Spoiler alert!

(I’ve always wanted to say that.)

On Friday night Darren and I chose to see The Mist without reading a single review of the movie. I thought the preview looked scary and I have liked Stephen King since I was a fifth grader trading his horror novels with my teacher Mrs. Connor. Years later I expanded my literary canon from Stephen King to Jim Morrison’s bad poetry (and for some reason Mrs. Connor then deemed me mature enough to babysit her child), but I still have a soft spot for the creepy books that used to keep me up at night. So imagine my surprise when I walked into the downtown movie theater with my hands full of expensive popcorn and saw octopus tentacles slithering into a grocery store and devouring a teenage stock boy. That sounds kind of cool when it’s written out, but believe me, it wasn’t.

I forget about Stephen King books for long periods of time and then all of a sudden he’s there on my radar writing about evil talking cars or giant carnivorous insects coming out of the mist and I’m like, “Stephen? What happened to the good old days? Have you run out of ideas? Are you just messing with us at this point? Why can’t you smack my primal emotions around like you used to?” King seems like a smart, self-reflecting guy, judging from his Entertainment Weekly Pop of King column, so there must be a reason for these nefarious tentacles that are vaguely linked to some secret military industrial complex in a small town in Maine. Maybe King is working on a much larger, meta horror story, where unsuspecting King readers and movie-goers are sucked into a nightmare of bad dialogue and outlandish visions. We pay $9 for a movie ticket and $14 for snacks and then we are haunted for the rest of our lives by the one time we failed to skim the New York Times movie reviews before date night. At the same time, I know that the director of The Mist probably butchered King’s story. And I know what it’s like to be out of ideas. And one time I was shopping for groceries and a sparrow whizzed right by my head and almost ate me.

One Thought on “Spoiler alert!

  1. You took the words right out of my mouth (most of them, at least). At least grocery shopping will never be the same again!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Post Navigation