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What Do Mirrors Have to Do With Earthquakes?

When I walked out of my San Andreas screening last week, there were a lot of things on my mind. I was thinking about the movie’s special effects and all the ancillary destruction and what I was going to say in the review. I was thinking about how Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson nearly cried in the movie—something so unexpected that I halfway expected to see a pig wing its way past me on my walk to the car.

But above it all, I thought: If I ever find myself in central or southern California again, I will not be parking in an underground garage.

San Andreas may be a lot of things, but a slam-dunk tourism tool it is not. I love California, but to be there if/when the ground starts a-shakin’ is not my idea of a great vacation. And even though San Andreas is an outrageously preposterous disaster movie, it still got me thinking about what a real disaster might look like.

I’m not alone. According to TMZ, earthquake disaster preparedness kits are flying off the Internet’s virtual shelves. Folks at the tellingly named earthquakestore.com are reporting a 300% surge in sales. The biggest seller? A $35 Quake Alarm, which will alert you to a potential tremor whole moments before the pictures actually start falling off walls. But the site also sells all manner of emergency kits, including some for your pets (only $59 for your cat, who’ll invariably need a handy toy and, perhaps a little oddly, a leash.)

0604blogmiddleThe wags at the A.V. Club, after hearing the Earthquake Store had already sold $100,000 worth of $250 Deluxe Emergency Preparedness Kits, tried to get in on the action, offering to its readers “Post-Earthquake Earth Replenishers.” “These are large handfuls of earth (also known as “dirt”), so that you can fill up the giant crack running through your backyard,” wrote Alex McCown. “When you think ‘Earthquake,’ think ‘earth.'”

I won’t be buying any earth replenishers from the A.V. Club anytime soon. But the story did remind me just how strangely influential movies can be, particularly when they tap into our own anxieties. Sometimes they even help create them.

In 1960, when Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho was first released, a bevy of moviegoers suddenly freaked out over taking showers. Jaws, released in 1975, precipitated a noticeable drop in tourism in beach towns across the country. “The fact that it was able to scare people out of the ocean in mass numbers, to the point where tourism on the coasts were seriously affected, helped show how influential movies can be in our society in culture,” writes Jordan Maison at cinelinx.com. Jaws 2 even played on our sudden aversion to the beach, luring potential viewers with the tagline, “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water …”

And even if we’re atypically brave souls who will splash in our showers and oceans with unthinking abandon, chances are we’re still scared of something. And that fear has often been leveraged, amplified or even triggered by our entertainment. If we think about the times we’ve been terrified for no good reason, I’d guess that about 80% of us were either watching a movie (or television show) at the time, or suddenly flashing back to a scene from a movie (or television show) when we heard that strange bump in the basement. And it doesn’t have to be CGI-laden entertainment to be an effective frightener, either. Trust me: I know.

In the 1930s and ’40s, way before television was king, The Shadow was one of the most popular radio dramas in the country. It chronicled the exploits of Lamont Cranston, a man who had somehow learned to cloud men’s minds and thus become invisible. He’d solve a mysterious crime every week, and many of the mysteries lent themselves to the macabre.

My grandmother, for some reason, had a couple of old Shadow episodes on a vinyl record, and one afternoon—when I was about 6—the whole family listened to one. It involved what was supposedly a magic mirror that revealed the faces of those about to die.

That night, my parents tucked me into bed at Grandma’s house. Above the bed hung a sepia-tone picture of my grandmother’s grandmother, all wispy hair and haunting eyes. And at the foot of the bed was a nightstand with … a mirror.

I did not sleep in the bed that night. Nor did I sleep in a room with any sort of mirror in it for the next 12 years. Long after the fear of the actual Shadow episode had diminished, my bizarre mirror phobia was still with me. The first time I had a mirror in my room thereafter was in college, where every dorm room was supplied with one … bolted to the wall. If I had found a way to take it down, I might still be mirror-less today.

We can say that our entertainment is “just” entertainment. We can tell ourselves that the movies and the television shows and even the old radio broadcasts we listen to have no impact on how we think and act. But I’d imagine that, if we thought about it a little, we’d realize it’s a lie. The stories we watch and hear can influence us mightily, and in some very strange ways.