Fates Worse Than Death

That twisted gut-punch of an ending. That's our final fate worse than death. Some admire the scene, some detest it, but there's no denying that Frank Darabont's (slight) deviation from the source material gives his Stephen King adaptation a real ... impact ... once the final frames show up. We'd just survived two hours of The Mist full of giant monsters and the true evil that men (and women) can do -- and just when things look like they couldn't possibly get any bleaker ... well, either you've seen the film and you know what I mean, or you haven't seen the film and probably shouldn't. Especially if you're a parent. I don't even have children and this final twist had me almost in tears.

And with that we close our month-long look at various Fates Worse Than Death! As always, we are truly grateful to the cinematic arts for letting us experience all sorts of truly horrible things, safe in the knowledge that no matter how horrific things may get ... whew, it's all just a movie. And boy do we love our safely fictional horrors.

Happy Halloween!

Session 9 is my favorite movie. I consider it to be the standard of psychological horror and what every horror filmmaker should strive to emulate when making a film. It is a perfect example of the slow burn, a crescendo of unbridled tension that focuses solely on the scariest thing imaginable: the frailty of the human condition.

Session 9 introduces us to the crew of a Hazmat team sent inside the walls of Danvers State Hospital, an old mental institution that harbors a sinister past. The dark history of the building resonates in a unique way with each member of the crew, and as tension among them begins to boil (including the disappearance of one crew member), things begin to take a sinister turn.

Much of the appreciation of this fate is contingent on having seen the film, so naturally spoilers dwell within.

I have been a supporter of Platinum Dunes since they, against expectations, didn't ruin their remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Sure, they're the biggest bullseye in the "blame Hollywood's lack of creativity for all these pointless horror remakes" game, and their non-remakes are awful, but I make no apologies when I say I not only enjoyed the Platinum Dunes remake of Friday the 13th, but it's one of my favorite horror films of the year.

Whether you agree with that or not (probably not), it's tough to argue that the Michael Bay produced, Marcus Nispel directed reboot of Jason Voorhees doesn't at least feature one hell of a kill in its opening sequence; a kill that widens my eyes every time I see it, a kill that I know is going to make me a little apprehensive the next time I snuggled up to a campfire in my sleeping bag.

I'm noticing a chauvinistic theme emerging in this column relating to our own junk and how we perceive assaults on said junk to be worse than death. And yes, this particular fate does befall a total backwoods d-bag who completely deserves it. But we the male writers of Horror Squad have a great fondness for the hanging endowments God gave us and it makes us wince to witness any man suffer penile punishment. The trap she sets for him seems to be another incarnation of the vagina dentata myth and actually does represent a fitting retribution for rape. Still? Ouch.

Check out Storm Warning if you can find it in the states. The first two acts are a little pedestrian, but the finale is a half hour of non-stop carnage. Also look for the fish hook trap that the wife sets up in the barn as it is also wonderfully wicked.

How's this for a Fate Worse Than Death! -- having your likeness manipulated after your death in order to shill for some satellite TV? And being forced to co-star with David Spade even AFTER your demise? Truly chilling.

So, you're 16 and a total outcast, but you're kinda hot and into gore galore. Surely this drives all the horror fanboys mad--biding time until the right moment when they can woo you with their impeccable taste for terror. Truth is, you'd totally make out with them, but they're too scared to approach you and puberty has left you devoid of social know-how. This leaves you with the football players or other average morons who don't get you but want to sleep with you. Now you can probably understand why Ginger Fitzgerald in Ginger Snaps equates hormonal distress with hell on earth--otherwise known as high school.

When Ginger finally 'becomes a woman' things just get worse, period. Her little sister is freaked out, her mother announces it to everyone at the dinner table (with cake!) and she gets bitten by a wolf while trying to enact some good old-fashioned revenge on a classmate. After the attack she notices her body changing into something more...wild. It's not easy to hide a tail in your skinny jeans and the fur sprouting in strange places is definitely not hot, but all that is forgotten when something stronger calls to her. Suddenly the jocks don't seem like jerks and Ginger's new-found sexual energy is all consuming, literally. Horny turns to horrific when her romp with a few boys turns them into a tasty snack. As Ginger's transformation progresses, her humanity slips and everything becomes jeopardized, including her close relationship with her sister Brigitte.

