Horror Lovers Challenge. Day 5: Favorite 2000s Horror

I am participating in a 30-day challenge. This time it is all about horror! If you know anything about us here at the Fort you would know that we are hardcore horror fans. Each October we watch a movie each night in that we dub “The 31 Nights of Horror.”

Day five’s prompt is: Favorite 2000s Horror.

The Mist (2004)

After the bountiful harvest the two decades before, horror films fell into somewhat of a rut in the ’90s. It was an era that saw the long overdue death of a number of once-lucrative franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, thanks to sequels with lessening box office returns. However, a resurgence began with the dawn of the new millennium. With the emergence of digital film technology and affordable computing power, films were cheaper to make, while the internet was a brand new frontier for promoting and releasing movies. Some of the honorable mentions are the Final Destination and Saw franchises, but I am a sucker for a good, spooky, Stephen King-inspired story. Adapted novella of the same name, “The Mist” tells the story of a group of people trapped inside a grocery store by a mysterious mist that has descended from the mountains. However, it soon becomes clear that some people trapped in the building are just as dangerous as the things lurking in the fog. Notorious for having one of the bleakest and most nihilistic endings ever put to film, “The Mist” is the closest we’ve come yet to a full H.P. Lovecraft adaptation from King. It features a veritable menagerie of horrific creatures from the Cthulhu mythos that’ll haunt your nightmares for some time. Religious zealot Mrs. Carmody is one of the best villains to debut in the cinema for quite some time. Frank Darabont and King together never fail at being a magical combination — “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile” are their two previous collaborations — and “The Mist” is another wonderful example of how the two artists complement each other. A later black-and-white release of “The Mist” improved upon an already superlative work, drenching the film in the heady atmosphere of a ’50s or ’60s monster movie.