Battening Down For Frankenstorm: Six Badass Storms In Horror Movies

The water has been bottled; the eggs have been hard boiled; bread and milk are tucked away in the fridge and we're sitting on a stockpile of of batteries, flashlights and candles. Yes sir, our house is prepared for "Frankenstorm" as it prepares to batter the North East later today and tomorrow.

While we wait for the inevitable loss of power, it's a good time to cozy up with some of our favorite horror films that center on a massive storm.

The Mist

It's damn near criminal that Frank Darabont's adaptation of Steven King's novella didn't light up the box office. This is a near perfect horror film with terror coming in equal parts from the other worldly Lovecraftian monsters and the religious zealots who believe they've incurred God's wrath. The mist that rolls into a small Maine town in the aftermath of a destructive storm carries terrors right out of one's worst nightmare. Darabont pulls no punches with The Mist. Where King can sometimes be accused of liking his protagonists too much to allow a bad fate to fall on them, the director has no such qualms. The mist features a stunning downbeat, stomach punch of an ending that I still hope doesn't happen every time it approaches. Bonus points if you're watching the bonus "black and white" version of the film on blu ray

The Old Dark House

I wrote a bit about this film earlier in the month, but its so good it warrants another mention. The storm that forces its players to seek refuge in a demented family's home still holds up as an absolute slobberknocker, complete with cars getting buried under mud slides and windows getting thrown open under the force of the gale. The force of the storm matches the murderous intent of the crazies that live in the home. What makes The Old Dark House such a treat is the realization that it's James Whale's Inception. Coming off the success of Frankenstein, Whale agreed to helm Bride only if he could make this film in between. Dark House finds the director taking the piss out of the nascent horror genre with sardonic exchanges between each of the players. You can feel the wheels turning in Whale's mind for the direction he'd take Bride as he cuts loose here. The Old Dark House remains an under appreciated gem that no fan of classic Universal horror should skip out on.

Suspiria

While storms aren't essential to the plot (such as it is) per se, the opening scenes where Suzy arrives at the Academy in the middle of a blinding storm and the howling wind that accompanies the famous death scene that follows help set the tone for what is to come. As Suzy's taxi cab provides the scarcest of illumination through the torrential down pour, the little light it does provide  hints and ominous figures tracking her progress int he night. Combined with Goblin's score, these scenes immediately force the viewer to sit up and take notice while at the same time putting them in a place of extreme discomfort.

Identity

Granted this 2003 thriller has a god awful twist that near ruins the film, but prior to the reveal, this is a damn fine update of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. The cast is stuffed with great performers: John Cusack, Alfred Molina, Ray Liotta and John Hawkes among them. A group of strangers find themselves stranded in a Nevada hotel during a fierce storm. One by one the group gets picked off in this film that is a whodunnit all the way up to the point that it is no longer a whodunnit.

The Fog

Oh Christ, how did I almost forget about this Carpenter gem? Ok sure it's mostly a rolling fog that rolls through town, but that fog carries murderous pirate ghosts! While this is a terrific horror flick for any time of the year, it's an especially good fit for Halloween season. Carpenter, as he always seems to do when he brings his A game, he takes a simple story and elevates the material into something truly spectacular. Solid turns by Hal Holbrook, Jaime Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins and Adrienne Barbeau make me long for the days when genre films weren't populated with air brushed members of CW shows, but that's why we have DVD collections I guess.

Poltergeist

There are few things worse than finding out your over priced cookie cutter suburban McMansion is haunted by forces that want to suck your precocious six year old daughter into a inter dimensional vortex. Finding out that home is built on the cursed soil of an Native American burial ground and that the realty company you worked for cut every corner in the book making it all that much easier for the ground to give way and raise the bodies of century old pissed off corpses would be among them. Poltergeist climaxes in the middle of near hurricane conditions and you can almost feel the putrefied skin of the corpses sloughing off and finding their way to soak right into every nook and cranny of a horrified Jo Beth Williams. There's a pretty good chance she's going to be flossing bits of grey skin out from between her teeth later on.  The end of Poltergeist is just one messy, slippery disgusting mess that a week's worth of hot showers isn't going to wash off.