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The Long Halloween 2013 - # 1, The Thing (1982)

10/31/2013

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Awesome poster.
“Can you ever really trust anyone?”

- The Room


Yeah, unless you really know me, you probably didn’t see this one coming, but John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing is my favorite horror movie of all time. I know it’s not a favorite all around, I know it’s got its pacing issues and a lot of the other standard problems that go along with all John Carpenter movies, but I’ll be honest: I don’t care. The Thing has been one of my favorite movies ever since the first day I saw it.

It was a summer day in 1996, and dad said, “Hey, wanna see a monster movie?” Now, this being a more innocent, fearful Matt, I asked him how scary it was. He said it had aliens and monsters, but they were no worse than the aliens in Independence Day. Since being an 11-year-old boy in 1996 Independence Day was my favorite movie in the world, I figured, what the heck, let’s give this a try. Two traumatized hours later, I was changed for life. On its own, my dad’s statement was not all that inaccurate. The Thing is not a traditionally gory movie. There is very little human blood, only slight dismemberment, and not even that many onscreen deaths. Still, what it lacks in these respects, it makes up for in mindblowing monster designs and terror that still manages to make me feel cold to this day while watching the movie. It has what I still believe to be two of the most effective jump scare scenes of all time (the defibrillation scene and the blood test), and I spent much of my adolescence introducing my friends to this movie and just watching their reactions in these two scenes. It was a cruel, unbelievably fun game. I still have fond memories of watching my best friend at the time leaping halfway across the room screaming obscenities during the blood test reveal. It made up a great portion of my youth, and probably worked as a gateway that helped me become a proper horror fan later in life.

Anyway, onto the movie.

Antarctica. Winter. 1982. The tedium of an American research outpost is interrupted by a Norwegian helicopter chasing a sled dog, shooting at it and trying to blow it up with hand grenades. An accident destroys the helicopter shortly after it lands, and the gunman is soon killed after raving madly and shooting one of the Americans the dog had run to for safety. Looking to see what caused this mystery, the Americans head to the Norwegian camp only to find it a burned-out wreck. There are signs of furious fighting, violent suicides and bodies deformed in impossible manners. Putting the pieces together, they soon find that the Norwegian camp had discovered a UFO buried in the ice for thousands of years and in digging it up discovered a frozen lifeform from the ship. To their horror, they too discover that not only was the creature still alive, but that it was capable of absorbing and perfectly replicate any lifeform it encounters, even people. Realizing the likelihood that members of their own camp have been taken over, the men soon begin to wonder if they can trust their best friends, and if any of them will make it out of this alive.

Two of my favorite themes in horror are claustrophobia and paranoia, and this movie better than any other plays with these ideas to maximum effect. The Antarctica setting of cold, barren wastelands is at once open and forbidding. These men are trapped not by hordes of ravenous zombies outside their doors, but by mother nature herself. This isn’t a horror they can hope to escape, they can’t just run outside, it is one they are forced to deal with from within. This is compounded by the fact that the menace they’re fighting comes literally from within. Unlike most body-snatcher type movies where a person will behave differently when they’ve been taken over, the copies in The Thing are perfect imitations. They don’t behave any differently than they did earlier in the movie, adding a further level of paranoia and whodunit when things start going to hell. They lead you down the path of assuming that a certain person just has to, has to be taken over, and then BAM! they’re revealed to be a red herring in a surprising, often gruesome manner.

This atmosphere of fear and paranoia is buoyed by an excellent ensemble cast of 80’s character actors. One of the biggest complaints against this film is that it’s just too many bland-looking guys with beards yelling at each other, but I don’t buy it. Yeah, there’s some overlap, but there are also a lot of distinct personalities hidden within to keep the whodunit aspects going. Kindly old Wilford Brimley plays a great, maybe bad guy with the biologist Blair (kudos to him for his gusto in all of the autopsy scenes). Keith David plays an angry badass like no other. Richard Masur is wonderfully suspicious as the dog-handler Clark, while Donald Moffat plays the pompous base commander Garry to the hilt. And of course, being a John Carpenter movie in the 1980’s, there’s Kurt Russell who plays… Kurt Russell with a beard and sombrero. Gotta love it.

This film is one of the great classics of 80’s special effects with some of the most awesome and bizarre creature designs of the day. There is no one set design for The Thing; as an organism that more or less exists at a cellular level, it can change its form and body as it sees fit. It can grow tentacles, spikes, and extra legs as it sees fit, creating some of the most horrifically surreal monster scenes of the day. Makeup expert Rob Bottin may have been out of his depth when taking this project on, but his skills shined through brilliantly, particularly in the infamous defibrillation scene. Every time I see that man’s head detach from the body, grow legs and start crawling across the room, I’m a giddy 11-year-old all over again watching something awesome he wasn’t supposed to see.

I get that this isn’t a movie for everyone (as my wife can certainly attest). Hell, this wasn’t a movie for 1982, if the box office receipts are any indication. It is, however, one of my all time favorites, and a movie that to this day still manages to make me feel cold whenever I watch it.

It is also my favorite horror movie of all time.

(PREQUEL NOTE: In 2011 for some unbelievable reason Universal Studios released a prequel to The Thing, based on the events of the Norwegian outpost. The film bombed, and has had a mixed reaction from viewers and Thing fans alike. I went in nervously, not knowing what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised. While flawed, it’s a pretty fun little movie that is very reverent toward the original source material, explaining all the little plot points in the Norwegian base scenes nicely. It falls apart at the end, but is still immensely fun, even with the overreliance on computer-generated Thing effects. Hell, my wife even loves it, and considering her opinions on the first movie, that’s pretty damn impressive.)

