‘The Last of Us’ gave us true terror without a scream on screen

It turns out that Halloween was, after all, serious about raising the dead. As if they had been given permission to rise from their graves, the same old silly texts reappear on the Internet every 31 October. Lists of things to scare yourself with on Halloween and compilations of the scariest moments from films and video games. Often soulless articles that repeat the same names over and over again. So yes, Halloween did come true, but the zombies were not in the cemetery, they were on the internet.

Those of us who write for a living (and therefore eat brains) are not journalists, we are Olympic jumpers. After all, when it comes to giving advice, people expect us to do the real thing. “Do you know any scary but not too scary games that are free and can be completed in an hour?” “Do you know of any films for tonight that are atypical, less than 90 minutes long, and have more spooky atmosphere than jumpscares?” You will be forced to dissect the genre from top to bottom, like a coroner, to find the name that ticks all the boxes.

So when we thought about what true horror is and looked at the usual references, our brains landed on ‘The Last of Us’ and stopped fluttering. Because little is remembered on these types of dates. It is usually associated with action and survival, but it also practices a terror that we already saw in ‘Chernobyl’, Craig Mazin’s previous series. A terror born of silence and human stupidity. For example, the prologue that opens the first chapter of Max’s series, perhaps one of the scariest that contemporary television has given us.

His staging was very simple. It had nothing to do with the video game it was adapting. Not a trace of its screams, monsters and explosions. In the show, all we had was a television, a very talkative host, and two scientists explaining to the public that we are not the gods we think we are. As a species, we are walking a tightrope that will one day snap and lead us to extinction. It will not be the result of an alien invasion or the vaunted World War III. It will be a silent defeat based on the everyday mistakes we repeat every day.

Mazin, the showrunner, gets it just right, setting this sequence in a bygone era so as not to sound preachy. The two scientists say that as the planet warms, fungal life forms could evolve and become a real threat to humanity. Faced with the gravity of their speech, the presenter can only swallow his saliva, and the audience in the room shares the looks of tension and surprise. If people who have never heard of climate change are aware of what is at stake, imagine what is on the other side of the screen. It’s a direct punch to the jaw.

The terror in ‘The Last of Us’ does not come from turning up the volume to scare us. It doesn’t come from scenes full of knives and blood and masked men chasing teenagers. It comes from the portrait it paints of our society, smart enough to be aware of its fragility and stupid enough not to take care of itself and strengthen its defenses. The end of the world he proposes could not be more plausible. Just look around, at the epidemic of a few years ago and the climatic disasters of today. They are all the result of the same thing, and we all react in the same way. We limit ourselves to surviving, getting out of the situation, and hoping that the next one will happen to other people, to another generation. The same thing Craig Mazin suggested with ‘Chernobyl’.

This sequence, which the series tried to repeat in later episodes, earned the episode 7 nominations for all kinds of awards and 4 statuettes. Only the emotional third episode got more (22 nominations and 6 awards). And in the end, the latter does not fail to do the same, to be frightening without resorting to common spaces. In his case, he prolonged this feeling for an hour and also showed what we will lose the day we can no longer run forward. I didn’t expect to think about The Last of Us this Halloween, but the chill I still get from its prologue seems to tell me that it’s a great date to remember it.