5 Terrifying Implications of Surviving a Horror Movie

5 Land of the Dead

Land of the Dead was George Romero's fourth bite at the undead apple -- even though he had made six or seven dead movies at this point (but some of the others don't count, including official remakes and a few unofficial sequels). Did you ever see Day of the Dead 2? It was about as entertaining as having a stranger eat a bowl of chili, take a dump in your lap and then berate you for it. Point being -- there are a lot of zombie movies, but Romero is the granddaddy of them all, thanks to Night of the Living Dead in 1969.

By the time Land of the Dead rolls around, the whole world is not only overrun with stinky, shambly corpses, it's mostly adapted to them. People live happy, normal lives in their protected cities, and outside, everywhere else, zombies just rot. Or do they?! They do. But apparently they also evolve, because that's what reanimated meat does. It gets smart. This is already going in a bad direction. But on the upside, most of the featured zombies are wearing costumes, and that's delightful. Zombie cheerleaders are rot-dorable.

At the ass-end of the film, as our living hero is driving away in his big, ridiculous zombie tank, he catches sight of Big Daddy, a zombie Martin Luther King Jr., leading a zombie horde away from the city. Instead of blowing them to smithereens like a sensible person might do, he stops and appreciates the view (like a crazy person drinking kerosene and masturbating with sand paper might do), and decides that the zombies are merely looking for their place in the world, and isn't that true of all of us? At the end of the day, aren't we the same as zombies?

The answer is no. Because zombies eat people and then people become zombies. This terrible analogy for the American dream (which is the semi-sensical way to interpret Romero's dribble plot point here) fails miserably, because rarely -- if ever -- do people in search of a better life bite others, turning them into the undead. Zombies don't deserve "opportunity." And do not invite one over to play with your child; it's really dumb.

If the surviving humans have now reached a point where they need to consider the needs of zombies in their day-to-day survival, they may as well all curl up in plastic bags for the night and hope not to wake up. How are you supposed to scavenge for food if the zombie with the taquitos at 7-Eleven has puppy dog eyes? Is the plan to give out hug therapy? That won't work, if my research into zombie behavior is even slightly accurate.

If you can't kill a zombie -- and, meanwhile, all a zombie wants to do is eat you -- then you're screwed, because there are a lot more of them than there are of the walking food bags. Zombies don't get the luxury of civil rights because -- and this should be in the Constitution if it's not already -- you don't get rights if you're a cannibalistic undead horror. You just don't.

In 1985, we all fell in love with Jeff Goldblum after he and his mullet acid-puked on a guy's foot and hand for love. Goldblum had been doing what all good scientists do, blowing up apples and baboons until he was sure he wouldn't blow himself up, and then tried out teleportation. But, oh snap! There was a fly in the pod! So he became a fly man. Science, you cray-cray.

Fast forward a couple of years and they make a sequel, starring Eric Stoltz, cinema's answer to a redheaded yawn and a fart half-stifled by your wallet. He plays Goldblum's part-fly son who was raised in a lab by the people who had confiscated all of Goldblum's research into teleportation. And who better to work out the problem than his accelerated-growth-afflicted progeny? No one! Except maybe anyone who is not a genetic monster.

As you'd expect, Stoltz also becomes a fly man, because movie genetics are pretty easy to figure out (man + thing = manthing), and he solves the riddle of teleportation just in time to horribly mutilate the film's villain and then have a happy ending with his girlfriend (who, by the way, is really accepting of the fact that her boyfriend is a 5-year-old half insect).

The issue Flyboy and his girl aren't dealing with is the fact that a fully functional teleportation device is now in the hands of an organization that's OK with secretly raising a half-fly child in a lab and keeping their own mutated CEO in a dog cage. This means that the new guy in charge is potentially even more deranged than the previous guy.

The company has the ability to teleport matter, including living matter, from one place to another, but they also have the ability to gene-splice any awful affront to God they want. You want to see what happens when you mix a naked mole-rat with Steven Seagal? You're awful. It's scheduled for next Thursday. Want to see what happens if Liza Minnelli merges with a puffer fish? Probably not, but we'll do it later today.

It's only a matter of time before they replicate the teleportation pods, set up a network and start transporting gross monsters all around the world. Thanks for nothing, Stoltz.

3 Halloween

In 1978, John Carpenter aced the "weird guy in a William Shatner mask who kills a lot" genre with the introduction of Michael Myers. Carpenter was going for the idea of a cold, awful, driven machine of a man, a monster in a human shell. He went out of his way to let you know there was no humanity left in Myers. He was evil. How do we know that for sure? Dr. Loomis says so. In fact, it was his diagnosis.