I just want to thank everyone who stuck by The Long Halloween, this was a fun, grueling project to pull off, and I hope you had as much fun reading (or commenting, or arguing with me) as I did. Have a safe and Happy Halloween, and just remember, if you hear a strange sound at the door, don't investigate it. If you do investigate it, don't split up. If you do split up, don't do it while being naked and/or getting drunk. If you do all of the above here, well, let's just say you made it easy for the killer.

Agree? Disagree? Have your own favorites you want to talk about? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween 2013 - # 2, Scream (1996)

10/30/2013

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(For the introduction to The Long Halloween, my 31 day countdown of my favorite horror movies, please click here.)

I’ve had an interesting relationship with the film Scream over the years. When it first came out on video, dad went out to Blockbuster (it’s what used to be called a “video store”) and rented a copy to see what all the hubbub was about. Naturally, my untrained 11-year-old eyes weren’t exactly expecting what they wound up seeing. The opening murder scene was about the most disturbing thing in the world I’d ever seen (it's still up there, even after all I've seen in subsequent years), and I had trouble sleeping for the next two nights. As I grew older, and Scream grew more popular, I started joining the Scream bashers, the people who hated it because it was popular even though I really had nothing tangible against it. When I became a horror critic for a few years, it was not only popular, but expected to hate Scream for ushering in all the half-assed imitators of the day. Again, though, I had nothing really against it, as I hadn’t seen it since a half-remembered viewing back when I was 11.

Then, as time passed, and I grew older, and I started to build my horror collection properly, I found a copy of Scream at a used DVD store for about $4. Figuring I didn’t have anything to lose, and wanting to get an educated view of what the film was actually like, I popped Scream in and was entranced. This movie was scary, this movie was funny, this movie was insanely well-written. It wasn’t just a deconstruction of the slasher genre, but a multi-layered whodunit that just happened to disguise itself as a deconstruction of the slasher genre. Time and repeated viewings have made this into one of my favorite movies, and a film that was *this* close to making it to the # 1 spot on this list.

The small town of Woodsboro is rocked by the brutal murder of two teenagers late one night, killed by an unseen maniac in a ghost costume who gets his kicks calling up and tormenting his victims with sick games based around horror movies. This hits Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) the hardest, as it is reminiscent of her mother’s murder one year before. The killer soon turns their attention to her, stalking and taunting her with details that only her mother’s killer could know. Aided by tabloid journalist Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), sheriff’s deputy Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and her boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), Sidney works to find the killer before her hometown is turned in to a bloodbath.

This film’s concept (killer in a ghost mask murdering teens in a small town) is about as stale and clichéd as you can get. Sure, the telephone stalking was a fairly novel concept at the time, but When a Stranger Calls did it first decades before, so it doesn’t even have that on its side. No, what made Scream truly unique in its time, was that it was the first major movie where the characters were aware of the existence of horror movies and the clichés that went into them. Films like Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Prom Night are quoted freely. Characters acknowledge the “rules” of horror movies only to break them mere seconds later. It’s a high-concept plot device that could have easily exploded in the filmmakers faces, but instead turned into one of this film’s greatest assets. All at once it is a love letter to and a pitch-black parody of 80’s horror movies.

As well, it is a movie that defies genres. At its core, of course, it’s a horror movie, however you can break up the film’s three acts into separate, awesome subgenres. The first act of the film is a traditional 80’s slasher movie, full of masked killers and some of the best horror put onscreen. The opening scene where the killer torments Drew Barrymore over the phone, breaking her down before killing her (a nice twist, given how prominent she was on all the film’s posters) still gives me the chills after all these years. The second act of the film is a surprisingly solid whodunit. We’re given this cast of characters, they are slowly whittled down, and we have to figure out who was where and when, and we get to try to figure out who the killer actually is. It may seem easy at first, but they keep throwing little twists and red herrings in that make it impossible to finger any suspect for sure. The third act, once the killer is actually revealed, transforms this into a near slapstick comedy. Once we know who the killer is, and see how their grand plan is foiled, this turns into one of the funniest damn horror movies ever made.

I can’t say enough how much I love this movie. I love the writing, I love the directing, I love the cast, I love how twisted and bloody the final act becomes. I feel stupid for having not given this film a chance over the years, and am proud to call it one of my favorite movies of all time.

Agree? Disagree? Have your own favorites you want to talk about? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween 2013 - # 3, The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

10/29/2013

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(For the introduction to The Long Halloween, my 31 day countdown of my favorite horror movies, please click here.)

As the newest, and perhaps strangest, entry in my Top 10, Cabin in the Woods is easily the most difficult to review and rank. For one, it hasn’t had the years to leave an impression that the rest of these films have, so I can’t quite stack it up to them yet. It’s jumped all around my Top 10 since this list was formed, bottoming out at # 9 and even spending a brief stretch of time in the # 1 spot. I do believe it is just that good, but at the same time I can’t say for sure just yet that it really deserves that spot. For another, this film, more than most, requires discretion from a reviewer’s standpoint, as most of the fun of this movie for first-time viewers comes from not knowing where exactly it’s going. You think you know the story, you think you know where it’s going, but Cabin in the Woods will surprise you at every turn, often in the most insane way possible. As of now it probably ranks in my Top 10 favorite movies of all time. Though only time will tell if it will earn my # 1 spot on my horror list, right now it sits at a much deserved # 3.

