The short answer is that Hollywood realised it could produce cheap and suspenseful peril scenes with a pool of water covered with cork chips and a layer of sand. This is an example of a textbook definition becoming more scientifically inaccurate over time – as we’ll discuss later, real quicksand does not actually suck you down – so what happened in between? There were inland bogs and marshes (particularly up on the moors) that swallowed up unwary characters in gothic horror novels, but that was referred to as mire rather than quicksand.īy 1975 the Webster’s definiton had been changed to “a bed of soft or loose sand saturated with water and having considerable depth, yielding under weight and therefore tending to suck down any object resting on its surface” (my emphasis). An 1838 edition of Webster’s dictionary described quicksand as “sand easily moved or readily yielding to pressure, loose sand abounding with water… Unsolid ground” – the natural phenomena of tidal quicksand (uneven ground that undulates and gives way beneath your feet) and mudbanks (which you could actually sink deep into) would have been familiar practical hazards to a seafaring society trading and foraging along the coastline. It’s worth noting that quicksand as it was understood in 1908 is a little different to that understood by young John Mulaney in the much-memed comedy bit at the top of this darkticle. This is, as far as I am aware, the first quicksand fatality to be depicted on film, and one of the few to thoroughly document the experience in other media.

He tears and tugs madly for liberty, but down, down, down he goes, until he is completely engulfed in the murky sand, and the last picture shows only a writhing, twitching hand protruding from the sand.

The terrible truth that he is caught in a quicksand dawns upon him, and he struggles frantically, but it sucks him further down. He endeavors to find a path and wanders to the beach, where, as he walks, he suddenly finds himself sinking into the mire.

The anxious man runs earnestly along, but being a stranger, soon loses his way. I have been unable to find a copy of the film or even still images from it, but here is a description of what Paul Capellani did on camera in genuine tidal quicksand in an era before the film industry figured out how to safely fake movie stunts, and then commemorated in plaster:

Quicksand visuals video