21 Days of Spooky: The Hanging Stranger (Philip K. Dick short story, 1953)

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21 Days of Spooky is not about pop culture that sets out to fright you with brain-eating, viscerae-hanging, slash-killing scenes, but with thoughts that linger and persist on your life long after you've watched them. Or are just downright creepy. Tonight's spooky: Philip K. Dick's "The Hanging Stranger". Some spoilers ahead.


What's it about?: Average dude Ed Loyce discovers a strange man hanging from a lamppost in the street right in the middle of the day, but nobody else seems to care about the why or how the body got there.

Let's begin by clarifying we're talking about the original Philip K. Dick short story, not so much about the Electric Dreams adaptation "Kill All Others" which, even though it touches on a similar topic, it tries to make everything too much, and ends up watering down the powerful message of the short story. The underlying story is still there, with a man discovering something odd nobody else seems to give a flying rat's ass about, alas, pretty much everything else is different.

You see, the plot is very simple, so simple that it hits close to home. There's no need to turn it into a political spectacle like the TV adaptation does, and much less expanding it into a wide-scale nonplussing. How would you react if you saw a man hanging from a lamppost and, to double down on my question, how would you feel if you saw other people passing by the corpse without giving it a single thought, not calling the police, not trying to bring it down, not trying to identify the hanging stranger? In 1953 there didn't seem to be this new "voyeur of agony" trend of snapping people's accidents, so it was even stranger.

Yes, nowadays there would be one or two wannabe YouTube Lou Blooms trying to capture every bit of the dead man, but they still wouldn't be exactly caring for the corpse, wouldn't they? And that is if we were taking the situation literally. But let's say you're visiting a crowded street and there's a beggar sitting under a building, asking for coins, and only you seem to realize he's there because everyone else keeps walking as if the man didn't exist. What are you going to do, stand up in the middle of the busy street and yell at everyone to look at the man and help with some spare change? No, you aren't. You keep walking, too.

Ed Loyce does yell. And boy does he causes a ruckus. To everyone he asks about, including police, he only gets a detached reply and people looking at him puzzled because they can't understand why Ed is panicking so hard. It's just a man hung from a lamppost. Now say you start yelling at people on the street to give the beggar a coin, and nobody even bothers to look at you or embarassingly approach the man with some change... you'd find that weird, because it's in humanity to act when called out. Yet, most people know a bunch of tech is made by child labor, and the common response is still "welp, it's just an iPhone".

Our main character brings awareness, which is great, but it's never enough. Ed is troubled by people's lack of care about the hanging stranger, but all he does is complain and question others. He never bothers to get the man down, or try to figure out its identity, and only when he realizes humanity is lost it's when he starts investigating if those around him truly are human beings. In "Kill All Others", Philbert (Mel Rodriguez) notices the weird political message of MexUsCan, but all he can muster to do is asking people if they too heard Vera Farmiga's character say the titular line. Does that change absolutely anything?

In classical sci-fi convention, humanity will end up being lost, and there's this really interesting (and scary) message about individual thinking. It's never "just you", there's always someone who sees what you're seeing and thinks what you think, but yelling at a disinterested crowd can only bring so much sorrow and disaster, and you can only end up destroying that very thing you want to make light of. Mob mentality is a very dangerous weapon, which man cannot face alone, and should thread lightly in the search of those who can make a stand against the inhumanity in humanity itself.

This massive-scale conclusion I arrived can be applied both to "Kill All Others" and to "The Hanging Stranger", but the latter has a bigger sense of urgency, considering it takes place in a small town, and seeing first a dead person you don't know and then your fellow townspeople not acting like themselves, well, it can be a pickle. But the story at least teaches us that, in the face of strange mass behavior, the advisable thing is to observe and help those you see, before the masses eat you alive.

You can read the short story at Project Gutenberg.

Tomorrow: The thrilling 2003 short film that began a torture porn franchise, James Wan's "Saw".