ELI5; Why was quicksand such a common film trope when it’s not a problem that people commonly run into in real life?
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People in jungles face it regularly. Maybe you live in the wrolg climate
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short answer: It worked in one movie, scared some kids, and was reused over and over again until it was more of a joke and not scary any more, so was dropped.
Long answer: [RadioLab’s got your covered](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/quicksand).
Why a trope becomes popular is impossible to answer with great authority. However, Daniel Engber theorizes that the extreme popularity of quicksand in films in the 1960s was connected to the feelings of sinking despair and getting stuck by a misstep associated with the Cold War and Vietnam War.
Depends where you are, its common in areas with loose soil and a wet climate, think swamps, jungle beaches. Dosnt really happen often in places like the Sahara
Thoughts of being stuck in quicksand evokes fear. Movies and media love to stir up visceral responses in people. That’s how media knows it’s being effective.
For the same reason that people always slip on banana peels and you can’t have any noises at all when you’re cooking a soufflé.
Watched a horrifying video of a guy who wanted to demonstrate how to escape quick sand. It did not end well.
People tend to fear what they don’t understand. So, having someone suffer in a way that you have not or cannot experience can make thinking about or witnessing it all the more frightening.
I was listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History earlier. The episode series that covered WWI. There was a battle where either France or Britain (forget which) launched an offensive, and it ended up raining all but 3 days that month in an already swampy area. If troops veered from a safe path, they would slip pretty deep in the mud and get stuck. In WWI, offensives needed the troops to move fast before it turned into a stalemate/trench warfare and progress stalled. They didn’t have tanks yet and cavalry got slaughtered by machine guns, so infantry needed to move fast.
So people would slowly sink in the mud, and soldiers were ordered to keep moving forward and couldn’t stop to try to help someone out of the mud. Carlin called it quick sand. I’m not sure when the quicksand trope started, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the early 1900s and inspired by that battle to some extent.
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