welcome, infidel!

I've been complaining lately that the only good horror movies coming out are Asian imports. Nearly all the Hollywood product we've been getting is either torture porn or remakes of movies that kind of sucked the first time around.

So I was intrigued when I heard that someone was making a movie out of "The Mist", a fairly obscure (but creepy) Stephen King short story.

The movie, like the story, takes place almost entirely in a store. While a man is there with his son a mysterious mist rolls in. The movie is partly about this mist, what it contains, and where it came from. It is also even more about how people act under stress, and the nature of man. (King's view on this is fairly cynical, but he does make a compelling case here given the cast at hand.)

The effects were good, fairly CGI-heavy for a King adaptation, but not really distracting with a couple exceptions. There is some gore that seemed a bit gratuitous to me, only because the horror involved here is chiefly psychological. There are very few "boo!" moments, and not very many deliberate gross-out shots. What the movie does have in spades is the development of a sense of creeping dread, of the inescapable.

I'd been warned that the ending of the movie was not quite what we've come to expect out of Hollywood films. Judging by the grumbling I heard around me in the theater, people expected this movie about the complete destruction of a large swath of (probably) Maine to end with birds chirping and people holding hands. It does not.

And reflecting on the last scene, I considered what a "horror" movie really is. This one completely nailed it.