Five college kids head out for a weekend of fun and debauchery at an isolated country cabin. They’re familiar archetypes, the jock, his scantily-clad blonde girlfriend, the sweet, quiet girl, the stoner, the smart guy (you can tell because he sometimes wears glasses). Like most kids in these types of movies, they are only interested in sex, drugs and ignoring the warnings of the crazy old guy who runs the gas station nearby. However, things aren’t entirely as they seem. This cabin and the surrounding forest are rigged with thousands of video cameras, monitoring their every move. Drugs waft in from hidden vents, controlling their actions. An unseen energy barrier keeps them from escaping these woods. They are being watched and controlled by unseen puppeteers for a greater, more sinister purpose than any of them could ever imagine.

…and that’s where I have to stop describing this movie, lest I give anything major away.

This film is a genre fan’s dream come true. Creators Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard have painstakingly deconstructed the entire horror genre with this film, sprinkling it with hundreds of little references and nods to classic films and tropes, seeking to explain them while at the same time subverting them. They know what we go in expecting, and then they come in to pull the rug out from underneath us in a lot of wonderfully unexpected ways. The fact that they do that with a very clever, infinitely quotable script makes it all the better.

And again, it’s the people who truly bring this film into another realm of awesomeness. Though each of the main five college kids was cast to fill their archetype, each brings something more to the film. A pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth brings charisma and intelligence to spare to the role of Kurt, the supposed meathead jock, proving once again that he is one of the best up and coming talents of the day. Fran Kranz brings most of the laughs and the quotes with stoner character Marty, who seems to be pretty dim but ultimately turns out to be the smartest one in the group. The true stars, for me at least, are character actor greats Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins. Playing two of the “puppeteers” working behind the scenes to manipulate these kids every move, they look like 1960’s NASA engineers, boring, stiff, but ultimately bringing out some of the biggest laughs the movie has to offer.

I’d love to go into more detail, but I really don’t want to ruin any of the surprises this movie has to offer. Cabin in the Woods is one of the rare works of art that manages to succeed at the metafictional narrative. It succeeds at parodying, and even explaining many of the classic horror movie clichés, showing not only why they exist, but why they *must* exist in their universes. It could have easily failed at its lofty goal of providing an explanation for basically every horror movie in existence, but with a top-notch script, a charismatic cast, and some of the best creature effects in recent memory, it succeeds in almost every way imaginable. It may very well be the ultimate horror movie.

See this movie. See it as soon as possible. It will make you believe in unicorns.

Watch out for that "Let's Split Up" gas.
Agree? Disagree? Have your own favorites you want to talk about? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween 2013 - # 4, Jaws (1975)

10/28/2013

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(For the introduction to The Long Halloween, my 31 day countdown of my favorite horror movies, please click here.)

When I first wrote this list for my personal Facebook page last year, one of the hardest films for me to cut from the list was Jaws. It has always been, in my opinion, one of the scariest movies ever made, and has always (well, always once I lost my early fear of it) been one of my favorite movies of all time. However, back when I was first making this list, it just didn't seem traditionally "horror" enough to earn its spot on this list, and I lamentably had to kick it off. One year of hindsight later has helped me realize two things: 1) That this movie is still scary as hell and could be called horror with only the slightest amount of stretching and 2) This is my list and I can do whatever the hell I want. So, here it is, in the # 4 spot on my list of favorite horror movies of all time (and a strong contender for my favorite movie of all time), Jaws.

It's summer on scenic Amity Island, and with the 4th of July ahead the townsfolk should be focusing on just how crazy their profits are going to be this year. However, a man-eating Great White Shark has been feeding in the waters off Amity, killing bathers and fishermen alike. Though the mayor wants to keep a lid on this, these shark attacks soon get out of control and gain national attention. This forces an unlikely trio of men together to hunt down the shark; police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), ichthyologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and veteran shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw). Trapped on a boat together these men have to survive not only the shark, but each other, as their hunting expedition transforms into a life or death struggle against one of nature's greatest predators.

Considering this movie's troubled production, it's a miracle it ever got made at all. Temperamental mechanical sharks and the problems usually associated with filming on the water ballooned the film's cost and filming schedule. There were multiple near revolts behind the scenes, which for a first time big-picture director Stephen Spielberg might have led to the end of an illustrious career before it had ever really started. However, in the end the Jaws team prevailed and pieced together what may very well be one of the few perfect movies out there (for more details on this production, check out the documentary The Shark is Still Working on the Jaws Blu-Ray release.)

You couldn't ask for a better trio of actors than Scheider, Dreyfuss and Shaw in these three lead roles. They are each announced as experts in their own particular fields, but are soon proven to be fish out of water (pun thoroughly intended) when facing this massive, killer shark. Praise is always heaped upon Shaw for his portrayal of Quint, and rightly so, as he brings a dark, grizzled energy to the movie, especially during his sublimely creepy monologue about the fate of the U.S.S. Indianapolis. However, great as his performance is, the other two are more than capable of matching him. Nobody can play the weary, slightly annoyed but ultimately capable cop like Scheider, and for my money nobody can play the cocky jackass quite like 70's era Richard Dreyfuss.

