Based on a conversation I was having last night, I realized that most of the movies that I refer to as horror films are rarely horrific. And I don't mean the kind of horrible where the ineptitude of filmmakers or writers have fashioned a huge honker of a movie, although that can certainly be fun. What I mean is that style of film that gives fans of the genre not only what they expect, but assaults them with a bleaker, more nihilistic style than what most films strive for.

The one that leaps to mind is Frank Darabont's The Mist, a movie that I feel best exhibits what horror movies can be. Sure, it has its roots in the monster movies of the 1950's, but it also draws heavily from Serling's work on Twilight Zone. A piece like "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" echoes in the aisles of the grocery store in The Mist. Although there is much to debate in the movie, one thing stands head and shoulders above the others - the final scene.

I remember reading an unproduced screenwriter griping that the movie was unsound because it failed to deliver a satisfactory resolution. The way this writer put it, the film failed to deliver what audiences most want. To which I would respond, "So?"

Horror is the one genre that does not have to satisfy a viewer, and, in fact, the best often do not. The whole point is to unsettle the viewer or reader, to create a space where the positively awful can happen. We drag these monsters into the light, straight from our subconscious, where we can see how awful they are. And, a movie like Darabont's doesn't stop there, but offers the idea that sometime the monsters win, too. That's the part I like. For every slasher film with the predictable heroine surviving at the denouement, or the supernatural thrillers where a long-buried mystery is finally solved, there should be the alternate view, where completely horrible things happen to perfectly decent people who don't come out clean. Some of them don't make it out at all.

Horror films should not be easy consumables. They shouldn't be easy going down, like aged whiskey. They should be like razors, slicing open the subconscious to expose the darkest places in our psyche, then to show us the world where those demons not only exist but thrive and succeed. If the ending of The Mist shakes you up, angers you, outrages your sensibilities, how can it not be marked as a pure achievement?