One of the truest forms of horror Hollywood ever depicts is the story of mankind abandoned, disoriented or forgotten. Whether it’s a film about being lost at sea like Robert Zemeckis’ “Cast Away” or one about being so miniscule that your spouse believes you’ve been eaten by the family cat — as was the case in the 1957 sci-fi film “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” — movies about isolation force viewers to confront some of their worst fears.
In this month’s Movies on the Radio, host Frank Stasio and film experts Marsha Gordon and Laura Boyes discuss the various forms isolation takes on screen and why ideas about being lost, bereft, and alone are so relevant in COVID culture. Gordon is a film professor at North Carolina State University and a public scholar at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Boyes is the film curator for the North Carolina Museum of Art and the curator of the Moviediva series at the Carolina Theater of Durham.