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What's the Worst That Could Happen? (Suspended Animation Edition)

A well-worn -- yet still fascinating -- science fiction trope involves suspended animation, the process whereby a person is metabolically "frozen," usually in a tube, capsule, or bed of some type, for a very long time, sometimes for centuries. 

Sometimes suspended animation is utilized for crews on long interstellar voyages (Pandorum [2009] or Passengers [2016]).  

Sometimes it is used because a patient has contracted a terminal illness, and a cure has not yet been discovered (The Starlost, Star Trek: The Next Generation, etc.). The idea there is that the sick person will be awakened in the distant future, and healed of their malady.

Going back more than sixty years, the science fiction cinema and cult-TV catalog have obsessed on suspended animation, and the myriad things that could go wrong in the long-term application of cryonics.

Accordingly, you will find below a list of the ten worst things that could happen to you in suspended animation, at least according to popular movies and TV shows.  

What's the point?  If you try to trick the clock and go the suspended animation route, be careful!

10. You awaken from your hibernation tube and find that all your belongings and fortune no longer are worth a penny, because man of the future -- your new present -- is now enlightened to the point that money is obsolete. Your brokerage and banks cease to exist! You went to sleep a millionaire, and now you're expected to take up pottery, or learn the flute.

Oh, and at the same time, you have awakened to find yourself on a starship on red alert, at the outer edges of space, on the brink of war with a long-time Cold War enemy, in this case, the Romulans. [Star Trek: The Next Generation: "The Neutral Zone" (1988).]

09. You go to sleep with a group of other crooks, having stolen a fortune in gold in a daring caper. You hope to sleep for a hundred years, wake up, and spend the money when no one is still looking for you.  

However, when you awake from suspended animation a hundred years later, one of your fellow crooks begins killing off your friends so he can keep the gold for himself. You manage to survive, only to find out that gold is worthless in your new, present era. In this day and time, anyone can manufacture and print gold. You left behind your life for nothing. [The Twilight Zone: "The Rip Van Winkle Caper." (1961).]

08. You wake up from suspended animation at the wrong time, almost a century too early. This means that because of a cryonics malfunction, you'll have to spend the rest of your life completely and totally alone, waiting for the rest of the sleeping crew to wake up. 

Either that, or you will have to do something completely unethical: wake up a companion so you will have someone to share your misery with you. [Passengers (2016)].

07. While you are sleeping on a long space journey, your suspended animation tube cracks, and you die slowly in your sleep. Admittedly, this fate is nightmarish, but at least you have no awareness about what has gone wrong. You just fall asleep in your tube, never again to awaken. 

It's much, much worse for those who are on the long space trip with you, in part because you are the only female aboard the ship. [Planet of the Apes (1968).]

06. As a genius and philanthropist, you are awakened into a post-apocalyptic world with the world's greatest minds, the very people who can save the ruined world and build a brighter future. But you went to asleep, decades ago, infected with the very plague destroying the world. Now, there are six "greatest minds" left alive in this future world, and only three does of vaccines for the plague. 

Do you take your chances that you'll be selected for survival after your long ordeal, or do you kill the competition? [Logan's Run: "The Crypt," by Harlan Ellison [1977].)

05. You have just died, apparently, in a car accident, but -- good news! -- your head has been saved and put into cryogenic sleep, in a small silver, temperature-controlled tank. 

In your new cryonic existence, you soon find you can reach out via telepathy to contact other, living people. But then, someone -- a professional rival from your previous life -- comes along and sabotages your tank, thawing out your severed head (and brain), so that you can die in a drippy pool of water. [The X-Files: "Roland" [1994].)

04. You are put into cryonic sleep because you are suffering a fatal disease (in this case, a "radiation virus.")  The idea is that, in the distant future, you will be awakened, and cured of this currently untreatable malady. 

Instead, however, two uneducated farmers awaken you early, and you die of the virus because a cure has not yet been developed, even in the far future. D'oh! (The Starlost: "Lazarus from the Mist." [1973]).

03. You awaken from suspended animation on a spaceship in flight.You quickly learn that the nuclear reactor has gone critical, and is in danger of imminent meltdown. Worse, the ship's un-frozen passengers are awake, and have mutated into berserker, zombie creatures. Now you must repair the ship and evade the zombies, and then get to the new planet you hoped to colonize. (Pandorum [2009].)

02. The Earth is decimated and sterile, but you are selected to go into suspended animation, and, centuries hence, re-populate the dead planet as it is reborn. 

In the meantime, you will be stored in cryonic sleep aboard a space station in Earth orbit.  Sadly, while you sleep in the suspended animation vault, the station is invaded by carnivorous, intelligent space bugs, the Wirrn, who promptly feed you and the rest of humanity, to their hungry, slimy young. (Dr. Who: "The Ark in Space" [1975].)

And finally...

01.  You lie, cheat and steal your way into a berth on a ship headed home to Earth. It will take 75 years to get home, so you will have to be put into suspended animation for the trip.  

Unfortunately, you are so suspicious and paranoid, given your methods of boarding the ship, that you don't let the crew tend to your capsule. 

Accordingly, you wake up one hour into your 75 year trip to find yourself fully conscious, trapped in a hermetically sealed chamber. The crew is all comfortably asleep, so no one can hear your plaintive cries as you find yourself, essentially, buried alive in your coffin.  

Enjoy the trip home! (Space:1999: "Earthbound." [1975]).

Honorable mentions:

In The Twilight Zone episode "The Long Morrow," an astronaut (Robert Lansing) slated to go away on a long trip to another solar system falls in love with a beautiful young woman (Mariette Hartley). 

The lovers realize that by the time he returns from his space voyage, she will be an old woman, and -- because of suspended animation -- he will still be young.  They part, sadly.  

On the long trip, however, the astronaut decides not to go into suspended animation, growing old as he travels.  He returns to Earth an elderly man, only to find that his lover went into suspended animation upon his departure, and has remained a young beautiful woman. Talk about star-crossed lovers!

Also, one can't forget Alien: Covenant (2017). Here, a mad android named David has the run of a "sleeper ship," and also two thousand colonists in suspended animation. His plan: to experiment on the sleeping colonists with alien DNA, making him a Dr. Frankenstein on a colossal scale. This movie also shows what happens to a sleeping human (James Franco) when a fire sweeps the suspended animation bay.  Not a pretty picture.

The View from My Screen #8

Which series? Which episode?

Horror Lexicon #8: Through the Looking Glass

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

Horror movies frequently serve as a mirror to our world, a reflection of our deepest fears as individuals and as a culture. Given this notion, it’s no surprise that the mirror remains one of the most important and oft-used symbols featured in the genre.  The looking glass, simply stated, reveals a picture of us.

In many instances throughout the horror genre, the mirror represents a peek into another world, a dimension in view, but often beyond touch.  In films such as The Boogeyman (1980), the mirror contains a terrible evil, a repository for a terrible childhood memory, for instance.  In this case, we see ourselves in the mirror and remember the pain we’ve suffered, the pain visible to us, but not to others.

In John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987), the mirror is utilized to represent the “other world,” one where evil dwells, our “opposite.”  This film is exceptionally clever, creating a dynamic of God/anti-God, matter/anti-matter, and deploying the mirror as the visual cue to that similar but opposing realm.

Poltergeist III (1988) treads similar territory, revealing that the world of the supernatural lives as malevolent reflections in all our mirrors.  The idea is interesting, if not consistent with previous Poltergeist lore.

Mirrors in horror movies are also used to say something about how we face fear.  

In films such as Candyman (1992) and Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), characters face the mirror, and quote a name (like “Candyman” or “Bloody Mary”) three times in a row to summon a force of darkness.  In these situations, people are facing themselves and their own fears, and looking for some sign that our “belief” can re-shape reality itself.  We look in the mirror at our own expressions, our terror growing...

There’s an old saying that evil cannot gaze upon itself, and so a mirror has proven a weapon against evil in horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master (1987).  

On a more frequent basis, mirrors are utilized in vampire films such as Fright Night (1985), because vampires don’t cast a reflection.  The mirror shows only empty space where Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon) or other “monsters” should be.  In other words, a mirror reflects life, but not the undead.

The mirror has proven a potent symbolic and visual device in non-supernatural horror films too.  In Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), for instance, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine) hides a terrible secret about himself, a fracturing of his very psyche.  Virtually each time his alternate identity, Bobbi, is mentioned even in passing, De Palma cuts to a view of Elliott looking in the mirror, an important visual cue of the psychiatrist’s schizophrenic nature. 

Single White Female (1992) treads a similar path.  The film involves a psychotic woman, Hedra (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who has never escaped her need for her twin…a girl who died years earlier.  Now, Hedra attempts to complete herself by making Allie (Bridget Fonda) a kind of twin-surrogate.  The film’s director, Barbet Schroeder features numerous shots of Hedra and Allie together in a mirror, a visual attempt to re-capture the film’s opening composition of Hedra and her twin sister.

On a very basic level, the mirror is also a useful device for generating jolts or jump scares.  A character runs into a room, slams the door...and something evil is reflected on the mirror hanging there.  We've seen this kind of surprise jolt in films such as Phantasm (1979) and even, to a degree, in Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), wherein we witness The Shape illuminated by lightning....in a mirror.  

One of my all-time favorite mirror shots appears in this film as well. The Shape lifts his knife, mirror behind him on both sides, and we see an endless lines of stalking Boogeymen in the frame.  This was a perfect visual representation of the film, which featured on more than one occasion "false" or "multiple" Michaels to confuse the authorities (and audiences).

The mirror is featured in (but not limited to…) such horror as: Phantasm (1979), The Boogeyman (1980), Dressed to Kill (1980), The Sender (1982), The Entity (1983), One Dark Night (1983), The Initiation (1984), Fright Night (1985), Cassandra (1986), Evil Dead 2 (1987), Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987), A Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors (1987), John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987), Halloween IV (1988), Night of the Demons (1988), A Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master (1988), Poltergeist III (1988), The Church (1989), Single White Female (1992), Candyman (1992), Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), Dark Shadows (2012).

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