Sylvain CORDIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Show More Show Less Now? Oh, you'll run into a piranha-cameo from time to time, but their presence in our cultural spectrum of fears has greatly faded. It's been one roiling, bloody scene after another culminating in the 1978 classic film 'Piranha' since then. In the Smithsonian's ' 14 Fun Facts About Piranhas,' Theodore Roosevelt is blamed for popularizing the delightful fear of piranhas in his best-selling 1913 travelogue. Nevertheless, no adventure movie a few decades ago was complete without some character being eaten alive by piranhas in a boiling, seething mass. But, as with quicksand, science paints them as pretty much harmless to living humans swimming in their midsts. They inhabit fresh water (and so we can imagine them infesting the rivers, streams, ponds or lakes around us), and they have bitten humans. Bettmann/Bettmann Archive Show More Show Less 2 of32Ī more sharp-toothed blip on the mass-hysteria-o-meter, the fear of piranhas had a bit more reality behind it. 'The Hollywood version is just incorrect,' says Thomas Zimmie, an expert in soil mechanics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,' the Nature article states. 'The probability that a person will be completely sucked into the sand. The journal Nature likely delivered the fatal blow to the quicksand plot trick in 2005 when scientists demonstrated that a human wouldn't sink very far in a pool of the stuff. How many of us older-than-Millennials have hesitated to step on a stretch of sand, just in case it turned out to be quicksand? According to an exhaustive 2010 report on the ' Rise and Fall of Quicksand' in Slate, the quicksand trope in movies, serials and novels peaked in the 1960's and 70's.Īnd now? The phobia has mostly passed from our collective fears. The myth of killer quicksand almost certainly has caused some moments of eremikophobia in those of us who grew up watching and reading fictional adventure stories a generation ago.

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