Best Slasher Movies

Finally a return to excellent Stephen King adaptations.

Frank Darabont does an incredible job of adapting Stephen King’s The Mist into a truly frightening movie. Like King’s original story, the movie doesn’t just rely on gore (although it is definitely top shelf gore and there’s plenty of it) to scare its audience. The Mist’s greatest strength is in the unique way it plays on what a danger we as people are to ourselves. It exposes people’s fears, prejudices and core beliefs as well as effectively showing the real horror of group mentality.

The entire cast performs in such a believable and real way. While they’re all very talented actors I think much of the credit has to go to an excellently written script. There’s a real humanity to this story and while the premise isn’t necessarily believable, the way the people react definitely is. The stand outs in the cast are definitely the incredible performances by Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden. You feel so strongly for these people which is such a rarity in horror movies. You care about them and that makes you want to watch to see what happens.

The Mist is an expertly crafted horror movie with lots of gore but lots of emotion. My only warning is that the ending is truly shocking, disturbing not easy to take. The Mist is not for the faint of heart.

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Sure there isn’t a lot of gore in Christine, but it’s a genuinely scary movie with at least two instances of graphic blood shed. I think the scene (near the end of the movie) that involved a rather large piece of glass in someone’s stomach is particularly good as well as the burning corpse we see earlier on.

With Christine, Stephen King takes what sounds like a ludicrous idea and turns into horror gold. There’s a reason this man is referred to as the King of Horror. He may not be the King of Gore, but he knows had to write a good horror story and Bill Phillips translates King’s novel into a very faithful screenplay which makes a truly frightening movie.

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The Shining, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, is horror at its finest. Sure it’s got it’s token blood, but it doesn’t rely on the red stuff to shock and terrify. The power of The Shining is its subtle intensity. There is little violence because the movie just doesn’t need it. The whole film smacks of menace and all things sinister.

The real heat of The Shining – what really makes it work – is the combination of Jack Nicholson’s performance as Jack Torrance and Stanley Kubrick’s expert direction. The music only serves to further the intense mood of the film; cued absolutely perfectly to heighten every scene.

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