Struggling in a panic may actually cause you to drag yourself down instead of up, and survival guides stress the importance of staying still if this starts to happen. The usual advice for someone who finds themselves caught in deep quicksand is to simply relax and float on their back. In fact, real quicksand is so dense that you can't sink in it (with more than half your body). In truth, quicksand (while real) isn't terribly common exerts none of its movie counterpart's mythical 'sucking' power and isn't nearly the Sticky Situation the movies made it look like. In movies, it is often used to set up a Chekhov's Gun scenario in which the hero stumbles into it and escapes early on, in order to set up for a villain to die that way later in the film. In particularly challenging versions, enemies will come out and attempt to drag the player to the depths, making them somewhat similar to Instakill Mooks if sinking in quicksand is an instant-death condition (and it often is).

This trope is a Discredited Trope nowadays, although the Shifting Sand Land of video games is still allowed to play it straight, as a gameplay challenge if nothing else. Originally a movie serial and B-film device, this trope has been carried over to television by way of programs that mimicked or paid homage to those films, or to pulp fiction in general. Although most victims blunder blindly into quicksand, it sometimes seems that the merest touch of an extremity is enough to pull the unwary into its muddy and all-consuming depths like iron filings to a magnet. In all cases, its most dangerous feature is its ability to suck people and animals down and drown them in a malevolent blend of sand and water. Science Fiction stories written before the Moon landings are also liable to describe thick layers of extremely fine lunar dust on the Moon's surface that are treated as functionally equivalent to quicksand. Quicksand is a common and deadly element of swamp, jungle, and desert terrain.

Women sinking in quicksand