One of the scariest movies I saw as a kid was Jaws.
I was way too young to see it in theaters during its initial release in 1975. ABC finally televised it in on a school night in November 1979 and for some reason my mom, in a rare, permissive mood, allowed me to stay up late and watch it. Of course, it was heavily edited for primtetime family viewing, which means there was no cursing or nudity and very little gore. For those who enjoyed the ferocious bite of the original, the TV Jaws was probably more of a PG-rated gumming. But even in its most innocuous incarnation, the film still wielded a visceral kind of terror. My 10-year old soul was so traumatized near the end when Quint slid down the deck of The Orca and got gobbled down like an oyster on the half shell, that my knees were literally knocking. Mom happened to glance over at me in the dark, curled up on our emerald green recliner, trembling, and mercifully asked me if I was done watching for the night. Yep! I was outta there!
I laid in bed all night with my New Zoo Revue nightlight on, nauseated and terrified of the dark horrors that the ocean held beneath it’s roiling surface. Sharks were VERY REAL. I had been to happy little resort beaches, just like the ones in the movie. That could’ve been ME chomped in half on a beach raft! It would be another decade before I actually saw the unedited movie in its entirety.
I still love going to the beach, but Jaws singlehandedly caused me to despise and fear sharks… to this day. Which confirms to me now, all these years later, that the scariest and most effective make-believe stories are always the ones that play into primal prejudices and phobias.
The “Found Footage” Technique
The Blair Witch project was one of the most successful movies of the 1990’s. It’s often cited as the scariest movie of all time too.
Filmed on a shoestring budget of $35,000, it went on to gross almost a quarter of a billion dollars in the U.S. Although it didn’t invent the genre, it popularized the whole concept of “found footage” movies– i.e. the cinematic technique in which part of the movie is presented as if it were recorded by characters in the story, and later “found” and presented to the audience.
Blair Witch featured shaky, handheld cam footage, supposedly capturing the terrible fate of a group of young filmmakers who were making a video documentary in the woods about a local witch legend . Although the largely unseen 1980 Italian exploitation film, Cannibal Holocaust, used the same technique almost 20 years before, a new generation of young audiences lapped the concept up. Many early audiences thought the film was real. The concept has since been used, to lesser effect, with a host of horror movies and short films.
Fake Story, Real Horror
Most people are unaware that the most popular “found-footage” horror myth of all time, is a book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Originally published in 1903 by a Russian newspaper, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion purported to feature leaked excerpts of the minutes from a clandestine meeting of the world’s most wealthy and powerful Jews. The “stolen” transcripts from this alleged meeting— featuring a total of 24 specific “protocols”—outline sinister strategies for Jewish world-domination. The writings were presented as an exposé of top secret documents and were regurgitated to the Christian public “in the interests and welfare of concerned Christians and humanity in general throughout the world”. The publishers framed the book in the uniquely Christian language of the Apocalypse— with a fiery, unambiguous epilogue : Doomsday is nigh and the Antichrist is now in charge of all global institutions, in the form of world Jewry.
When it was first released in book form, it struggled to find a mass appeal audience. But as chaos and mayhem rumbled across Europe over the next several decades, the ugly scapegoating myth gained traction and eventually became a “blockbuster” global phenomena. Only, instead of entertaining readers, it stoked ancient bigotries and directly incited persecution, pogroms, homicidal outbursts and eventually the institutionalized murder of 6 million people.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion makes a number of completely hateful, fictionalized assertions– many of them merely modern updates of more ancient scapegoating myths from the Middle Ages:
- The Jews have built a worldwide secret society that seeks to infiltrate and destroy all establishments, institutions and governments.
- The Assembly of the Elders of Zion are the secret, supreme government of the world. This small, Jewish cabal controls every facet of world affairs.
- Elite liberal Jews revel in the rise of atheism and the destruction of Christianity
- As a part of this takeover strategy, the Jews deliberately foment revolution and wars in different nations in order to introduce their destructive liberal principles as a “solution”.
- One of the most intriguing myths in these documents is the claim that the Jews would install a “dummy” president in a prearranged, phony election. He would be a man with a problematic record, which would make him easily controlled by the Zionist elites and therefore a “mere puppet in [their] hands”.
- Freedom of the press is a Jewish strategy for confusing Christians in a “labyrinth” of opinions
- The Jewish call for liberalism and liberal principles will “eat like worms” into the foundation of Christianity, “destroying their peace, steadfastness and unity”
- The “Jewish” influence of the sciences is a social strategy designed to demoralize Christians. Darwin’s theory of evolution was “prearranged” by the elite Jews.
