On Post: Hella Good

Date: January 8, 2014

This one was not a particularly long walk for me. For some reason, my mind went directly to that darkest of films THEY SHOOT HORSE, DON’T THEY? off of Stefani’s repeated assertions that she was, in fact, “going to keep on dancing” for any number of reasons. She is obviously portraying it a.) a choice she’s making and b.) a good thing. But what, as with HORSES, it was neither? What if a force was compelling her to dance and it was bad.

The dance competition angle did not work for me as a.) we don’t really do dance-a-thon and b.) I did not want to outright crib HORSES. So something unseen, something within the body made sense. Like that laughing disease I remember from some podcast forever ago.

Once I had a reason for the uncontrolled dancing and that, if it was a disease, it would not be isolated to one person, the idea of a newspaper article seemed logical. I chose Pennsylvania because it has long been the home of the eerie thanks to Romero and, like it or not PA-ers, Shyamalan so it just felt to me like it was ripe soil for this kind of bizarre plague.