Editorials
[Editorial] ‘Temple Run 2’ and The Black Dog of Depression
Temple Run 2 is a horror game.
Recently, that’s been sort of obvious. For October, developer Imangi’s endless runner was decked out in Halloween accouterments. Jack-o-lantern’s shine with glowing, yellow smiles as you sprint past. A kryptonitic green liquid has replaced the blue H20 that usually flows down waterfalls. Dead ends are marked with tombstones, ghosts lurk just off the track and bone-white candles and cobwebs spookify the fallen logs that obstruct your path.
But, strip away the haunted house decorations, and horror is still at the heart of the Temple Run 2 experience. More specifically, Temple Run 2 can be read as an allegory for depression that gives physical shape to mental illness in much the same way that The Babadook did in 2014.
But, before we dive into that, a few words on what— allegory aside— Temple Run 2 is. In the 2013 sequel to the hit 2011 mobile game, players assume the role of an Indiana Jones-style adventurer navigating an endless, procedurally generated obstacle course. The adventurer must move quickly because a hulking monster pursues him.
The creature, which is covered in black fur and looks like a mixture of bear, gorilla and dog, is relentless. One misstep and the monster is at your heels. Two missteps and the monster has captured you, scooping you up in a massive paw and using your puny body to pound its barrel chest.
None of this is especially scary (though, as you get further along and the track becomes increasingly serpentine, the tension gets ratcheted up significantly). But, intentionally or not, Imangi makes interactive a famous metaphor for depression, popularized by Winston Churchill. The former British Prime Minister referred to his depression as a “black dog,” a phrase which he borrowed from Samuel Johnson.
“I think this man might be useful to me,” Churchill said, of a doctor who had treated the wife of a friend of his, “if my black dog returns. He seems quite away from me now – it is such a relief. All the colours come back into the picture.”
This metaphor has always, in my mind, conjured the image of an animal stalking its prey, hiding in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to strike. This may be because I associate the metaphor with the Grim, the literal black dog that Harry sees on a London street before boarding the Knight Bus in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Professor Trelawney tells him that this animal is an omen of death for whoever encounters it. (Things end up working out okay between Harry and the dog, but it’s still spooky).
The beast in Temple Run 2 also means death for whoever encounters it. Imangi’s game is an endless runner, meaning the aim is to achieve a high score, not to beat the game. You can’t beat the game; for as long as you can run, procedurally-generated track will stretch out in front of you. That means that, if you decide to play Temple Run 2, to encounter the beast, it will certainly mean death for you eventually.
To my depressed brain, this is what makes the concept of the black dog existentially terrifying. When I see older celebrities, like Robin Williams and Anthony Bourdain, become victims of suicide—both while in their sixties—it can be triggering. It reminds me of the dogged persistence of the pursuer. These men dealt with issues of mental health until late middle age, and they still weren’t able to escape.
Temple Run 2’s beast embodies this version of the black dog. Fast, strong, and tireless. No matter how many stages you unlock, how many crystals and coins you collect on the track, how many dodges and leaps you execute flawlessly, the beast follows.
But, fortunately, there’s a more hopeful facet of the metaphor. Humans have been taming dogs for centuries. Canines can be unruly. Sometimes they bite. Sometimes people are even killed by dogs or infected by rabid bites. But, dogs can be leashed, they can be walked, they can be lived with.
The same is true of the black dog. If you or someone you know needs help in that endeavor, this is a great place to start: https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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