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• 1 media/Screenshot 2022-10-24 at 9.16.28 PM.png 2022-10-20T08:53:36-07:00 Reflecting on Real Issues 13 image_header 2022-10-25T13:47:51-07:00 Echo-horror works commonly take inspiration from real life facts and events that either have happened or have the potential to occur. For example, the title card of 1977's Day of the Animals states that research three years prior "...startled the scientific world with [the] finding that fluorocarbon gases used in aerosol spray are seriously damaging the Earth's protective ozone layer." It then goes on to state that the movie "...dramatizes what could happen in the near future if we continue to do nothing to stop this damage to Nature's protective shield..." (Girdler, 1977, 00:00:10-00:00:30).
  
  
  
  Similarly, The Maze Runner series is based on an event that was predicted to happen. Munir Ahmed Al-Aghberi makes note of this in the paper "Pandemic Apocalypse In Between Dystopias: Observations from Post-Apocalyptic Novels," stating that "[the] novel’s idea is derived from a pure scientific fact: that a solar flare was predicted by NASA to hit the Earth in 2022" (2021, p. 10).
  Morton & Lounsbury reference Dashner as saying that "...[the series] ‘could serve as a warning’ about ‘how bad a society could get’" (2015, p. 66; Ellsworth, 2011). However, while Dashner may have been focusing more on the dystopian aspect of the series's universe, he also used conventions of the eco-horror genre to extend his story into a frightening tale of human society coping with an extreme natural disaster and a destructive plague. By blending real-life inspiration with eco-horror tropes, The Maze Runner series and other similar works bridge the divide between fantasy and reality. Therefore, while the events within the fictional world are often exaggerated, basing the premise of works in reality punctuates the possibility of such events happening.
  
  
  
  Plot information retrieved from The Maze Runner Wiki | Fandom, n.d..