Six things that thrilled the West

What were we afraid of 20, 50 or even 100 years ago? Real threats or figments of the imagination, these six things have caused anxiety in the West in recent decades…and they may still scare you today.

satanic panic

What do roleplaying games and heavy metal have in common? In the 1980s, they were associated with Satanism. “At the time, people were convinced that in almost all American suburbs, there were satanic congregations that met and made human sacrifices,” says Antonio Dominguez Leiva, a UQAM professor specializing in cultural history. According to him, the success of the film Rosemary’s Baby by Roman Polanski, published in 1968, certainly contributed to rekindling this fear of the devil. In the United States, daycare educators, suspected of being part of Satanist groups, have been accused of sexually touching children. Francis Langlois, history professor at Cégep de Trois-Rivières, draws a parallel between the distrust of these men and that of drag queens in the past year. “It is part of the same kind of trend. We demonize categories of people. And that, where does it come from? From a form of Puritan Christian fundamentalism. »

aliens

The idea that there is another form of life in the universe hasn’t always been called terrifying. “Extraterrestrials became worrying when it came to abductions in the 1980s,” says Antonio Dominguez Leiva. People have testified to being transported on ships to undergo medical experiments. “They are really convinced that they have been in contact with these creatures,” he continues. Earlier this year, the Pentagon filed a report on “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” which continued to fuel the debate over whether or not extraterrestrials exist.

Nuclear weapons

The images of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely razed by the explosion of two atomic bombs during the Second World War, marked the spirits. Throughout the ensuing Cold War period, the nuclear threat scares the entire planet. “We were really afraid that at any moment the USSR or the United States would decide to attack with a nuclear bomb and that the other would retaliate. […] It was the fear of the end of the world,” recalls historian and teacher at Villa Sainte-Marcelline Sophie Doucet. The war in Ukraine and rising tensions between Russia and the United States have reignited this fear. However, the nuclear threat had never disappeared, emphasizes Francis Langlois. “Nobody is fully aware that there are still many nuclear weapons and that they are significantly more powerful than those used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. »

evil clowns

They are supposed to cause joy and laughter, but in 2016 they caused panic in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, among others. “Suddenly, there were people who began to see disturbing clowns in their garden, in the woods or on the road”, says Antonio Dominguez Leiva, author of a book addressing this “great clownish fear”. Sometimes filmed, these incidents were the subject of media reports… as was also the case in the 1980s and 1990s. The many horror films featuring evil clowns, including Halloween by John Carpenter, then It, of Stephen King, contributed to feed this fear. But beyond fiction, a very real character has also fueled this fear of clowns: John Wayne Gacy. American serial killer who took the lives of at least 33 young men in the 1970s, he was nicknamed by the press the “killer clown” because he disguised himself as such to volunteer in hospitals.

Terrorism

The attacks of September 11, 2001 completely changed the fear of terrorism in the United States, of course, but also elsewhere in the world. If before 2001 it was associated with an internal threat, as was the case in 1995 when a far-right group blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, the collapse of the twin towers has changed this view. “With 9/11, terrorism became the fear of Islamism. We have “ethnicized” terrorism”, notes Francis Langlois, associate member of the Observatory on the United States of the Raoul-Dandurand chair. “The fear that it would happen again made many people suspicious of a category of the population that we associated with these events. Fear fuels racism, intolerance,” adds historian Sophie Doucet. Even today, we feel the effects of this “fear of the other”, think the two experts.

Virus

Absent from the thoughts of many Quebecers just four years ago, fear of viruses has come back strong in 2020, thanks to a certain disease called COVID-19. However, the fear of pandemics has been observed in waves since the end of the 19^e century, says Antonio Dominguez Leiva. “At that time, there was paranoia around the discovery of microbes and microbial medicine. The fear that anarchist groups would use viruses against a portion of the population was real at the turn of the 20th century.^e century. This fear of bioterrorism has also reappeared during the world wars, the cold war and even quite recently. “It remains the hypothesis of many people on the origin of the COVID-19”, underlines the professor of UQAM.