Film and Media Studies: The Horror Film

Dawn of the Dead showed how a group of people was trying to evade a zombie apocalypse, while the Mist should how people can shift to the monster role after random creatures emerge from the mist. The idea of Dawn of the Dead core theme began to show how consumerisms are somewhat evil. Stephen Harper discusses that paying for certain things can make an individual seem like more of a monster than what they truly appear to be. This is interesting in a sense of that it is somewhat. I thoroughly enjoyed Dawn of the Dead and truly like how it elevated from Night of the Living Dead. The zombies were only stronger in mass multitudes and help little to no weight from an individual level. Being that it is a survival movie, it shows the sense of fear that can be developed from feeling helpless and could be seen in both Dawn of the Dead and The Mist. Though these types of horror films are nice to watch visually, they cannot always be seen as scary. Unlike Dawn of The Dead, The Mist was an overall great movie from a visual and contextual perspective. It enabled the audience to see how people react when placed into areas of the unknown and how mass hysteria can be one of the most dangerous types of fear. The zombie apocalypse movie mainly focused on individuals and how their level of consumerism affected their overall well-being. Yet, the Mist showed how scary the one-dimensional characters could be.

Something that stood apart as a comparison between the two movies was steadfastness to their gathering of individuals. They were eager to place their own lives in peril to secure those inside their gathering. Additionally, we saw troublesome guarantees kept in the two films. In the Mist, David guaranteed his child that he wouldn't let the beasts get him and ended his life when he believed that was the lone alternative to evade it. In Dawn of the Dead, Peter guaranteed his companion that he wouldn't allow him to stroll around with the zombies on the off chance that he returned as one and Peter did the ghastly errand of shooting him.

The consummation of the two movies felt miserable yet their last activities were diverse by the way they reacted to the sadness. In The Mist, they surrendered and chose to end their own lives as their final hotel. In Dawn, Peter appeared to have settled on that equivalent decision however in that last second, he chose to take his risks with the obscure. Overall, this portion of the class allowed me to get a better insight into how individuals react to events that come about in areas of the unknown. Fear is often associated with a lack of knowledge and I feel that both directors did an excellent job of portraying that in each of their movies. While they were not necessarily my preference for horror movies, they were still thrilled and ultimately fit each of the known characteristics of a horror movie.

In Dawn of the Dead, a group of people are trying to escape the zombie apocalypse and see refuge in a mall. The Mist is a film that showcases what humans are capable of under extreme circumstances as people are shown to be attacked by mysterious monsters that emerge from a mist that surrounds the town.

Personally, I liked the idea that Dawn of the Dead’s core theme was the idea that consumerism is essentially evil (Harper). In his article, “Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate:
George Romero's Dawn of the Dead,” Stephen Harper discusses that paying into consumerism makes a person “zombie-like.” Within the movie this seen pretty heavily as most of the movie takes place within a mall, which is arguably the epitome of consumerism. After securing the mall from the zombies, the group is in a “shopping utopia” and is able to take advantage of whatever the mall has to offer (Harper). This ideal may play into the purchasing power of the group. Now that they do not have anyone to compete with, they are able to garner all the things that they desire. Moreover, the idea of class conflict can be seen by the struggle between the group and the gang of bikers. In this scene, the bikers represent the proletariat and they are rising against Peter and his group, the bougeosisie. Having fallen to the lure of consumerism, only Peter and Fran are able to survive and reach a consciousness which is seen by them leaving the mall.  

However, The Mist, is a movie that opens a dialogue of the fear of the unknown and the anxiety that comes along with not knowing the future of the right actions to take. Noel Carroll describes that horror movies not only show the actor’s reaction to these monsters but all the internal symptoms of fear that accompany it, such as “revulsion, nausea, and disgust” (53). Within The Mist, David Drayton reacts to both the seen monster, but also interacts with the monsters that exist within his mind as he has to decide what is the best action to ensure both his and his son’s survival. The horrors that David has experienced within the movie leads up to an internal distress caused by these monsters which leads him to make a rash decision to kill his group along with his son moments before they would have been rescued. Although the characters may have escaped the store and were making their way to safety, the never relenting threat of death created a shared helplessness within the group as the movie never turned them “into pseudo-heroes who conquered their fears” (Eggert). Instead, David becomes a monster himself, and after he kills his group, he then has to live with the biggest monster of all, guilt as he has just taken four lives that we about to be saved, including his son. For the rest of his life, he is left to wonder that if had just waited one minute longer, would everyone else still be alive?

I think the concept of humans being the true monster of the horror film is a very interesting concept to explore with in film. I think what makes it so interesting is we know going into it that it’s at least partially true. We can watch the news or look out into the world and see the evil existence is human naturally. This film just gives us an avenue to explore how far that evil goes.

