“A good small film”: the underrated 2009 horror movie Stephen King called “beautiful to look at”
While you may not want to take his word as gospel, since he’s voiced some questionable opinions on the genre, Stephen King is enough of an icon in the horror sphere that people will listen anyway.
Did John Cusack deserve an Academy Award nomination for his performance in 1408? Absolutely not, but King was adamant that he did, which admittedly came laced with more than soupcon of personal bias, considering he wrote the book that the movie was based on. A decent little chiller, sure, but hardly Oscar-worthy.
He knows that John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy is not a good picture in any way, shape, or form, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t allowed to enjoy it. After all, everyone has a smattering of shitty flicks that they’ll die on a hill defending, and if that’s one that the author wants to place on an undeserving pedestal, then fair fucks to him.
Some of his contrarian opinions include his hatred of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, an inexplicable disdain for Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, and his infamous aversion to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but King did arguably hit the nail on the head when he singled out a lesser-known 2009 picture for not getting the flowers it deserved during a theatrical run that barely registered as a blip on the mainstream radar.
Originally filmed in 2006, co-writers and directors Àlex and David Pastor’s post-apocalyptic Carriers didn’t land in cinemas until September 2009, and it wasn’t a coincidence that the movie was pulled from the shelf and sent to the big screen four months after Chris Pine had played the leading role in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, not that it did its commercial prospects any favours.
The story follows four survivors of a humanity-destroying virus travelling across the ruined wastelands of the United States, navigating threats that come from both inside and outside their group. Lamenting how far it slipped under the radar, King acknowledged that Carriers‘ theatrical run “lasted about as long as a fog of breath on a window pane.”
“Is Carriers a great movie?” he asked, before answering his own question. “No. But it’s a good movie.” The cast came in for particular praise, with King adamant that “actors who spend 50% of their screentime wearing flu masks that cover 50% of their faces deserve medals for even adequate performances,” which he believed Pine, Piper Perabo, Christopher Meloni, Lou Taylor Pucci, and the rest had all achieved.
“The real pleasures of Carriers are its bleak, believable script and the gorgeous daylight-nightmare cinematography of Benoît Debie,” King continued, although that was to be expected, with the Belgian DP a frequent collaborator of Gaspar Noé. “Downbeat or not, Carriers is a beautiful thing to look at.”
It’s not the greatest or most memorable horror flick by any stretch of the imagination, but the bestselling scribe and one-man Hollywood production pipeline wasn’t wrong when he called it “a good small film.” Sometimes, that’s all you need, and in that respect, it ticks all of the necessary boxes.
