. “Embarrassment springs not just from the lack of realism in the original scenes, but also from their inherent simplicity,” she says. Because quicksand remains firmly in filmmaking’s past, generations can engage in collective nostalgia. “Being able to share memories is a form of bonding and gives a sense of belonging to the group with a common history and preferences.”
Yet if quicksand scenes have been declining since the ’60s, why do the comparatively few scenes of the ’80s and ’90s still hold weight in the public imagination? Mulaney was born in 1982, so his quicksand joke wasn’t based on a groovy ’60s childhood. Quicksand scenes may be less frequent, but they’re arguably just as memorable. Why?
“One of the ways we learn about how the world works is through watching television and film and reading books. When we’re kids, we notice recurring ideas,” says Karen Dill-Shackleford, a media psychologist at Fielding Graduate University who studies how immersion in fictional worlds influences our real lives.
Dill-Shackleford argues that recurring scenes become cultural touchstones that we accept “as part of the way the world works.” By way of example, she offers references to “the milkman” as a common way of talking about extramarital affairs, even as few people encounter an actual milkman. Regardless of whether there’s any truth in these recurring ideas, they create a “pop culture code” that sticks with us.
Quicksand is universally easy to understand, and it taps into a variety of common fears such as suffocation, getting stuck, or being buried alive. The psychological appeal of quicksand means that, in fact, quicksand scenes haven’t gone away; they’ve just shifted underneath our feet. From the “devil’s snare” in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), to the “Nesquik sand” in Wreck-It Ralph (2013), to, most recently, the corn silo scene in A Quiet Place (2018), quicksand-esque scenes still provide narrative suspense.
Mark Hawker, a special effects supervisor on A Quiet Place, explains how the team filmed the scene in which two children begin to sink in the silo. “We had to use real corn because there’s nothing that really looks like corn,” he says, explaining vermiculite was out of the equation. Like Allder before him, Hawker built a platform with an open space underneath, but because the corn was so heavy, he was unable to use the traditional rubber opening and instead had to ensure the hole in the platform was the same size as the actors. One of the most unexpected difficulties, Hawker says, was that corn gets everywhere. “I’d leave and go back to my hotel room and there’d be corn all over the place.”
Hawker notes that A Quiet Place’s budget forced the team to rely on old-fashioned practical effects instead of CGI. This lends credence to the idea that quicksand scenes were once so popular because they were cheap and relatively easy to create, and that plotlines developed alongside budgets and technology.
Yet in the end, this isn’t a story about quicksand’s decline. Quicksand scenes remain in our minds (and tweets) if not in our films. In real life, people such as Osmun very rarely get stuck in quicksand, but more often than not, quicksand sticks with us.
Amelia Tait is a freelance features writer based in London. She enjoys tackling subjects that are mysterious, unusual, or just a little bit strange.