While the men in front of the camera make the movie, the behind the scenes work makes this truly special. Spielberg shows an eye for the dramatic that masks the fact that he was still fairly inexperienced when this job was dropped in his lap. Editor Verna Fields ramped up the tension insanely with her expert scene compositions and clever editing tricks that quite deservedly gained her an Oscar for this movie. When the mechanical shark repeatedly broke down, she managed to use what little footage they did have and made what could have otherwise been a basic monster movie into something truly special, where we barely see the titular villain until the film's final act. Composer John Williams created one of the truly iconic movie themes that remains utterly terrifying to this day (despite being kind of goofy in its own right), and easily ranks in the top pantheon of horror soundtracks (somewhere up there with Psycho and Halloween). And let us not forget the shark effects. While it kept breaking down (with one of them still sunk off the shore of Martha's Vineyard somewhere), the mechanical shark effects are still effective and creepy as hell to this day. While they may not realistically portray a Great White Shark, they are still unbelievably cool and creepy to this day.

There may come a time where I will have to write a more dedicated article on Jaws, but until then... Farewell and adieu...

Agree? Disagree? Have your own favorites you want to talk about? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween 2013 - # 5, Halloween (1978)

10/27/2013

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(For the introduction to The Long Halloween, my 31 day countdown of my favorite horror movies, please click here.)

This was perhaps the most difficult movie for me to rank on the entire list. Over the course of the list’s design it’s held every spot between # 1 and # 3, and ultimately it fell to # 5. This is not a knock on the film’s quality or importance in the slightest, but more just a matter of personal preference, in that there are four more movies that have elements in them that push them more into my personal favorite territory. Nevertheless, it has come time to pay respects to one of the greatest movies ever made.

If you were to ask me what I believed the most important horror movie of all time was, without a doubt I would tell you Halloween. Sure, you could make cases for Psycho, or Night of the Living Dead, or Jaws, or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as they all came before Halloween and they were all innovators in their field, but I still would not hesitate to call Halloween the most important of them all. This low-budget movie about an escaped mental patient stalking and murdering babysitters on Halloween night remains one of the simplest, scariest, and most brilliantly executed horror movies of all time, and would forever change the genre as it established a new status quo. All the tropes of the genre that would later become cliché were established in this movie, and it must be acknowledged and respected (and maybe criticized, if only slightly), for that.

On Halloween night, 1963, in Haddonfield, Illinois, six-year-old Michael Myers brutally murders his older sister with a kitchen knife. Fifteen years later, he remains in a mental institute, under the constant care of Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) who believes Michael to be pure evil. As he has been in a catatonic state since his sister’s murder, everyone thinks him crazy, at least until Michael breaks out. Loomis knows that Michael is out on a quest for blood that will lead him back to Haddonfield, and into the life of young babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).


All the rules that became so popular to emulate and reference in horror movies of the 1980’s have Halloween to thank for creating. Everything from the final girl, to the slow-moving killer, to the sluts and stoners have to die mentality, all of it started here. It did them first, and while others would go out of their way to do it better in the future, Halloween is still the gold standard by which the rest would be judged. However, while all the other films that would follow Halloween thought that buckets of blood and gore running down the screen would be the best way to get an audience, Halloween knew better. It knew that true terror doesn’t need blood, it just needs darkness, and imagination, and a man in a white mask, staring at you coldly, mercilessly…

Indeed, one of the things that Halloween has going most in its favor is a sense of class in its performances and filming. Donald Pleasance brings a strange sense of amused professionalism in his combination mentor/doomsayer character Dr. Loomis, a seemingly timid man who will go to any lengths to prevent the spread of evil, much like a modern day Van Helsing. On the other side of the coin we have Jamie Lee Curtis in her first starring role as Laurie Strode. She’s virginal, she’s sweet, and she’s got one helluva set of lungs on her (as her Scream Queen title will attest), but when her back is against the wall she pulls out great strength more believably than most of the teeny-bopper final girls that would follow her. Nick Castle’s silent, yet frightening turn as Michael Myers, is one of the most interesting. Cast by director John Carpenter simply because he had a creepy walk, he indirectly wound up creating all the mannerisms and motions that would become almost mandatory in masked killers that would follow him. His performance is understated and simple, yet completely menacing.

And credit given where it’s due, John Carpenter really knocks this film out of the park. The guy has about a 50/50 success rate with his movies, with his films either falling into the classic category or the bomb category, with none more classic than Halloween. He knows how to get the most out of his actors, he knows how to frame every shot to gain maximum suspense (the shot of Michael Myers sitting up after Lori supposedly stabbed him to death still gives me the willies), and that score, THAT SCORE! How many nightmares were created with that simple synthesizer score of his?

I know I’ve given a lot of credit to movies where splatter reigns supreme and blood runs down the screen by the gallon, but in my heart, I just like good, scary movies. Halloween is one of the simplest, and the scariest, and will always hold a place in my heart.

(P.S. One of the coolest things about Halloween? I grew up in Haddonfield. In reality, all of the Haddonfield, Illinois scenes were filmed in South Pasadena, California. I walked to school along the same streets that Michael Myers stalked Laurie, went to the same high school where they picked up Lynda from cheerleading practice, hell, I still drive by the Myers House on my way to the Laundromat, even though it’s now a chiropractor’s office. One of the many, many fun things about living in Southern California.)


Agree? Disagree? Have your own favorites you want to talk about? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween 2013 - # 6, The Mist (2007)

10/26/2013

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(For the introduction to The Long Halloween, my 31 day countdown of my favorite horror movies, please click here.)

