Crash! Boom! A thunderstorm races across the windswept Great Plains. Rain echoes in the distance as life giving water barrels its way east. Throughout geologic time, storms nourish the undulating waves of grass, plants, and animals on the plains. Hold Your Breath (released on Hulu in October, 2024) shows us what happens when the rain stops. It takes place in the 1930s during one of the worst droughts in modern Great Plains history known as the Dust Bowl. The drought caused immense suffering in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. The psychological horror-thriller gives audiences in the 21st-century a vivid picture of life during the Dust Bowl. I’m analyzing the trailer which can be found here: https://youtu.be/Pcpb-Zq4-dQ?si=cAuTRDHc5Vh0zsZQ.
A lone farm house sits covered in dirt after a dust storm. Taken north of Dalhart, TX in 1938. Source: United States Farm Security Administration
It opens with a child asking “Momma can you tell us about the wheat?” Their mother (Sarah Paulson’s character Margaret Bellum) grew up during the period that created the Dust Bowl. She tells them about growing up before the drought when “you could hide inches away” in the tall grass and not be found. When she was younger, Americans transformed the short grass prairies of the Great Plains from a natural wonder into the bread basket of the world.
By the late 1800s, the grand herds of bison were gone. The Great Plains sat empty. People saw a golden opportunity to “civilize” the plains by converting it to farm land. Cities like Garden City, Kansas (founded in 1878) and Dalhart, Texas (founded in 1901) sprung up from the plowed prairie sod. The early decades were successful but World War One changed everything.
After the war, someone needed to feed Europe. Wheat prices shot up and American farmers took advantage. They squeezed every ounce of profit out of the land by farming every inch possible. It’s a good business model in wet years but devastating in dry ones. Farmers destroyed the complex root structures of native plants that held the soil together. Grasses like the little bluestem adapted to the dry climate (the region gets about 13 to 21 inches of rain per year on average) by sending roots deep into the ground looking for water. They were gone by the 1930s and shallow wheat roots couldn’t hold the soil in place.
Throughout the movie, you see a landscape that actually fits the moniker “American Dessert.” The drought transformed the lush grassland into a dry, sandy environment. Without the roots holding it together, dirt went air born. All that sand and dust in the air caused significant human suffering. Famous novels like The Grapes of Wrath and photos like the Migrant Mother series by Dorothea Lange publicized the plight of migrants going west to escape the Dust Bowl. Hold Your Breath depicts the people who didn’t leave.
The dust crept into buildings from every direction. At 0:31 in the trailer, Bellum sadly says “it’s a battle” against the dust. People tried everything to keep it at bay. They shoved fabric into every crack, door stop, and window sill. Nothing worked and the dust slowly choked life on the Plains. At one point in the trailer viewers see children lying in bed coughing and looking sickly. Maybe they have a cold or something, right? Wrong. Like one of the adult characters says, “it’s just too much dust in the air.” Doctors called it “dust pneumonia” and it swept across the Great Plains in the 1930s. It was a catch all term for any respiratory infection caused by breathing dust. Medical professionals tried everything to help.
In many cases, the long drives in dusty conditions caused more suffering. Historian Donald Worster stated many dust victims were almost dead when they arrived at rural hospitals. Patients “spat up clods of dirt, washed the mud out of their mouths, swabbed their nostrils with Vaseline, and rinsed their bloodshot eyes with boric acid water.” After a series of dust storms in April, 1935 the small hospitals in Meade County, Kansas reported over half their patients were dust related and 33 people died.[1] Similar reports echoed across the plains. In response, people tried all kinds of make shift masks. At 2:17 in the trailer, a woman is wearing a great example of those masks. It looks like a cup with air holes covered by fabric over her mouth. I don’t know how effective these masks were but it’s a sign of the desperation and struggle to survive.
I don’t enjoy horror movies but Hold Your Breath is an exception. It does an exceptional job showing the lived experience of an entire generation of people on the Plains. It’s too easy for people to gloss over those lives. People in big cities like Los Angles get a glimpse of the dust and grime but it’s so hard to comprehend for many of us. Eating, breathing, smelling, and seeing the dust for months at a time is unimaginable for many people in the U.S. today. For people on the Plains in the 1930s, it was a daily reality. Their Duster was the dust itself.
[1] Dust Bowl, pg 20.