- The Jews falsely promise liberty to the common man, and the idea that liberalism will lead them to a “kingdom of reason”, but it is intended to trap them in the eventual snares of Socialism, Anarchism and Communism.
- Class war is an invention of Jews–e.g. it is the Jews who incite workers to demand higher wages, form unions and organize strikes.
- This Jewish supreme government owns most of the world’s gold reserves and controls most banks. They are the true “masters” of the stock exchange and they bankroll everything of importance in the world.
Between 1905 and the early 1930’s, these “found documents” were printed in a variety of languages and began to see wide circulation throughout Europe and eventually in the United States. Automaker Henry Ford, infamously published hundreds of thousands of copies in his four-volume “International Jew” series. By the 1920’s, the text was printed in Arabic and saw broad distribution throughout Muslim countries [Richard S. Levy, pg 36, A Lie and Libel] . Hitler and Nazi Party officials referred to the Protocols repeatedly. Many Muslim countries still promote the Protocols as fact, to this day.
Anti-Semitic Zombies Summoned By MAGA
Although the sordid history of the Protocols lay largely dormant in the Western world following the Second World War, there were flashes of its reemergence at the end of the 20th century, among Muslim nations, Illuminati conspiracy theorists from the West and various Neo-Nazi sects.
The most bizarre wrinkle in this saga has been the revival of Protocols mythology within mainstream, Right Wing American politics. And no surprise here: it has also re-emerged within mainstream Christianity. Most baffling, is its echoing within Evangelical factions, who borrow the anti-Semitic language of the Protocols and subscribe to its toxic conspiracies and yet simultaneously claim to support Israel.
Qanon conspiracy theories have been tweeted and retweeted by former President Trump and his MAGA followers ad nauseum and those ideas have a straight through line to the Protocols, as well as blood libel myths of the Middle Ages. The use of “globalism” or “globalists” as an epithet in Right Wing circles– i.e. code for “Leftist Jews”– is another riff stolen from the Protocols. The “Soros conspiracy”, which is universal among today’s Republicans and their array of media outlets, is an obvious motif from the book as well.
Reading the Protocols in today’s hyper-polarized climate, which I’ve done several times over the past few years, feels eerily prescient. The comparisons to 2023 Republican tropes is so obvious, commentary feels almost unnecessary.
Former President Donald J. Trump, has repeatedly invoked the “George Soros” trope in his public statements, which is a conspiracy theory that left wing billionaire Soros is funding violence and mayhem in democratic nations in order to bring about their demise. The “Soros conspiracy” has accused the billionaire philanthropist of funding US riots (one theory has him even paying for spare bricks to be sent to riot locations!), funding ANTIFA and BLM, paying for protestors (see: attached Trump tweet), funding the migrant caravan at the border, funding the “stolen” national election of 2020, and funding the criminal indictments of Trump. In short, when trouble raises its head in civil society, Right Wingers are quick to confirm that the boogeyman of the “international Jew” is somehow directly responsible.
The official Donald Trump 2024 campaign goes so far as to invoke the Protocol’s “puppet master” figure, in addition to blaming Soros for owning the justice system. This isn’t merely political opportunism or scapegoating one’s political adversaries.
The Protocols describe a world in which billionaire Jewish Elders control the powers that be from behind the scenes via manipulation and coercion. The modern Soros conspiracy, a cartoonish depiction of the concealed Jewish hand secretly directing societal unrest and upheaval, is a myth lifted directly from the 120-year old hate manual.
The most disturbing trend in US politics over the past decade, has been the widespread move away from traditional Conservatism and the push towards faith-based conspiracy narratives. Those modern narratives– be they QANON or Soros scapegoating or the blood libel myth of blood-guzzling, child-sacrificing Leftists/Jews — share the same ideological DNA as the anti-Semitic Protocols.
If you pause and take a whiff– you will smell the distinct aroma of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion template everywhere in Republican politics. The smell is death because, as history shows us, this bigotry is more often than not, lethal.
The age-old template still riffs on the main themes :
- Liberals/Jews secretly controlling all world affairs via an all-powerful cabal
- Liberals/Jews deceiving and enslaving bible-believing Christians/Gentiles
- Liberals/Jews confusing the public in order to bring about a Socialist or Communist States
- Liberals/Jews controlling the press, entertainment and global banking
All of it is a revival of these ancient scapegoating myths, which ultimately have a guaranteed trajectory of bigotry, intolerance and violence.
All of it is a recipe for depersonalizing the “other”.
And all of it is a reboot of the world’s scariest fable, which is designed to play on our worst primal phobias and prejudices.