I’m sure nobody saw this one coming; this is one of the ultimate dark horse horror flicks of all time, almost nobody saw it when it first came out, but it was a favorite of mine from the first moment I saw it. While most of the movies that have made it this high on my list have earned their spots through consistent greatness throughout, or a lot of nostalgia giving me fond memories of the film, The Mist is one of those movies that makes it this high simply by the virtue of one single, amazing moment that I can’t believe anyone had the guts to put on screen. That’s not to say The Mist isn’t a great movie in its own right, it really is. It’s one of the best and most unique monster movies that’s been put through in recent years, and is one of the best Stephen King movies ever made, even if nobody really saw it when it first came out.

Based on the Stephen King novella (one of my top five favorites of his stories, if I’m going to be honest), The Mist follows a group of people from a small town in Maine (naturally) trapped in a grocery store after a mysterious storm and power outage. When a man comes running in saying something in “The Mist” killed another man, they are skeptical. However, when the mist rolls in, enveloping the store, they are left only with their imagination and the strange sounds coming from outside to ramp up their fear. Soon, after the threats within the mist make themselves clear, fear gives way to paranoia, and paranoia gives way to religious mania when one woman within the store declares this the end of times, and that only she has the answers that will save them. In time, the monsters within the mist become the least of their worries.


Director Frank Darabont had already directed two Stephen King movies by this point with The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, but not having adopted any of King’s horror work I was a bit dubious when I saw him signed on to this project at first (this was before The Walking Dead, kids). However, his early years writing 80’s horror movies really shows through as he helps transform The Mist into the big, creepy as hell monster movie that it was meant to be. He is an expert at ramping up tension, taking full advantage of the mundane setting and making it all the more claustrophobic and binding as the movie progresses. Much of the fear comes from not knowing what is within the mist, and even once we see what is there, we wish we hadn’t.

All of the monster set pieces in this movie are suitably horrifying and grotesque. Though the origins of these monsters is never explicitly stated, it is hinted that they may be from another dimension that intersected with our own. As such, the creatures are recognizable, but different and unsettling, existing in forms and moving in ways that should not be. Though I am kind of an old school purist when it comes to my special effects (practical effects, all the way!), the digital creations in this movie are suitably otherworldly and entirely unsettling.

However, at its core this film is a character drama, and that is where the true heart and terror come in. Thomas Jane plays the great Stephen King standby everyman hero, trying to protect his young son while trying to make sense of what has happened to the world, while backed up by an expert cast of character actors including Andre Braugher, Toby Jones, Laurie Holden, Frances Sternhagen and Jeffrey DeMunn. However, the true star of the movie has to be Marcia Gay Harden in the occasionally over-the-top, but often creepy role of Mrs. Carmody. A religious zealot, she starts the movie out looking like a madwoman, but slowly and seductively gains a cultlike following in the store. She falls into the role with great relish, never giving up on the character’s insanity, but growing more bombastic as she gains more power and believers within the store. The scene where she leads a lynch mob to stab and execute a soldier by forcing him out to face the monsters within the mist still gives me chills.

So I’ve gone over why this is a good movie, but what makes it top 10 worthy? Hell, what makes it # 6 worthy? It earns this spot entirely on the merits of one scene: the ending. To go into details would be giving away massive spoilers, so I’ll do what I can to do it justice without giving it away. In short, it is quite possibly the bleakest ending attached to a major studio release I have ever seen. I’d never believed any film could have the balls to pull off the ending this one did. Hell, when Stephen King himself says, “Man, I wish I’d thought of that…”, you know you have to be doing something right.

See how many cast members of The Walking Dead you can spot, kids!
Agree? Disagree? Have your own favorites you want to talk about? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween 2013 - # 7, Dawn of the Dead (1978)

10/25/2013

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(For the introduction to The Long Halloween, my 31 day countdown of my favorite horror movies, please click here.)

Dawn of the Dead may very well be the most important horror movie in my life. Why? Well, because Dawn of the Dead is the movie most responsible for getting me into watching horror. How is that? Well dear reader, come sit a spell and let me spin you a story. (And yes, if you’ve read my # 5 Favorite Zombie Moment before, you’ll have heard this story. Feel free to skip it, or hang around again if you’ve got nothing better to do.)

Once upon a time, Matt Carter was not the jaded horror freak that you know, but was an innocent boy who knew nothing of the genre other than the fact that it was mostly crap. He got this from his father, who is a great man, but is not the biggest genre fan in the world. Matt was also a fearful boy, very jumpy with a great imagination. He would not sit in a room with his back to an open door and feared monsters in every shadow, even going on the ripe old age of 15. Like I said, he was a fearful boy. His father had introduced him to a few genre selections over time, mostly The Universal Monsters, and 50’s classics like Them! and It Came From Outer Space, and some more recent additions like John Carpenter’s The Thing and Cronenberg’s The Fly, but for the most part it was a genre he ignored and feared.

Then, however, he came upon a book! It was a great book called Men, Makeup & Monsters, talking about the great Hollywood special effects makeup artists. Young Matt was a huge fan of special effects makeup, and loved reading about the greats like Rick Baker and Stan Winston. However, there was another chapter that caught Matt’s eye and stole his attention: Tom Savini, The Master of Splatter. At first dubious at what the chapter might hold, Matt was fascinated by the life story of Vietnam vet Savini, who used his wartime experiences as reference for a career in makeup of carnage and mayhem. He loved reading of the improvisation and freedom for creation that he had on his early 80’s works, with none given as much loving attention in over the top detail as Dawn of the Dead. He was intrigued, and wanted to know just what this movie was like. After months of curiosity, and one videotape recording of the movie off of an Independent Film Channel horror movie marathon, Matt was hooked. Dawn of the Dead was awesome, and Matt was forever brought over to the dark side of horror.

