The first signs of trouble were small. So small that we ignored them. Ditto the second, third, fourth, fifth…
- There’s a relatively minor problem.
- Everyone blows it off (although there might be one person who panics about the situation in an obviously useless, “it’s all in your head” fashion).
- Until it’s too late to do anything preventative to head off major consequences.
- Successively larger efforts to fix the problem may in fact just make things worse.
- Grand Guignol moment.
- Either it finally gets fixed and things are fine (mostly), or it doesn’t get fixed and everything’s fine because the relevant people are dead, so…yeah.
Gremlins. The Orphanage. Death Note. The Haunting of Hill House. Hamlet.* When I was brainstorming this, I was thinking about The Cabin in the Woods, but now I’m not sure about movies of that type. There are a lot of movies where the problem was always horrifically, massively bad, but the characters don’t find it out right away. This is more, “Yeah…we kinda just helped make this even worse.”
*That is, if you look at Hamlet as a horror movie with Hamlet as the antagonist.