“When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth!”
From White Zombie to Dawn of the Dead; from Resident Evil to World War Z, zombies have invaded popular culture, becoming the monsters that best express the fears and anxieties of the modern west. The ultimate consumers, zombies rise from the dead and feed upon the living, their teeming masses ever hungry, ever seeking to devour or convert, like mindless, faceless eating machines. Zombies have been depicted as mind-controlled minions, the shambling infected, the disintegrating dead, the ultimate lumpenproletariat, but in all cases, they reflect us, mere mortals afraid of death in a society on the verge of collapse.
The Mist The storm rolled across Long Lake in Maine with a fury, leaving David Drayton and his family with fallen trees, downed power lines, and no electricity. At his wife’s request, David heads to the local supermarket to stock up on supplies, taking his young son and neighbor along for the ride. But the […]
Stephen King recently made an appearance on NPR’s Talk of the Nation: To the delight of Stephen King fans, the latest installment in the Marvel comic book series inspired by his Dark Tower epic was released in early March. The illustrated saga was kicked off in the graphic novel Dark Tower: Gunslinger Born, which introduced […]
The genre of story telling that has best succeeded in giving me the creeps is the tried and true ghost story. It tends to be reliably frightening in written form, and although less so on film, it’s hard to find someone who’s not been given a heebie-jeebies overdose by The Changeling (1980). Other successes worth mentioning include The Haunting (1963), Poltergeist (1982), and more recently, The Others (2001). Unfortunately, the list of bad haunted fright films is far lengthier. This brings us to the genre’s most recent offering. To describe 1408 in appropriately metaphysical terms, Swedish director, Mikael Håfström’s film is stuck in movie purgatory, somewhere between good and bad.
“When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth!”