OK, enough life story, should we get onto the movie itself now?

This sequel to Night of the Living Dead picks up a few weeks after the zombie apocalypse has swept the nation. People are in a panic, looting, fighting one another as society crumbles. News producer Fran (Gaylen Ross) and her boyfriend, traffic reporter Stephen (David Emge) steal a helicopter to try and escape the madness. Joined by SWAT officers Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott Reiniger), they hop across the Pennsylvania countryside looking for refuge. When they stumble across an abandoned shopping mall, they think they’ve found heaven, but they soon find that being trapped within may even be worse than facing the dead.

Again, this one gets a lot of credit as sequels go for going bigger and more over the top than its predecessor. While the original Night of the Living Dead took place within one farmhouse, Dawn of the Dead has an entire shopping mall for its playhouse. I’ve heard stories about how wild their nights of filming were (especially since they had to clean everything up by morning, with this being an actual, active shopping mall and all), and seeing a lot of the stunts they pulled, especially during the biker invasion scene, I’m amazed George Romero and company weren’t sued.

While Night of the Living Dead capitalized on themes of race and culture colliding during times of struggle (particularly potent as it was filmed during the height of the civil rights movement), Dawn of the Dead tackles late 70’s materialism in its shopping mall setting. While at first it comes off as a bit heavy-handed, in time it becomes quite sad to see these characters becoming obsessed with their surroundings, willing to give up their lives instead of lose their possessions to the living or the dead. It’s still heavy-handed, but as movies with hidden messages go, this one’s pretty decent. While on a cross-country road trip a few years back, my wife and I actually visited the Monroeville Mall where the majority of this film was made, and though it has been almost completely refurbished over the past 30 years, it was still awesome to see the few bits where I could say, “Hey, that’s where the zombie fell in the koi pond!” or “Hey, that’s where Blades plunged to his death!”

This film gets some of the better performances of the Living Dead series, particularly through Ken Foree as zombie-killing badass Peter, and David Emge as the weak, petty Stephen, but really the stars of this movie are the zombies and the stellar makeup effects of Tom Savini. For working on a budget, he pulls off some amazing stunts and gore effects. Heads are lopped off by helicopters, screwdrivers jammed through ears, zombies feast on the guts of downed bikers. It’s a smorgasbord of some of the most classic, over-the-top gore effects put onscreen, made almost comical by the oft-bright blue makeup of the zombies and almost neon-red blood. It’s not a very serious movie, and it’s one where they know we want to see the zombies, as they are made alternately horrifying, hilarious, pitiful, and ultimately heroic.

Dawn of the Dead is the ultimate zombie movie. It’s fun, it’s heartfelt, it’s gory as hell, it’s got a fun location… really, it’s got everything you could ask for in a zombie movie. It will always hold an important place in my life for bringing me into the horror fold, and I can never thank it enough for that.

(REMAKE NOTE: When the remake of Dawn of the Dead came out in 2004, I was writing reviews for a couple of horror movie websites, and one of the first films I had the opportunity to look at was Dawn of the Dead. I expected the worst, but it turned out to be an awesome, fun movie, that took the concepts of zombies and mall and very little else from the original, and still managed to be great. As genre fans are wont to do, they really tore into the film at the time because it was a remake. I enjoyed the hell out of it. I argued that it could very well be as good as the original. They thought I was nuts. Now you often see this movie on lists of Best New Horror Movies. Who’s crazy now?)

(P.S. Before I leave, I have to also note that as a senior in high school, I wrote my senior thesis on how horror movies were perhaps the most relevant genre of films to study, as they reflect peoples fears and neuroses at the times they were made. A good portion of it was made on the women’s lib movement and the rise of the final girl in slasher movies, and the political relevance of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Since I did it at the last minute, I forgot to include a list of sources cited and got a B+ on it. My teacher told me after the fact that I’d have gotten an A if that were included. So, in short kids, if you have a cool enough teacher, you can get good grades while writing about horror movies.)
Agree? Disagree? Have your own favorites you want to talk about? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween 2013 - # 8, Misery (1990)

10/24/2013

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(For the introduction to The Long Halloween, my 31 day countdown of my favorite horror movies, please click here.)

As I’ve probably said once or twice on this blog, I’m a huge Stephen King fan. I won’t go so far as to call myself his number one fan, since there’s bound to be a lot creepier people out there with shrines containing various King body parts they’ve collected over the years, but I’m a pretty big one. Good, bad or otherwise I intend to have a complete collection of King first editions within my lifetime, and I intend to read most of them too (sorry, Dark Tower fans, but that series is really hard to get through at times). That being said, I want to note that a lot of the man’s books that are considered classics suffer from a number of problems. Most of them are overlong, are full of unnecessary details and subplots, and almost go out of their way to make their main characters unsympathetic. Many of his true classics, I think became classics due to high quality film adaptations that came out after they were released (seriously, would anyone actually know Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption if it weren’t for the movie?). Every so often, however, a film comes along that takes one of his legitimately great works and makes something special out of it with some capable grooming and direction. Misery is one of these movies.

