All Hope is Lost
By T.J. Tranchell
Answers are discomforting to me. Answers are either an end or a call to action and I don’t like either of them. And so, I find a strange comfort in a style of not knowing. I don’t want easy answers or happy endings. The majority of Hollywood films — yes, even horror films — bask in wrapping things up in neat bows and sending everyone on their merry way until the sequel. Then they’ll do it all over again.
I understand the allure of tidiness, of having things lined up for us because life is rarely like that. Life is ambiguous and lacks answers, so we want entertainment that provides clarity. That clarity, however, often avoids the ultimate answer: We will all die. Everyone you know and love will die. All your pets, all your children, and their children will someday die. Comfort, for me, comes in knowing there is an end and that we can’t actually see it. When a film does this, it’s jarring and regularly not accepted by audiences right away. Sometimes that movie is even hated for being different from what is expected (a failing, I believe, of the horror genre by too often playing it safe). There is safety in answers and danger in ambiguity. Hope is a safety net. A few movies remind us that there isn’t a safety net, and I am comforted by that.
Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist (2007) expertly straddles the lines between answers and hopelessness. The novella left readers trapped in the fog, still in the car, driving into the unknown. I like that, but Darabont took it a step further. He knows that everyone has a breaking point. When David Drayton (Thomas Jane) pulls over and ends the stories of everyone else in the car, he has lost hope and everyone else. Even his young son agreed to it. Drayton shoots them all but doesn’t have a bullet left for himself. We are left in the absolute pit of despair, what we think is rock bottom. And then, the mist clears. We don’t know how or why, just that it dissipates. Drayton looks up and sees the military vehicles full of people, including a woman (played by Melissa McBride who would later be featured in Darabont’s The Walking Dead series) who ran from the grocery store earlier because she had kids at home. Other than screams, we don’t know how Drayton will live with this and while everyone on the trucks has the hope of rebuilding, Drayton is lost. Rock bottom fell to another level and added survivor’s guilt to the mix.
Darabont leaves the audience in a strange place of both hope and hopelessness, and I find that oddly encouraging. There is comfort in seeing someone escape because we know that eventually, no one does.
Some filmmakers won’t tack on even a little bit of hope. Writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace gave the finger to the traditional Hollywood ending in 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch. While the movie has steadily gained the audience it deserved all along — almost to the point of being overrated — the ending of the film is what I always watch for. Tom Atkins’ character is complex. He loves his kids but he’s also a busy doctor and half the time I’m not 100 percent sure he’s divorced. Dr. Challis does eventually sleep with the much younger Ellie, and I’ve often felt that was out of character. He becomes a man on a mission, and it feels icky to take advantage of the younger woman’s grief over her dead father. I admire the complexity, though. Challis is a “good guy” who has made mistakes. We all do so we shouldn’t expect any of our film characters to be squeaky clean. It’s fascinating to watch this man who would probably prefer to be doing almost anything else try to save the world.
He tries and…and that’s it. He’s not a conquering hero defeating the bad guys. Technically he beats them, but he doesn’t stop them. By the time he gets a hold of one person who can end the commercial broadcast, we are led to believe it is too late. The kids all have their masks on, and the commercial is running. The credits roll while Challis is still screaming into the phone. Results? That’s just it. We do not know! We don’t know if he stopped the ad from running or not. We don’t know how many thousands of children already had their heads turned inside out. We don’t know.
Not knowing is the nature of life. That jackass who cut you off on the highway — do you know where they were going? Nope. Do you know what the barista you cussed out at the coffee shop this morning is going through? No, you don’t. Not knowing how a story ends should give us a sense of comfort. We don’t know and so maybe we should be treating people better. You could die tomorrow. They could die today.
You don’t need to hope for a better future; we all need to act better today. 🩸
About
T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published the novella Cry Down Dark and the collections Asleep in the Nightmare Room and The Private Lives of Nightmares with Blysster Press and Tell No Man, a novella with Last Days Books. In October 2020, The New York Times called Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from Central Washington University and attended the Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp in 2017. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife and son. Follow him at www.tjtranchell.net or on X @TJ_Tranchell.
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