Last night I watched the 1974 thriller The Parallax View for the first time. It had been on my list for a while but something I never really got around to. The premise of the film is that after a political assassination, Warren Beatty’s character, a journalist, tries to uncover a conspiracy that arises when people who witnessed the assassination are periodically killed. Yet they are killed in such a way that no one thinks they are murdered (drunk driving, pills that look like heart attacks, drowned in a fishing accident, etc.). An interesting thing about this movie, being made in 1974, is that it happened after Watergate, but before the great ‘All the President’s Men’ was made (which was made by the same director, so perhaps ‘Parallax View’ was a warm-up).
So. The movie itself was good and entertaining. Yet what I noticed was that night, when trying to fall asleep, I couldn’t. What struck me was how the Parallax Corp. could make people look like they died naturally when they were in fact murdered. Sure, if I watch a horror movie like ‘Halloween’ or ‘Drag Me to Hell’ or ‘The Descent’ before bed I sometimes have trouble sleeping. But those are mostly supernatural horrors. What is so eery about movies like ‘The Parallax View’ is that, while they are called conspiracy theories, they are surely possible.
Maybe I believe in these theories more than most people. But even if we simply look at examples like Watergate or the Kennedy assassination (one that we have mostly figured out and one that we may never figure out), we see that these things do really happen. How scary is it to think that one may be murdered for something they didn’t even know they witnessed? That the food from a delivery service is actually poisoned? That one may die and that everyone around would be told it was from natural causes and no one else would ever know what really happened?
These are the kinds of horrors that keep me up at night.
