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canyonwalkerWhen we visited Lake Geneva, Wisconsin on Sunday to see the birthplace of role-playing games we also got an unexpected encounter with wildlife: Cicadas. Cicadas were out in force in the leafy old small town.
We first noticed something different when we parked an climbed out of the car. There was a warbling sound filling the air. "Sounds like a car alarm a block or two away," one of the group quipped. "Sounds like multiple car alarms at the same time," another said. "Wait, no, it's cicadas," we all realized moments later. The four of us adults had all heard cicadas before, though not in many years. And the tone of their sound was slightly different from what I, at least, remember from 37-ish years ago.
One of the group spotted a cicada in the tree next to us. We all whipped out our phones to start taking pictures. Then we saw another in the tree. And another. Then another in the grass. Then they got bold enough to start flying around us. They started landing on our shirts, our heads, our legs.
Classic horror movies didn't have to deal with this suspense-killing reality because there were no cell phones— or they weren't common yet. By the late 90s and early 00s most adults had cell phones, but movie makers often didn't acknowledge their existence since they'd destroy the plot. That's when "Why does nobody in this movie have a cellphone?" started to become a trope.
By the 2010s moviemakers generally had to acknowledge that phones existed and could help protagonists make short work of mysteries— so then they'd come up with sometimes-flimsy reasons why cell phones stopped working. That's a related trope, "Suddenly cellphones stop working." And occasionally they still revert to the older trope of "Surprisingly nobody here owns a cellphone" because they (the writers) are that lazy.
Keep reading: We continue headlong into more cicadas!
We first noticed something different when we parked an climbed out of the car. There was a warbling sound filling the air. "Sounds like a car alarm a block or two away," one of the group quipped. "Sounds like multiple car alarms at the same time," another said. "Wait, no, it's cicadas," we all realized moments later. The four of us adults had all heard cicadas before, though not in many years. And the tone of their sound was slightly different from what I, at least, remember from 37-ish years ago.
One of the group spotted a cicada in the tree next to us. We all whipped out our phones to start taking pictures. Then we saw another in the tree. And another. Then another in the grass. Then they got bold enough to start flying around us. They started landing on our shirts, our heads, our legs.
Horror Movie Tropes
This encounter with nature happened at the time we were trying to visit the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum and realized it was closed for another 45 minutes. Visiting Gary Gygax's old house, where he lived when he co-created roleplaying games, D&D, and TSR, was also on our agenda. And it was just a few blocks away, meaning we could walk. Except half the group's phones weren't working right for some reason. One showed our location and claimed to have signal but couldn't load any data (i.e., it had "fake bars"), another showed our location as 40 miles away. At this point my brother-in-law and I quipped that we were clearly characters in a horror movie as we were hitting nearly every horror movie trope:- We arrived in an area with an unexpected threat— hordes of cicadas.
- We initially misread the signs of threat, thinking it was something mundane— in this case, the sound of a car alarm.
- Having noticed the threat we then greatly underestimated its magnitude, deeming it more a cute curiosity than something threatening.
- We then decided to walk— walk— deeper into the threat zone.
- And then our cell phones mysteriously stopped working.
Classic horror movies didn't have to deal with this suspense-killing reality because there were no cell phones— or they weren't common yet. By the late 90s and early 00s most adults had cell phones, but movie makers often didn't acknowledge their existence since they'd destroy the plot. That's when "Why does nobody in this movie have a cellphone?" started to become a trope.
By the 2010s moviemakers generally had to acknowledge that phones existed and could help protagonists make short work of mysteries— so then they'd come up with sometimes-flimsy reasons why cell phones stopped working. That's a related trope, "Suddenly cellphones stop working." And occasionally they still revert to the older trope of "Surprisingly nobody here owns a cellphone" because they (the writers) are that lazy.
Keep reading: We continue headlong into more cicadas!