Harlequin romance writer Paul Sheldon (James Caan) gets in a car accident in the middle of a blizzard on a lonely mountain road in rural Colorado, badly breaking both of his legs. He wakes up soon after in the home of nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) who has saved his life and slowly tends him back to health. As it turns out, she’s his number one fan, and though she’s a bit odd at times, she seems mostly harmless at first. However, when she finds out that he’s killed off his signature character, Misery Chastain, in an effort to become a respected writer, Paul soon discovers the true sickness lurking in Annie’s mind. She’s keeping him prisoner, forcing him to bring Misery back from the grave, and she’ll go to any length to make this happen.

This is one of the rare movies I can watch over and over again and never get tired of. I might even dare to call perfect in every way. The writing and directing (from a surprisingly awesome with horror Rob Reiner) is superb, creating a tense, tight thriller that makes even something as simple as moving down a hallway into a breakneck scene of suspense. Trimming the fat from the novel, they shift the focus away from Paul’s battle with writers block and focus more on how the two of them have formed an unfortunate, symbiotic bond. Paul needs Annie to stay alive, and Annie needs what Paul is writing so she’ll stay sane. What was a tense and brooding book often broken up with pages of sappy harlequin romance is simplified into a battle of wits between two very intelligent, very forceful people, who refuse to back down from their ideals and desires.

And the performances… though there are a number of familiar faces in the supporting cast, almost all the credit in this movie has to go to the stellar performances of James Caan and Kathy Bates. Caan injects a sense of world-weary frustration into Paul Sheldon. He may start out the film as cocky, maybe even a bit unlikable, but as we begin to follow his various escape plans, and see how he learns to play Annie’s game of manipulation for his own survival, we get to see that he is truly a hero worth following. On the other hand, we have Kathy Bates’ Oscar-winning performance of Annie Wilkes. I haven’t seen mental illness so compellingly portrayed in… well, maybe ever. Annie’s manic-depressive states are so real and so frightening, that you don’t know where she will go at any given time. In one moment, she’ll be squealing like a schoolgirl and gushing about her Liberace records. In another, she’ll break Paul’s feet with a sledgehammer while crying about how she’s doing this because she loves him. Her performance is at once terrifying and pitiable, as the rare moments we get to see the real, kind person that Annie could be, make her a truly sad villain to watch.

Misery is one of the rare horror films that the Academy didn’t ignore, and rightly so. I imagine the hobbling scene was more than enough to convince any Academy voters that spurning Kathy Bates would be a bad idea.
Agree? Disagree? Have your own favorites you want to talk about? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween 2013 - # 9, The Fly (1986)

10/23/2013

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(For the introduction to The Long Halloween, my 31 day countdown of my favorite horror movies, please click here.)

All right, I’m just going to come out and say right now that David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly is quite probably the saddest horror movie ever made. It’s the kind of tragedy that Shakespeare or one of the classical Greek authors would write, if they were into sci-fi and splatterpunk horror, though Polanski’s Macbeth has taught me that Shakespeare did have the potential hidden in him. It is a tale of love and madness and the deterioration of the human condition (and some of the most grotesque makeup effects in film history), and is one of the horror films that has been most cheated out of some serious Oscar nominations.

At a scientific symposium, brilliant physicist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) meets magazine writer Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) and boasts about having created something that will change the world. Taking her back to his lab, he shows her that he has nearly perfected teleportation. Though she wants to take this public, he charms her and offers her exclusive book rights if she can keep this quiet until he has perfected the process, as it still has difficulty transmitting living organisms. As he works to perfect this, the two fall in love, and with her inspiration he finally manages to successfully transport a baboon. However, her jealous ex-boyfriend and editor, Stathis Borans (John Getz; also, what the hell kind of character name is that?) threatens to reveal his discovery. Looking to head off his reveal, Veronica goes to talk to him. Drunk and jealous, Seth teleports himself. He comes out of the machine feeling better than ever, but soon becomes aggressive and violent, deteriorating mentally and physically. Checking the machine, he sees that a common housefly had gone through with him, and that the two of them are bonding at a genetic level, creating a monstrous hybrid that threatens to consume him in body and mind.

In any other hands, this remake of the 1950’s Vincent Price camp classic could have been silly, or at the very least a standard 80’s monster movie. However, in the hands of David Cronenberg it becomes something special. Focusing on the mental as well as the physical deterioration of Seth, it becomes a truly painful film to watch. If this film had had him suffering from AIDS or cancer instead of him becoming a grotesque fly-beast, it would have been some of the best Oscar bait. Instead it was one of the many great films that the Academy ignored because it fell under the horror banner.

Though the acting is stellar all around, this movie is really made by Jeff Goldblum’s tour de force performance as Seth Brundle. His gradual evolution throughout the movie shows more range than most actors do in entire careers, as he starts out as a nerd, transitions into a hopeless romantic, then to an arrogant jerk and a sad, mad monster, all within the course of two hours, and all without anything feeling forced. His chemistry with Geena Davis is palpable (the fact that they were really sleeping together at the time couldn’t have hurt either), and through their interactions we get an epic and truly sad rise and fall of a great man sort of story. This film could easily have worked as a stage drama, given its small cast and intimate setting, and I am not surprised in the slightest that this film was successfully made into an opera a few years back. He should have gotten an Oscar nomination for this movie, no question.

Of course, you cannot talk about The Fly without talking about its Oscar-winning and truly disgusting makeup effects. David Cronenberg’s penchant for body-horror stories manifests quite well as Seth’s body falls apart (literally) throughout the movie, as he becomes this lumpy, diseased-looking monster that sheds more pieces of humanity with every passing minute. Though subtle at first, he quickly transitions into full-body makeup and animatronic effects that make him (or at least, “Brundlefly”) into one of the most horrifying and sympathetic monsters ever put onscreen, though the less said about the vomit-drop scenes the better. Those must be seen on their own. Again, though, I cannot stop giving credit to Goldblum, for offering a remarkably deep performance under pounds of latex and paint.

