FILM COMMENT : Feel Better. See a Scary Film. : People take their own fears into the theater, where many of today’s fright movies offer closure. But this can also make the plots seem absurd.

When politicos talk about how Holly wood movies have bludgeoned us and desensitized us and caused us to do bad things, what rarely also gets discussed are the ways in which movies connect up with and act out our already overactive fears. Hollywood doesn’t need to inspire us to dread; we bring our dread into the theater. And perhaps one reason we go to the movies now is for a communal closing down of dread. Whether it’s AIDS, Ebola or Oklahoma City, we want the satisfaction of seeing our fears allayed in a way they can never be away from the movie screen.

We embrace the solutions Hollywood offers up for our fears. We want to believe, at least for the time we’re in the theater, in all the claptrap heroism and claptrap villainy and happy endings. We want to believe that movies “about” terrorism (“Speed,” “Die Hard With a Vengeance,” “Blown Away”) or nuclear brinkmanship (“Crimson Tide”) or viral plagues (“Outbreak,” “Species”) can be wrapped up in the same old Hollywood-honed ways. In the old days, scare movies sometimes ended with the title card: “The End . . . or Is It?” Now, perhaps more so than ever in our films, we want a sense of closure to the horrors, because in real life the horrors seem open-ended.

Many recent fear movies are engineered for closure. That’s why they often seem so absurd. The fears they touch on are not so tidily disposed of. Watch Dustin Hoffman in “Outbreak” turn himself into a human ICBM and vanquish an Ebola-like virus, “Motaba.” Watch him rescue his marriage (“I can’t believe you’re taking a deadly virus and turning it into a family matter,” he chides his estranged wife). Or watch Bruce Willis in “Die Hard With a Vengeance” swagger his way to victory against a bomb-happy terrorist, and rescue his marriage. All this may not be the best way to spell r-e-l-i-e-f at the movies anymore.

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Old-style heroism works best with old-style villains, although, in these PC times, it’s difficult to find bad guys anymore who aren’t white Anglo-Saxons, preferably with British accents. (Or else they’re dinosaurs or apes.) The problem with the new fear movies about viruses and random bombings is that the old ways of disposing of “new” problems don’t really satisfy us.

We still go to these movies anyway, maybe because a faulty safety valve is better than no safety valve. (Most of the films described here are hits.) And yet it’s more difficult to suspend disbelief now--it’s more difficult to say “it’s only a movie.” When that terrorist bomb rips through Bonwits at the start of “Die Hard With a Vengeance,” which was filmed before Oklahoma City or the latest Unabomber threats, the illusion that we are watching an action cartoon is momentarily snapped, and we resent it a little; that ripple of “real life” into the moviegoing experience calls into question--spoils--our delight in these kinds of vicarious kicks. For modern fear movie-makers, the dilemma is: How do we make it real without making it too real?

In the days of Cold War gamesmanship, we may have fretted about nuclear apocalypse but, whether the approach was straight-arrow like “Fail Safe,” or giddy-gruesome like “Dr. Strangelove,” the battle lines were always clearly drawn: We knew the face of the enemy (Commies, ultra-right renegades, etc.).

But now the modern tyrannies are perceived as more insidious, random, intimate. Viral plagues and random bombings and serial killings are not the sort of fears that unite us; they dis unite us into prejudicial enclaves. As our sense of community has diminished we are more susceptible to fears of invasion of self. Our own boundaries--our very cells--are permeable.

The cycle a few years back of (You Name It) From Hell movies was an early clue to the mood. Whether it was a temp (“The Temp”), a nanny (“The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”), a roomie (“Single White Female”), a tenant (“Pacific Heights”), a fling (“Fatal Attraction”) or a cop (“Unlawful Entry”), all these hellish invaders inserted themselves, randomly, intimately, into our private precincts: our homes, families, marriages, jobs. (If this cycle had survived into the Prop. 187 era, no doubt we would have had an Illegal Alien From Hell movie.) They were viruses in human form, and it’s not a big leap from them to Ebola and AIDS. The warning is still the same: Watch out who you get close to.

Terror images have shifted from the Cold War era. The mushroom cloud has been replaced by the obscene hieroglyphics of the Ebola or the AIDS virus viewed through an electron microscope. The apocalypse has turned inward: invisible to the naked eye.

But in fear movies there must always be someone to blame. How else do you begin to dispel the fear? In dramatic terms, Hollywood in the AIDS-Ebola era finds it too abstract to blame a virus--we’ve come a long way since “The Story of Louis Pasteur”--so the virus, or more to the point, those who unleash it, must be given a human face.

It is not the virus that is the real enemy in such movies as “Outbreak,” where a military cover-up impels the transmission of “Motaba” to a sunny California town; or “Species,” where extraterrestrials send us a mutant strain of their own DNA that combines with ours to create a morph predator in the shape of a super-model (!). The real enemies are the military brass and the profiteers and the God-playing scientists--villains we can understand. The unleashing of viruses is the result of a basic moral taint in the unleashers. We’ve messed with the rain forest and the ecosystem out of greed, and now there’s hell to pay.

