Caught in a terrifying crowd surge, a panicking Santa is taught critical survival skills by Banta. He learns to use the “boxer pose” to protect his breathing space and the “accordion method” to ride the waves of the crowd and move diagonally to safety.
Crowd crush vs crowd collapse
The Rational Fear
Fear of crowds is a normal or rational fear and not a phobia, particularly after a bad experience or psychological impact of crowd crushes and one needs to learn to cope with crowd anxiety which is called enochlophobia.
The Two Faces of Death
Santa asks whether a static ‘crush’ or a moving ‘collapse’ is more dangerous. Banta brilliantly compares the two, explaining that while one is a horizontal force and the other is a vertical one, they are just two different faces of the same killer: compressive asphyxiation.