King f*cked with my childhood head with stuff like Salems Lot and the Kid scratching at the window! Cujo and Christine and the shining I prefer to the non horror stuff like Shawshank, greenmile and Stand by me which i prefer as stories. Sometimes it scares more in your head and doesn't always translate that well to the screen - Langoliers, Dreamcatcher turds!? and Maximum Overdrive were sheeeiiite!

The Mist looks like a propper good horror though, like From Beyond, The Thing, or Night of the Living Dead well paced with a solid plot and good cast of characters instead of just random CG FX and nothing else.

Very clever, Harry.

Excuse me? We have a well-established history of doing exactly that going back all the way to the Salem witch trials. Tack on McCarthyism and the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and the point is made - you don't even have to debate our response to 911 to do it.

Back To Bataan-well that's not bad either-unofficial sequel time you know. Lawrence Tierney has a noticeable cameo, Anthony Quinn plays a filipino hero, the Duke is the Duke, Buelah Bondi does her Grandma Walton routine w/ some plucky school kids, and there's Phillip Ahn for your pleasure, too. I like it fine though it's not as much fun as Bataan I, sure.

Hey it's future Senator George Murphy crashing his plane kamikazi style---poor Gilligan never knew what hit him...anyways. Is this about those big bugs on the loose again-?

At first, I thought it was just a downer, you know, a thank you to the film students. But it perfectly illustrates a point King has made many times: that the horror story/novel/film is inherently conservative and optimistic. They just didn't give it enough time, which drove the point home better than a happy ending.

Also, this ending seemed to almost purposely go along with what was wrong with the David Drayton character in both the book and the film. It always irritated me as reader (and when I caught the flick far later than most of you, last week)that Norm the bag boy is supposed to be an idiot for going outside, from Drayton's point of view. Later, Drayton goes outside. Morton is an idiot for wanting to take off with a group, from Drayton's point of view. Later, Drayton takes off with a group.

The ending showed Drayton, having followed Norm's and Morton's mistakes, doing what Mrs. Carmody and her people wanted to do.

For me, this ending seemed to be conscious of what King didn't seem conscious of(or maybe he was because when he's good, he's great...and he's smart):anybody who disagrees with Drayton is either evil or an idiot, yet Drayton later does what they did and it works for him because...he's the hero. That's the sole reason, which is fine if it really was a 50s B movie, but we know better and so does Mr. King.

I loved the book (as much as I hate the term "novella")but it suffered from what I call the Boromir complex. In LORD O' THE RINGS, Boromir existed to wrong so the other characters could always be right. C'mon, I'll buy elves and flying monkeys, but even the biggest idiot jerk is right sometimes. Not ol' Boromir. And not anybody in THE MIST who disagrees with Drayton.

Darabont's ending fixed all that for me. And I loved the Lovecraft monster at the end.

Frank, if you're reading (and I know yer not), puleeeeeze do CALL O' CTHULHU or SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH or THE DUNWICH HORROR!

The Mist, on the other hand, was a horror flick that kept you guessing. I love King, but this is actually a story I never read. For me, The Mist was a fun ride that DID have legitimate scares, and it wasn't so much the monsters as the people (especially the fundie bitch) that were frightening.

I think most of the people who hate The Mist are Christians who were offended by the portrayal of a fundamentalist asshole as the most dangerous, insane, frightening creature brought on by the mist. Don't let them dictate to you what it good and what isn't-- Because they're assholes, and those kind of people really deserved the lambasting this film gave them.

For perspective, I also like Haute Tension (High Tension) quite a bit, and I LOATHE crap like "The Ring" and "The Grudge" because cat boys, wet girls and creaking women ARE NOT SCARY. They're laughable. I hated SCREAM a lot, because it was paint-by-numbers horror that was WAY below what Wes Craven can do. I tend to dislike slasher flicks unless they're originals, or well-thought-out. Rob Zombie's stuff has balls, and I dig it. The original Halloween is also pretty awesome, as are the original Friday the 13th, The Exorcist, and Nightmare on Elm Street. Sequels were mostly garbage.

THEY LIVE is a classic, as is Carpenter's "The Thing" and Ridley Scott's "Alien" (which I personally liked a lot better than "Aliens") -- In the torture porn genre there's only one contender, and that's SAW. The whole series has been decent, and it stays pretty fresh considering they keep going to the well. "Candyman" is a classic, and I even though I don't consider them scary, the Hammer films were awesome.

With that sort of taste, you can judge for yourself. I loved "The Mist" and would recommend it to any horror fan. It's how horror should be done.

The characters had watched hell unleash for longer than they could handle. They had watched friends and neighbors getting slaughtered in front of them. They watched their fellow humans turn into psychotic cultists with just a little goading from a madwoman. They were tired. They were terrified. They were facing what they thought was a hopeless situation without end. Didn't you catch that they had actually driven OUT OF STATE and the mist and monsters were STILL THERE? They sincerely thought that there were no more people left, and that their choice was a horrible, agonizing, possibly slow death at the jaws/claws of some otherworldly beast, or a quick, merciful respite from the terror they felt. The guy had seen his wife's corpse just recently. His kid was catatonic and unable to fend for himself. The two in the back of the truck were old and tired. The teacher was just out of energy to fight.

Think about it-- What if he didn't shoot his kid? He and the kid step out of the truck, and then BOOM, some beastie shoots acid in his kid's face and the poor sonofabitch has to watch his son writhe in agony, scream, and die slowly as his face melts off? Or how about he gets dragged off-- not killed-- and impregnated with those spider-things? Remember the MP at the pharmacy? Would you want THAT for your kid? Alive, in agony, with those THINGS inside of him?

Better to die quickly than to suffer for days... And when you're out of your mind with fear and exhaustion, such decisions are pretty easy to come to.

I've been in insufferable pain before, laying in a hospital bed, BEGGING them to kill me and end my agony. I'm glad they didn't, of course, but when you're at that point where you feel like nothing will ever be good again, and where your whole world is pain and torment, a merciful death can seem like a gift on the horizon.

And that none of you have ever been so psychologically devastated by loss that you didn't feel like dying-- That's strange and sort of inhuman, unless you're inexperienced kids or shut-ins. When the woman I loved died in front of me, I was destroyed. If I'd had a gun in my hand that day, or perhaps even that week, I would probably have sent a bullet into my brain to end the emotional pain. Again, I'm glad I didn't. I'm glad I had neither the opportunity or the failure of will required to actively seek my own end, but I can also relate to what those characters were feeling.

That's why The Mist is good horror-- because the monsters are merely a catalyst. The Mist is not a "man against nature" tale, or even "man against man"-- It's "Man against Himself" elements that make it truly frightening.

But hey-- You big, macho studs would have just walked out in that mist and karate chopped the next carnivorous extradimensional monster that came along, and you would have shrugged it off if one of them bit your son in half, right?

Liars. You'd have wet your pants when the engine died, and probably would have tried to convince the woman that she had more to live for than you, so you could have that last bullet.