Quicksand -- brrr, horrible stuff. Back in the day you couldn't move in the movies without taking one wrong step and sinking into a sandy grave (unless your pals were on hand with a handy rope or jungle vine). Well, whether you've noticed or not, quicksand has been disappearing from our screens as the handy peril of choice for filmmakers.

How do we know this? Well, in a beautifully researched essay for Slate, Daniel Engber has traced the decline of quicksand in cinema, which reached its peak during the 1960s. Weirdly, the basis for his research started with online quicksand fetish communities.

Give yourself a minute to laugh/drop your jaw/scratch your head in disbelief and then read that again -- yes, there are actual people who get off on the idea of quicksand. Quicksand -- brrr, horrible stuff. Back in the day you couldn't move in the movies without taking one wrong step and sinking into a sandy grave (unless your pals were on hand with a handy rope or jungle vine). Well, whether you've noticed or not, quicksand has been disappearing from our screens as the handy peril of choice for filmmakers.

How do we know this? Well, in a beautifully researched essay for Slate, Daniel Engber has traced the decline of quicksand in cinema, which reached its peak during the 1960s. Weirdly, the basis for his research started with online quicksand fetish communities.

Give yourself a minute to laugh/drop your jaw/scratch your head in disbelief and then read that again -- yes, there are actual people who get off on the idea of quicksand.

Anyway, Engber used data provided by the "sinker" community's desire to log every film that features quicksand and came up with his graph (which you can admire below) that charts its decline in popularity. Taking in the Vietnam war, Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, 'Star Wars' and many other examples of high/low/pop culture, Engber's article is well worth your time.

Thanks to the 1000+ strong online community, quicksand will never really go away (apparently we're in a "golden moment," according to one fetishist) although it's still losing its pull (get it?) in the movies. In fact, the last big film it featured in was 'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull' -- not the best entry for quicksand's CV, you'll have to agree.

Here's Engber's graph showing quicksand in the movies:



And here's a terrifying moment of death by quicksand from the film 'Kekexili: Mountain Patrol' (2004):