The Running Man

Reading Stephen King's On Writing made me want to do two things: read his books and follow his advice. Luckily, one of his pieces of advice is to read daily, and when you can't read a physical book, to listen to an audio book. Searching the bargain bin at Barnes & Noble, I came across this gem, which he wrote under the pen name Richard Bachman.

The protagonist here is Ben Richards, a poor man living in the ghetto of Co-Op City in the year 2025. When his sixteen month old daughter gets sick, he's desperate enough for money that he signs up for the Games, a collection of deadly game shows made to distract the masses from the ever growing problems of pollution and suffering. He is selected for The Running Man, a game where he must evade the Hunters for thirty days, netting $100 an hour for each hour he stays alive.

First off, skip the forward. It actually spoils the ending.

Even with that, King shows his talent for suspense. There is a feeling of no place is safe throughout, even though you know he has to survive for the seven and a half hours the book goes on. No place is safe for long, with people willing to sell him out at every opportunity. The last part gets a bit explicit in its violence, but not too much.

The story is pretty basic, which is fine. After The Wheel of Time I needed a good game of cat and mouse. The ending... well, I won't spoil it, but King describes it as "A happy ending, by Bachman's standards."

If this is how King writes, I have a lot to look forward to.

Evil Dead

Well, I start of my October with a first: a horror movie that actually managed to scare me! Yes, it’s Evil Dead, a low budget independent film directed by Sam Raimi and starring Bruce Campbell, in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, and eventually turned goofy by its sequels. While the later ones might be funny, this one was pure scares.

The plot is five friends go camp out in a cabin in the woods. I only bothered to learn one name, Ash, so the rest we’ll just call the dead meats. They find a strange book in the basement, they play a recording with some weird incantations, and then stuff happens.

I'm glad I didn't know much more about this movie than Ash got a chainsaw hand in the second movie and the infamous tree scene, because I found myself being generally in suspense. The first scene where the woman was possessed by a deadite caught me off guard, and I was generally freaked out. However, the first sign the book was working was the infamous tree rape scene, and I was relieved that Sam Raimi regretted it, because I could have gone my whole life without seeing it. It wasn't scary, just unpleasant.

Everything else was scary though. The possessions... I havent seen The Exorcist as of this reading, but I think I'll pass if it's scarier than this. The creepy laughing, the make up, the voices... yikes. I'm not going to spoil any more of this, since that would ruin the scares, but it works.

A lot of it is atmosphere and camera angles, which makes it works on the small budget. It really speaks volumes for the talent. A lot of it is fear of the unknown. You don't really see a lot of the deadites in this movie. There's a lot we see from POV, but not the monsters themselves.

Oh, and the stop motion effects at the end are a treat. You never see that technique anymore unless it's an entirely animated movie. Always a plus.

The only nitpick? Is there any explanation why Ash wasn't possessed? Maybe in the sequel.

Rating: 9/10