Druid abbey in a metal soarer/It's a total Horror/at 37,000 feet (wookawookawookawooka)
My sincerest apologies to Pop Will Eat Itself. They deserve better than that email title.
Today we have the second title in our four-film Disaster Blaster series, The Horror at 37,000 Feet. Put a lot of thought into this one… maybe more than necessary? Bah, I regret nothing.
Now, despite that huge cast list, I’ve left out some important characters — the flight crew. That’s Captain Slade (Connors), co-pilot Driscoll (Wynant), flight engineer Hawley (Johnson), and flight attendants Margot (Carr) and Sally (Benet). These are the most technically skilled people on the plane, and if the plane is threatened, they should be the ones in the best position to respond. And in fact, they are the first to respond. Here’s point #1. If, by virtue of being supernatural, the spirits of the abbey represent irrationality, then the flight crew, the scientific masters of the gravity-defying airship, represent pure rationality. Slade announces this in the first minutes: “There’s no mystery about it. It’s a selsyn motor, not a human female… it’s an instrument. It won’t lie to you.” And in ghost stories, and H37k in particular, rationality is not only no defense against the supernatural, it’s a vulnerability. The flight crew cannot accept the spirits as real, and so every incursion is explained away. The freezing temperatures in the cargo hold are the result of a blowout. The plane isn’t being held in place by supernatural willpower, but a headwind of impossible, unheard-of speed. Until late in the film, the only people attacked by the spirits are the unbelieving flight crew — Sally and Captain Slade nearly bite it in the elevator, Hawley is turned into a popsicle, and Slade is wounded. Yet, even after witnessing all this, including the Lovecraftian true face of the spirits, Slade is still making excuses. Those that cannot apprehend the irrational are useless.
Once again, tabled any ttrpg material for some thoughts about horror, physical space, and slowness. Check it out!
LINC’S LINKS
• Gene Hackman, 1930-2025, RIP. Here’s A Small Gene Hackman Memory For You by Drew Magary.
• Right after I published my write-up on The Poseidon Adventure, Scott Tobias tweeted/skeeted/posted this article he’d written a few years earlier about the film for The Guardian, keyed to the film’s 50th anniversary.
• One thing I love to read about (and write about) are taxonomies of ttrpg adventures. Here’s a terrific one about the various types of mystery adventures by Wax Wings.
• John Harper of Blades in the Dark fame is working on a new game, one that apparently can support a range of different adventure/genre types, and one of them is disaster-themed. Excited!
NEXT TIME, ON AGAINST THE ‘70S:
