If you haven’t read the preceding post about horror and isolation, do so now! Then soldier on.

As I’ve written previously, fear is not the only element that drives the engine of a horror story. Equally necessary is the element of hope. Characters must have some hope, however small or twisted, to fuel a compelling horror narrative.

Per the preceding post, if isolation is one of the most frightening elements of the human experience, I argue that a central hope to many horror stories is the hope for connection.* Stories that have a “bad ending” often result when a main character fails to find the connection they need to survive. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone lives. But the presence of connection brings a powerful presence of hope to a character arc, especially one in which a character is mortally threatened AND isolated (which, in some cases, are the same thing; are you alone with the tiger, or is the tiger your aloneness?).

Back to Loop Track. I won’t spoil the ending. But I will say, a hinge point of the film occurs when a secondary character experiences what the protagonist is experiencing, and the protag is no longer alone. Someone finally believes him. Even though this doesn’t resolve the mortal threat of the story, it brings such relief to the protagonist (and the viewer) that honestly, the rest of the story could have been an episode of Bluey and I wouldn’t have cared. Thankfully, though, it sustains the tension and follows through in a way that I found satisfying. The closing scene is another poignant moment of connection that clinches the character arc of a human desperately alone, who stumbles his way hopefully to connection.

Entire stories are written on this premise. Stephen King’s infamous It is a manifesto around the necessity of community and connection as a means to survive evil. Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is about a mother tortured by the isolation of her grief, saved by a moment of connection with her young son. I tried to play the video game Alien: Isolation, and spent four hours crawling around an abandoned space station alone and terrified out of my mind, until I finally saw the Xenomorph, and when I did, I nearly pissed myself and DNF’d the game. But when I watched a streamer play, I loved it, because suddenly, I wasn’t alone in the experience.

Test it out for yourself. The next time you read or watch or play a scary story, observe the interplay between isolation and connection, and the tension it creates for you as a reader/viewer/player. Put yourself in the MC’s shoes, ask yourself, if you had do go through what they are going through, could you do it alone?

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*I’m using broad strokes here, because of course there are exceptions. In future maybe I’ll get to writing about final girls, the hero’s vs the heroine’s journey, and what fuels these stories in particular.