This moral dimension associated with the spread of plague--it’s the thrust behind both Richard Preston’s “The Hot Zone” and Laurie Garrett’s “The Coming Plague,” the two “hot” nonfiction plague books--assumes that only the morally righteous can squelch the spread. In all those ‘50s sci-fi movies about giant crabs and ants and spiders, Nature (i.e. the Commies, the Bomb, McCarthyism, etc.) was on the attack. It had to be subdued by the forces of good--Establishment types like the military, government scientists, technocrats.

T hings have changed. Now we must be punished for tampering with Nature and then brought back into the light. What matters now in the new fear movies is that the heroes who fight the fear are brainy, pure-in-heart do-gooders, often on the margins of the Establishment.

Dustin Hoffman in “Outbreak” is improbably valiant--a runty Everyman. (His miscasting is a signal that he’s one of us.) The morph chasers in “Species,” which is by far the best and the most inventive of the current fear movies, are a ragtag bunch: a Harvard anthropologist, a Muslim “empath,” a shambling executioner, a by-the-book brainiac of a scientist and a horny female microbiologist. You feel a warming connection to each and every one of them.

In the mutinous debate in “Crimson Tide” about whether or not to nuke renegade Russians and risk global holocaust, it is the Harvard-educated equipoise of executive officer Denzel Washington that holds sway over the old-school trigger-happiness of captain Gene Hackman. The film never seriously raises a core question: What if the old warrior’s ways were proven correct? The assumption is that only he who is imperially “reasonable” is right.

It’s an assumption that never knitted the brows of an earlier generation of law enforcers--like, say Dirty Harry, whose taint was indispensable to his worth. In order to beat the scum you had to be a bit of a scum yourself.

The commercial success of “Crimson Tide” may have something to do with the public’s high comfort level with nuclear doomsday scenarios now that the Cold War is in permanent deep freeze. Even though the filmmakers attempt to give the action an up-to-date spin--the Russian renegade recalls Zhirinovsky--the apocalyptic machinations seem almost soothing to us now. The back-and-forth yelling aboard the submarine Alabama is a lullaby. In reality nuclear apocalypse is certainly still a possibility--there are plenty of hot wars left--but, in popular terms, we’ve shelved those fears in favor of a newer strain. “Crimson Tide” is a nostalgia trip for people who want that good old-time “Fail Safe” feeling without the willies that go with it.

There’s comfort in “Apollo 13” too, where once again we are presented with a potential disaster with a solvable solution engineered by good people. Tom Hanks’ Jim Lovell is another of our pure-in-heart heroes; so are his fellow astronauts and ground crew. Their miraculous commandeering back to Earth of the damaged lunar exploration module is a testament to American stick-to-itiveness. “Failure is not an option” is the film’s motto. It’s another nostalgia trip, set in 1970, but it bolsters our flagging confidence that we can pull ourselves back from the brink of any dangerous orbit.

“Apollo 13” doesn’t linger on the astronauts’ miseries in space, or the ghastly poetry of being so close to the moon and yet unmoored. It’s pretty much a four-square nuts-and-bolts thriller about how to make it back from your own private hell safely. It displays the proper style of heroism for the current fear-film cycle: All you need is reason and goodwill and maybe a little dash.

The one new fear film that doesn’t conform to all this hearty square uplift is “Safe.” For fear-o-philes, this it-can-mean-whatever-you-want-it-to-mean Todd Haynes film is perfect: It’s a catalogue of virtually every free-floating modern ailment around and, because none of its cures cure, it makes you buggy with anxiety. It’s also just about as rigged on the downbeat as most of these other films are on the upbeat.

Julianne Moore’s Carol White is a vacuous Valley housewife who gradually, inexorably, turns into an allergy-riddled phantasm who can find no real help for her nosebleeds and seizures and panic attacks and depressions from a phalanx of condescending therapists, physicians, allergists or New Age gurus. Toting her oxygen tank and face mask on a New Age retreat, she finally finds a kind of depresso contentment in the solitude of a porcelain igloo (chemical-free, of course).

Carol, in the film’s terms, is allergic to the 20th Century. She’s a stand-in for all the ways in which we believe we are being harmed by silent atmospheric dangers. The key to the film’s inflated critical reception is that Haynes sentimentalizes Carol’s vacuousness by making her a victim. She’s vacuous because the terrors of modern life have blanked her out; her pristine beauty--as porcelain as her igloo--is a residue of what has been ravaged. Carol, conveniently, has nowhere to turn: Her husband is a boob, her stepson unfeeling, her doctors ill-informed or unsympathetic.

And so she does the modern equivalent of the Antonioni walk: She glides through her sorrows puffed by cosmic ennui. Carol represents the educated audience’s toniest masochistic fantasies of its own sweet victimization. She is how we in our most self-dramatizing moments would like to appear in the face of fear: Too poetically sensitive for this cruel, cruel world.

The politicos who blast Hollywood are right about one thing. By and large the people making the movies are not looking to save our souls. But, by fiddling with our fears, they’ve entered a warning zone. The results can be cathartic and lots of fun. Much more often they’re the sheerest exploitation. If, as a result of recent successes, virus movies and terrorist flicks become all the rage, Hollywood will have added yet another toxin to our atmosphere.