At one point in the film Ginger says to Brigitte, "A girl can only be a slut, a bitch, a tease, or the virgin next door." Now, Ginger can't be any of those things if she wanted to. It's hard to celebrate your femininity and sexuality when you only have the need to feed.

Alright, there's going to be spoilers from the get-go, but if you're a good Horror Squad reader, you likely caught Sam Raimi's so-called "spook-a-blast" in theaters or recently on home video (and enjoyed the, um, heck out of it).

So this entry could go one of two ways. We could concern ourselves with Christine (Alison Lohman), whose gypsy-spurning behavior results in a three-day-long curse. She is bashed around her house, given the mother of all nosebleeds, forced to kill her kitten (and for naught, it turns out), embarrassed before her potential in-laws, driven to pawn most of her possessions, whacked with a sizable gravestone, and then -- in spite of all her best intentions and elaborate schemes -- dragged down to hell for some good old-fashioned eternal damnation.

OR we go with Christine's boyfriend, Clay (Justin Long). He is forced to see his love fall prey to forces that he -- the psychiatry major and eternal skeptic -- fails to comprehend, embarrass herself before his parents (who weren't so keen on her to begin with), and then see her dragged to hell before his very eyes. How do you explain that away? How do you even live with that? Is that not an equally damning Fate Worse Than Death?

There are two reasons that the Hellraiser series has spawned a bazillion sequels, books, comics and a possible remake. First, Clive Barker is wildly imaginative and can seduce the dark with his poetic and beautifully perverse reverie. Second, the Cenobites.

The word cenobite means 'a member of a monastic community' but the Cenobites in Barker's stories and the Hellraiser film series are the dark guardians of an unholy order. Barker's novella The Hellbound Heart describes the Cenobites as Theologians of the Order of the Gash (or simply, The Gash) and The Hierophants. These creatures can only be summoned through the Schism by a device such as the Lament Configuration. Yeah, that's the infamous puzzle box. Many of the Cenobites were once human but their insatiable appetite led them to open the box -- transforming them into the mutilated figures we know. Purveyors and explorers of the flesh, the Cenobites are called by those who seek unearthly delights and become trapped in an endless cycle of torture and pain.

In the films, Doug Bradley portrays the most well known Cenobite, Pinhead, who is considered the leader of the pack. A former Captain during the First World War, he lost his faith in humanity and sought comfort in the cruel and unusual. Pinhead boasts a head full of pins that have been hammered into his skull, hooks and chains galore (also his favorite weapon) and a torso of peeling flesh. Even though I totally dig his leather gown, I'm not sure that's enough to make me open the box. Other Cenobites include the Chatterer, the Siamese Twins, Butterball and Stitch. Each one has a sinister set of mutilations that would make Bob Flanagan jealous.

Based on the works of Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis, Serpent takes zombies back to their Haitian roots. There's no military experiment or book bound in human flesh here. It's a mysterious zombie cocktail. Not the kind you'd order at Trader Vic's, but one born of tetradotoxin, something from the datura family of plants, blue diamonds, and purple horseshoes. As anthropologist Dennis Alan (Bill Pullman) gets closer to the source of the forbidden knowledge, he ears the ire of the locals. As in any good horror flick, pissing off the locals results in some truly heinous retribution. In this case, they don't poke a doll of him with needles or sell him skank weed. They strap him to a chair. And in an act that makes every male wince, they nail his junk to said chair.

Men's legs instinctively cross at this scene. Women chuckle. It's Craven operating at a level of sadism not seen since the original Last House on the Left. Since the media storm that resulted from the book and its follow-up, Passage of Darkness, some of Davis' conclusions have come into question. The books certainly make for interesting reading, but in spite of all of the high minded research and feats of anthropological derring do, all you'll think about is the hammer, the nail, and Bill Pullman's Little Bill.