Kevin Costner is Scary

The face of terror.

I just watched "Mr. Brooks", a 2007 movie of crazy dark psychological thriller-ness. It's kind of a spin off of Jekyll & Hyde . Kevin Costner plays Earl Brooks, a CEO of a box-making company who has an alter ego named Marshall. Marshall is the embodiment of Earl's addiction to killing people, then rearranging their bodies and taking artsy pictures. There's the obligatory plot of a spunky law enforcement agent trying to find him out, but they throw in a sicko photographer who wants to accompany Earl in his deeds, among a few other things.

It was dark. It was twisted. It was screwed up. It was tense. And I did NOT see the ending coming. Holy balls, that was a good movie. See, I don't know about you folks, but I love a good psychological thriller. Anything that bends the mind is fantastic to me because it requires a person to bend their own mind to come up with everything in the first place.

That's why I like horror. True horror. Not the crap put out these days with the formulaic plots regarding hot teens having sex and then getting gruesomely murdered by one stupid stabby thing or another because they don't have any brains. I mean stuff that really gets into people's heads, stuff that doesn't even have to be gory. I mean stuff like that of the late Polish painter Zdislaw Beksinski. Stuff like this:

Look at that and tell me it's not scary. That painting is just one of many of his that give me chills. That's some real horror there.

Think, as well, of the video game Dead Space 2. The horror in that game is fantastically done I think. Honestly, it's not hard to think up a mean scary bad guy. But are they truly terrifying? I think Dead Space nailed it by making the enemies in the game a mutilated and mutated onslaught of humans. Ho, but not just adults, because everyone in video games is an adult. No, they went after kids and babies too. 

Visceral Games probably had a board meeting and decided something along these lines:

Let's do 'em, man! Let's do this whole fucking village! 

If you get the reference, then you're a fantastic individual. If you didn't, then you are wrong and you need to see "Platoon." It's got Charlie Sheen in it. Anyway, these boys did NOT hold back when it came to making as many things as fucked up as possible look as fucked up as they possibly could in their game. Seriously, if I was ambling along some mining facility and I saw something twice as tall as me with this face:

That is the point where I'd just throw my hands up and walk out, muttering, "I fuckin' quit bro. I fuckin' quit." That's SCARY. And I love it.

The ability to truly psychologically affect someone, especially in a negative way such as scaring or confusing them, is applause-worthy in my book. The skill to reach outside one's own comfort zone to find something truly affective (and I specify "affective" and not "effective," I'm not always stupid) and then bring it to others is very impressive. Often I have trouble thinking of scary or tragic scenarios because I don't like to think of them, so to me the ability to not just think of these things, but to be able to draw them and give them life goes far beyond making a good romantic comedy or painting a pretty picture of some fruit in a bowl (I admit I'm absolutely terrible at drawing anything in general).

And just FYI, at the end of Mr. Brooks, Snape kills Dumbledore.