This topic is all about people as monsters and monsters as people. The two films we were required to watch for this section were George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2007). In this blog post I will be discussing my thoughts on both of the films and this particular subgenre of horror films. Although these films differ in many ways, they both have the same general theme. That is of people being trapped indoors from dire danger waiting to rip them apart if they try to go outside. It really is the thought of seeing a person’s true character when they a put into an environment of intense stress. You really see who they are as a person when their life is at risk. Some think to run away, some think to fight, but everyone first thought is survival. I will go more in depth on The Mist because I saw this film when it came out in 2007 and had always thought of it to have the worst ending in any film I had ever seen. Every time I see a film that has a bad ending I always think back to when I first saw The Mist and that was 13 years ago so I guess you could say it really stuck around in my head.
Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is basically a zombie survival movie. There have been numerous other films exploring the “zombie” apocalypse but 1979’s Dawn of the Dead is a classic. Being trapped in a mall with no way out really brings a sense of helplessness and that is the same in The Mist but the characters in that film are trapped in a grocery store. These kinds of movies I find difficult to believe because monsters are clearly not real or at least these kinds of monsters. That is why I do not particularly get scared of these films. They were both excellent films but they do not make me fearful. With these “monster” films you really have to just try to put yourself in the main characters shoes and try to embrace the world of these films. If you can hypothetically think that “what if?” these monsters did exist in our world, then they can be really scary to you.
Now let me get to Darabont’s The Mist. I thought this was a great film, pretty disgusting, but a really engrossing story and some superb cinematography. This film had a real uneasy feel to it. The other-dimensional creatures were terrifying. The thing that stood out to me the most was the crazy woman in the grocery store that was basically starting a cult. This may have been the most irritating and unreasonable character I have ever seen in the film. I flat out hated her, and this may be slightly wrong to say but I had never been happier to see a character die in a film. To me, that woman and Joffrey from Game of Thrones were the two most relieving deaths in recent cinematic history. I could go on for another 1,000 words about how much I strongly dislike that woman, but that won’t benefit anyone. Now let me go in about what I have referred to as the worst ending in all of the films I have seen. The main character David, his son, Amanda, and the two elderly people try to escape the mist by driving as far south as they can in the hopes of making it out of the mist before their gas runs out. David also has a gun with four bullets in it. As the car runs out of gas when they are still in the mist, David knows that a bullet to the head will be much less painful of a death than being ripped apart by the creatures in the mist. David shows his mercy on the other four in the car and shoots all of them. David is very distraught after killing four morally good people including his young son. David runs out of the car as he is ready to die, but about 20 seconds after he exits the car, the mist clears and it shows the army clearing the mist. If David just could have waited another minute, all five of the passengers would have survived. This ending honestly would have been much better if David just would have died at the end along with the others. I cannot imagine the feeling he had when he saw that first truck full of soldiers clearing the mist after what he just did. There is no way he would have ever been able to mentally and emotionally recover from that. This was in fact, the worst end of a movie I have ever seen.