It made me a little afraid of fog after watching it. (The Best Actual Horror Movie Monsters, 1)

It's a MiniBest!

Sweetie and I are going on a date, at 11 a.m. this Saturday, to see what she called a horror movie, "Final Destination 3-D: Final-er Than Ever" or something like that. Sweetie's very excited. I'm not. The Final Destination movies pose a whole bunch of problems for me, which I won't get into at this point other than to say that it makes no sense, frankly, [SPOILER ALERT!] that Ali Larter was able to survive from movie 1 to movie 2 by being in a padded room. If Death can, through a series of Rube Goldbergian contraptions, kill that one teacher as she moved by (ultimately) lighting her on fire and then also stabbing her (Death being a bit of a drama queen prone to overkill, apparently)(Ha! Overkill! Get it? Pun intended), if Death can do that, why couldn't Death just collapse the roof of the asylum and crush Ali Larter?

Plus, did nobody else die during the time that Death was going back and killing those students from the plane? Or did other people die and Death was just putting in overtime to get the students and teacher?

So you can see my problems with that movie. That and they're just not scary. They're not, in my opinion, horror movies. They're more like torture porn movies, along the lines of Saw or Hostel. That's how I break out my supposedly-scary movies:

Torture Porn: Where the killer uses contraptions or just torments the kids, by, say, putting them in a house full of booby traps, or makes them repeatedly listen to Miley Cyrus songs or something.

Slasher Films: Any movie in which a regular human guy, or a regular human guy who happened to be dead at one point and came back but doesn't have any special macabre powers beyond being dead/walking really slowly, tries to kill people using regular human tools that you'd find laying around anyone's house, like a knife or chainsaw or scythe or a giant grinding machine of the kind that exists only in movies, and exists solely for the purpose of having the Slasher try to stuff the cute-but-nerdy girl into it, only to himself get stuffed into it.

Horror Films: Horror films, real horror films, have to have more than booby traps, viruses, and dead guys getting ground up. They've got to have a demon or a giant spider or ghosts or... something. Something supernatural. Even if it's just Michael Keaton listening to static and being scared by it, or Winona Ryder letting the devil take the wheel for a spin around town before the end of the world, if there's not something that can zap you, haunt your dreams, walk through walls or bite your head off in one swoop, it's not a horror movie.

That's the message I try to get across to Sweetie, who insists that things like The Strangers are horror movies when they're not. And Sweetie's not the only person who confuses "horror movies" with other types of movies. Even the experts, like these guys, claim some movies are "horror movies" when they're clearly not. ("Seven?" That is not a horror movie. Neither is The Silence of the Lambs.)

So to drive my point home (by putting it on a blog Sweetie rarely reads) I'm going to, for the next series of MiniBests declare which are The Best ACTUAL Horror Movie Monsters, and why.

Number One, The All-Time Best Horror Movie Monster, is a relative unknown, but one of the freakiest, weirdest, scariest movie monsters, ever. It is, or rather they are:

1. Those Freaky Weird Other-Dimensional Monsters From The Mist.

From the moment a guy yells There's something in The Mist until the very end, when giant weirdly-shaped, somehow-skeletal monsters are being dispatched by the Army, The Mist's monsters will freak... you... out. They rank extremely high on all the required categories of great movie monsters: They came out of nowhere. They have some sort of connection with the military. They have weird powers that we can't cope with. They don't look like they correspond to our laws of nature. They're fast.

And, worst of all, they can't be reasoned with. They're seemingly-intelligent animals that are stronger than us, but they don't talk. They just encase you in some kind of cocoon and then eat you, probably from the inside out. Or worse.