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November 06, 2007

Monsters!

It's been a really long time since I read The Mist by Stephen King. Skeleton Crew, one of his short story collections, was the first Stephen King book I ever read, and I don't remember all the details of The Mist but I remember that it scared the bejesus out of me. As I got older I started to find King a little formulaic at times, but I think some of those first impressions of his writing have really stuck with me. I remember really liking The Tommyknockers when I read it in high school too. The Mist is, if I recall correctly, the first story in Skeleton Crew, and it's quite long. There's a new movie coming out based on that story, starring Thomas Jane (from The Punisher) and it looks pretty darn scary. I don't remember Marcia Gay Harden's character, but maybe I need to go reread the story. Stephen King is great entertainment, and scary in a way where you can tell yourself it's not real. There have been some really good movies based on his books, and some really bad ones, but we won't get into that (giant bat rats indeed...)

We have so little time to go to the movies these days, but I suppose this is yet another that will be much better on the big screen. I've really lost my tolerance for gore as I've gotten older (I simply could not in a million years sit through any of the Saw movies at this point in my life) but I still like a good monster movie. I guess what it comes down to is that ghosts and monsters are scary, but movies about people doing awful things to each other disturb me far more because it's actually plausible that those things could happen. So, hooray for The Mist by Stephen King. Let's go watch monsters eat people until the cows come home! Then again, being trapped in a grocery store (or on any sort of public transit) during any kind of crisis probably is my worst nightmare (and that's part of what they seem to emphasize in the film).

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