The exact quote from the movie Halloween is this: "I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply ... evil." Powerful stuff, huh? Now imagine if your son was locked up in Dr. Loomis' hospital in the room next to Myers. How happy are you now with Dr. Loomis' approach to mental health?

This is a doctor who openly admits that he gave up on a 6-year-old boy by the time he was 14 and then spent seven years not treating him, but holding him prisoner. Who else was Dr. Loomis treating over those 15 years?

Odds are that Myers' story became big local news after it happened -- what with his own doctor shooting him six times and all -- and then there's the body count caused by the escaped mental patient under Loomis' care. You could probably find a lawyer who advertises on the asses of strippers who has the wherewithal to build a malpractice suit based on what happened. Basically, anyone treated by Loomis at the time of Myers' escape who wasn't a model of mental health had grounds to sue both Loomis and the hospital because "you're evil and I'm just not going to treat you for seven years" is the kind of shit most HMOs wouldn't be too cool with.

2 The Descent

The Descent is an adorable little tale of a group of girls with a passion for spelunking who get eaten by grub people in a massive system of caves, except for the one lady at the end who gets away. (This actually depends on what version of the movie you saw, but let's just say you watched the version in which she got away, which, technically, has to be the official ending, because they made a sequel.)

In the sequel, the woman leads another group back to the cave, because that's how horror movies work: Officials don't believe you and, assuming you're a lying murderer, follow you back to an isolated cave system to see if your story about the penis monsters pans out. For real though, didn't they look like a bunch of foreskin men? They so did.

Naturally, everyone dies again with the help of one weirdo who is trying to keep the monsters' secret. Those foreskindlers sure are voracious!

But the issue here is that she got away once. The story got out. Unless local law enforcement and the team of experts decided that they'd take the word of the lady they had already assumed was a murderer, more people are coming. Help is on the way.

Eventually, those dick beasts, too full of new people meat, or with their numbers dwindling so much they won't be able to rely on human stupidity to keep them secret anymore, will be discovered. With an entirely new life-form to study, scientists will ship the foreskin men around the world for research. They'll go to zoos. They'll be bred and protected as an endangered species. Then it's only a matter of time before the world's first bipedal, cannibalistic phalli become the targets of hunters looking to up the ante with more exotic game. And is there a chance they wouldn't be used in some kind of weird sporting event where they get tossed in a pit and forced to fight to the death while people place bets? Not likely.

The Ring and its sequel were pretty popular films despite the complete ridiculousness of the plot and how weird that Aidan kid was. For real -- ignore the girl in the well -- what was his deal? He looked like the only 7-year-old in the world on a three-week bender. He looked like he'd taste your toothbrush.

So, in a nutshell, The Ring is about an evil little girl who, in reality, is just an asshole who likes killing everyone. Kill, kill, kill! All damn day. And, naturally, she uses the magical technology of VHS tapes to facilitate this.

Across the first movie and its sequel, the creepy kid and his mom, Rachel, try to survive the awful little girl's wrath, and eventually, they put a stop to her (and not by doing nothing that makes any sense, but -- shh! -- no time to worry about that). The bigger problem is that the first victim was the little boy's cousin. Then, right after Rachel visits him, it's the little girl's adopted father. Then it's the creepy boy's dad. And the bodies following Rachel across the country continue to pile up until they are a generous handful of corpses that she's had direct contact with, most of whom died the same, mysterious way. You don't have to be Detective Fin Tutuola to figure out that some fishy shit is afoot here. (But if you were Detective Fin Tutuola, you'd say something like "Yo, look at the size of my wife's ass. You wanna see something that really kills? Dat ass!" It's not profound, but he still might say it.)

Once the evil little girl is stored safe and sound in her well, Rachel would have had only a few days before police, likely investigating the death of the doctor who had forbidden her access to her own son when she tried to drown him, came a-knockin'. They'd already be aware that the boy's dad and cousin had died at that point as well ... kind of like a couple of local teens had. Hmm. And unless she's the smoothest talker on earth and can really sell the "evil dead girl who comes out of the TV" excuse that we all try to cover our own asses now and again, odds are she's looking at consecutive life sentences.

Check out more from Ian in 8 Romantic Songs You Didn't Know Were About Rape and 12 'Sexy' Ads That Will Give You Nightmares.