 I Really like Dawn of the dead. I really like how it ramps up the scope from Night of the living dead. I really like the depiction of the zombies in the movie. I personally am not a fan of fast or strong zombies. I think zombies work best when they are only strong in numbers. The zombies on an individual level aren't that much of a threat in this movie. It's not until there’s a big crowd of them that they become dangerous. I think this setup lets the zombies still be scary, but allows them to be a backdrop to the end of society, which is what zombie movies are really about. I love the mall setting. I think it's a fun location that allows our protagonist to have a lot to play around us. It also lets us have a time where our heroes try to live out a normal life and just have fun. I think this part is interesting because we see the illusion start to break as Roger gets sicker and sicker. They want to avoid the problems of the real world, but they can't just live the lie. This comes crashing down even more when the biker gang takes over the mall and forces them to leave. I think this is the point where they really realize that the world has gone to hell. I really like the ending where Peter contemplates taking himself out, but can’t give up hope and make it the helicopter last minute. It's a hopeful ending, and contrasts good to the ending of Night of the Living dead where no one makes it out alive. 

The Mist is a very bleak movie, there really is little hope left at the end. But in my opinion that's kind of what the movie is about. It’s about having hope and faith, and how important that can be, but how it can be manipulated. We see this as most of the store starts to hold onto the wild idea of this being a holy rapture and they can make it out if they hold onto faith. The other group hold onto the hope that if they can make it to the car they could drive out of the mist, but when they run out of gas they give up faith of making it out just moments before they are about to reach salvation. That might be the only problem I have with the ending. I feel that the mist dissolves almost comically soon after they take themselves out, like you think you would hear an army of soldiers and tanks traveling a few minutes behind you. It is not a huge issue but, I think it could be improved slightly. Another part I really like is the depictions of the mist monsters. They’re not really evil, or even that interested in the humans. They are very animal like in their behavior. I think they does a good job to not set them up as the true evil of the movie. The last issue I have to say on the movie is I don’t like how the mist is explained to come from a government experiment that is open to another dimension. I think this over explains the mist and take a chunk of the mystery surrounding it away.

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.    

I personally liked both movies in this topic. The Mist did an amazing job with making you feel as if you’re part of the crowd at the supermarket. Throughout most of it, I wished I was a part of it just so I could shut the preaching lady up. They characterized people so dramatically that it felt like a representation of people in a real disaster. Dawn of the Dead surprised me because even though the effects weren’t what they are today, I still enjoyed it. It alternates peace and action between each other to allow time to breathe and take in what’s going on, while still being on edge about what will happen next. 

Both films have a theme of how people handle seemingly impossible situations. When these uncontrollable events occur, we see the true evil in humans. The fear of the unknown causes panic and when humans can’t rationalize the situation, we try to take control even if that leads to turning on other humans. In both movies, we see like-minded groups ban together. In The Mist, when the unknown approaches, we see them group into three different types of people: the people who refused to believe there was something supernatural, the people who believed it was supernatural even though they couldn’t explain it, and the people that bought into the religious hysteria. Throughout the film, we saw more humans versus humans than humans versus the unknown monsters. They couldn’t get past their differences to ban together. The fears caused hysteria and led to drastic decisions. In the end, one group was ready to take their chances in the unknown to escape the threat of the humans. In Dawn of the Dead, we don’t see the commonalities that bring the groups together but we still see separate groups that have banned together and don’t work together against the zombies - the main characters, the group they run into while refueling and the biker gang. The main group in this film ends up taking refuge in a mall and they avoid the unknown reality in the outside world for as long as they can. So much of this film was focused on materialism. They were excessive in taking things, even taking money when they didn’t have anywhere to spend it. They were dressing in fancy clothes and jewels and living a make-believe life. Greed even cost the pilot to lose his life in the end because he didn’t want the biker gang taking “his” things so he started shooting at the bikers when they probably would have ravaged the mall and taken valuables and moved on to the next town.

One of the things that stood out as similar between the two films was loyalty to their group of people. They were willing to put their own lives in danger to protect those within their group. Also, we saw difficult promises kept in both movies. In The Mist, David promised his son that he wouldn’t let the monsters get him and took his life when he thought that was the only option to avoid it. In Dawn of the Dead, Peter promised his friend that he wouldn’t let him walk around with the zombies if he came back as one and Peter did the dreadful task of shooting him.

The ending of both films felt hopeless but their final actions were different in how they responded to the hopelessness. In The Mist, they gave up and decided taking their own lives was their last resort. In Dawn, Peter seemed to have made that same choice but in that final moment, he decided to take his chances with the unknown.