The Fly is not an easy film for me to watch (I’m a crier, so sue me), and the ending gets me almost every time. Though this is a film that scares and repulses with ease, the fact that it tears at the heartstrings separate it from its peers and make it into a true classic.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Agree? Disagree? Have your own favorites you want to talk about? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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The Long Halloween 2013 - # 10, Saw II (2005)

10/22/2013

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(For the introduction to The Long Halloween, my 31 day countdown of my favorite horror movies, please click here.)

And we’ve finally gotten there! My Top 10! Some of these films are bona fide classics while others are just personal favorites. Some of them are widely considered as greats, some of them I’ll need to defend. There are new films here, and there are old, but all of them have earned a place in my heart as true favorites.

And so, without further ado, let’s get this Top 10 started!

When it came out, the original Saw was hailed as the genesis of a new generation of horror. Six sequels later, it was derided as a tired, repetitive formula, and the horror community as a whole almost seemed to turn their back on it. In time though, I think it will gain the respect it deserves and will be held up in a similar light as the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm St. franchises, because it did what so many horror films over the past 20 years have attempted and failed at miserably: it created a new horror icon. Furthermore, they created a series that plays out as one great, giant plot instead of a bunch of standalone movies that constantly reinvent the villain's mythos with each film (i.e. Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street), and though it gets muddled the further it goes, it's a fun, creepy story. I’ll even go so far as to call it my favorite horror franchise of all time, which almost feels blasphemous to type considering how great a Friday the 13th fan I was in the beginning, but there it is.

I don’t think anyone expected the first one to be as successful as it was, nor do I think they really knew how they wanted to go about making that first sequel. When designing the first sequel to a successful film, there are so many routes to go, so much pressure to succeed, and so many ways you can fail. You have to ask yourself, do we want to go the same route? Follow the path of the first one and just hope for the best? Or do we do something different, take the same basic ideas and see how far we can go with them? It’s a tough spot to be in, and in principle I understand entirely why so many sequels are effectively copies of the original. It’s safe. It’s what people enjoy. It’ll probably be profitable. But every so often you get sequels that take risks. They try to be bigger, and ballsier, and they often turn into something classic. I think of films like Dawn of the Dead or Aliens or Terminator 2 and yes, even Saw II.

Instead of following the exact same path as the original Saw and following another couple guys chained to some pipes in a bathroom, Saw II follows the Aliens approach of bigger being better. They start out with a dedicated team of homicide detectives led by Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) capturing and cornering Jigsaw at gunpoint. They think they have won, until they see a set of TV monitors showing another game taking place. Jigsaw has captured a group of people, including Det. Matthews’ teenaged son, and barricaded them inside of a house that is slowly filling with Sarin nerve gas. There are antidotes hidden throughout the house inside of a series of traps, and unless they and Matthews play Jigsaw’s game, there will be blood.

By changing this from a small, personal movie into a large, over-the-top ensemble piece, Saw II separates itself from the first film so much that it is not forced to live within its shadow. It stands on its own, which is a nearly impossible task for any sequel in this day and age. As well, one of the greatest things about this one is how restrained it is, from a violence standpoint at least. While it would have been so easy for them to look at the first film and think, “Hey, people seem to love this torture thing, let’s have more of that and have gallons of blood pouring down the halls!”, they hold back. There are still traps, but they are more nefarious and painful than anything else. They are not designed to titillate us, but to make us legitimately feel bad for the people who have been thrust into them, no matter how horrible they may be (as the infamous Needle Pit scene proves). This movie, more than any that followed, subscribes to Jigsaw’s philosophy that people are actually meant to survive these traps, and when they do not it’s more from their own stupidity than any desire for them to actually die on the killer’s part.

Perhaps the greatest asset this film carries with it is a very intelligent script. Films that try to pull off plot twists this day and age usually suffer from an overly complex setup that makes the big reveal ultimately unsatisfying, or a twist that comes out of nowhere that just pisses its audience off. Saw II slowly adds layers of plot, building a twisted, jigsaw puzzle of a film (pardon the pun), that keeps its audience as confused as the people trapped in the house, without insulting anyone. By the time the requisite twist ending comes around, it hits like a truck in all the best ways.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t say Tobin Bell’s performance of Jigsaw in this film is one of the best in recent horror. Relegated to a few seconds of screentime in the first Saw, he demands center stage in this film. He is intelligent and soft-spoken, yet menacing to a point where you often forget he is a wheelchair-bound invalid. So much of the movie features him sitting in his chair with no less than a dozen guns pointed at him, yet he maintains this calm, almost amused demeanor. He is effectively under arrest, yet maintains complete control over his surroundings, and that makes him creepy as hell.

I make no bones about how much I love the Saw franchise, despite all its flaws, and Saw II is easily my favorite of the bunch. Twisted, scary and well-plotted, it’s the bigger, ballsier sort of sequel that the first film needed.

Oh yes, there will be blood.
Agree? Disagree? Have your own favorites you want to talk about? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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    Matt Carter is an author of Horror, Sci-Fi, and yes even a little bit of Young Adult fiction. Along with his wife, F.J.R. Titchenell, he is represented by Fran Black of Literary Counsel and lives in the usually sunny town of San Gabriel, CA.

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