It’s Friday…
Ahem…I mean Frightday…
And I have some recommendations for you to enjoy this weekend…
Okay…This Frightday’s theme is…
SPOILER ALERT! – How The Hell Did They Survive???
The girl in the photo is Sally Hardesty…
In 1974…
Out of all of her friends…
Somehow…
Some way…
Sally survived a run-in with some seriously ravenous rednecks…
How did she avoid becoming another tasty Texas teen on their table?
Beats me…
The only weapon in her arsenal was screaming incessantly…
But, when the Sawyer family’s dusty and desiccated Grandpa was elected the lucky one to swing the hammer and take Sally out…
He fucked it up…
And she got away…
Sorry in advance about the spoilers…
But, it’s kinda hard to do a list of the most surprising survivors to ever make it out of a horror movie alive…
Without telling you guys who they are.
So, let’s take a chronological look at the least likely, hardest to believe, and possibly even unknown to you, How The Hell Did They Survive??? Movies…In the years following Sally’s escape in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The Shining (1980) – So…Your husband is an alcoholic prone to bouts of aggression and violence…Wendy was thinking…Hmm…Maybe some couples counseling…Or perhaps a sit down with the priest at the local parish for some sage-like advice…But no…Wendy went with a little known third option…Go live in a secluded hotel in the middle of snowbound Colorado…Wait for your husband to get good and influenced by the dark forces around him…And hand him an axe…No offense to actress Shelley Duvall…Because, for all I know she and Wendy couldn’t be more different…But her portrayal of a mouse imitating a human trying to navigate her way out of a wet paper bag was amazing…And thanks to the cunning bravery of her young son…Danny turned his totally mental Dad into a Freezer Pop.
Here’s Wendy now…
Doing what Wendy does best.
Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) – Not until Cabin In The Woods did we see either a stoner or a nerd get even a little bit close to surviving a horror movie…Shelly in Friday the 13th: Part 3 was perhaps the quintessential dorky comic relief in a slasher film…And you know what happened to him, don’t ya? Yep…That’s right…Dead…And upon Shelly’s death…He unknowingly bequeathed to Jason, his hockey mask…Thus providing the killer with his signature look for years to come…But the film that preceded that one…Not only broke the cardinal rule about the dorky comic relief biting it…But did it in the most surprising way…You see…Ted didn’t survive the carnage of that summer…He escaped it entirely…And no one was more surprised than me that Ted, that magnificent bastard, pulled it off…He just left Paul and Ginny at the bar…In search of an after hours joint…Now Paul was another one who was never seen getting slaughtered either…But he didn’t go with Ted…He went back to camp…And we all knows what happens there.
And…Here’s Ted hanging out with Paul…Right before…
Ted chose getting shit-faced over getting disemboweled.
Cujo (1983) – Now when Donna and Tad Trenton arrive at Joe Cambers place to get their Ford Pinto repaired…Here’s what we know so far…The mechanic has a pet St. Bernard who has become rabid…Has already killed their alcoholic neighbor Gary, and his own abusive owner, Joe…Oh…And we also know that Tad’s mom is a cheatin’ ho…Oh yeah…And by the way…Tad is a chicken-shit little turducken who wets his jammies every time Mike and Sully pop out of his closet at night for a visit…So they are definitely lined up to become Cujo’s next bowl of human kibbles and bits, right? Well that’s what I thought too…But somehow…Some way…Donna manages to do what even the town sheriff can’t pull off…She goes full Tiger Mama and kicks that nasty dog’s ass.
She would’ve put Tad down before shooting Cujo…
But he is stuck there…Due to the slimy dog slobber all over her shirt.
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) – Okay…So not only did two people survive this edition of the series…Tommy and Trish Jarvis…But the other huge monkey wrench is that Trish is not the Final Girl…In fact, she isn’t really made of Final Girl stuff…Hell, there isn’t even a Final Girl in this one at all…Nope…In this my favorite Friday film…Corey Feldman played one of my great horror movie heroes…As a fourteen year old kid from rural New Hampshire obsessed with horror movies and special effects…I had never seen anyone on the big screen that represented my people…Horror Geeks…But here was a kid that not only managed to get inside Jason’s head with his mindfuck trickery…But he also managed to get inside Jason’s head with a big ol’ machete.
Went sort of full creepy there at the end, Corey…
Still not half as creepy as that TODAY Show performance.
Nightbreed (1990) – In this multicultural monster movie from the macabre mind of Clive Barker…Lori, a sweater clad fan of Mom Jeans, has discovered that her boyfriend Boone isn’t a psychotic serial killer, after all…And he also isn’t dead…But…He is a monster…So she travels to a place called Midian…It’s a town beneath a cemetery where the monsters all live…And hot on her tail, is an actual psychotic serial killer…If that wasn’t scary enough…He’s played by David Cronenberg…I’m not sure how mousey little Lori pulled this one off, folks…I know her monstrous boyfriend protects her…But that sumbitch can’t be everywhere at once…And yet Lori avoids all manner of possible demise…The monsters of Midian don’t get her…Ol’ Buttonface doesn’t get her…Flaming carnage and destruction don’t get her…Huh…Maybe it’s the Mom Jeans after all.
Don’t worry about all that blood, Lori…
All you have to do to survive…Is harness the power of those jeans.
Cronos (1993) – In his delightfully macabre and touching take on vampires…Guillermo del Toro shows us the effects of his version of the vampire virus on an elderly antiques dealer…He also shows us the effects of the infection on the elderly man’s relationships…In particular…His young granddaughter, Aurora…Who is by her grandfather’s side through the entire process…The fact that she is in the presence of a man becoming a monster is dangerous enough…But she also gets caught up in a conflict with a deranged wealthy businessman…And his homicidal nephew, played by Ron Perlman…If not for the unconditional love of her metamorphic grandfather…There is no way that young Aurora could have survived this surreal nightmare.
Poor little Aurora had to watch her grandfather transform before her eyes…
Like when my Grandpa started wearing a toupee and a gold chain…Simply frightening.
Cube (1997) – In Vincenzo Natali’s directorial debut…He brings a group of unique individuals together…And tries to kill them all…Inside the cube, there are thousands of rooms…Many of which contain deadly booty traps…It’s booby traps…That’s what I said…Booty traps…This diverse group of prisoners must work together to traverse this cube in an attempt to escape…One of them…Kazan…Is a severely autistic man who happens to have been granted the amazing gift of doing prime factorizations in his head…Not only can danger be found within a room loaded with acid spray, or a giant cheese grater…But danger can also be found within the group itself…And Kazan manages to escape each and every one.
Go to the light Carol Ann…
Um…I mean Kazan.
The Hills Have Eyes (2006) – When one of my favorite French directors, Alexandre Aja…Came to the states and started remaking old horror films like this one and the campy gorefest, Piranha…I was super-psyched…Here’s why…When low-budget films of the late 70’s get the modern, high definition, big budget treatment…It can go one of two ways…When in the wrong hands like 2006’s The Wicker Man…Or like when Rob Zombie attempted to repaint the Sistine Chapel in 2007’s Halloween remake…It almost sullies the memory of the original…But when these memorable movies are in the right hands like with this film…Or like when Breck Eisner remade The Crazies…Oh boy…It’s as if they took everything that you loved from the original…And improved on it…And just like in the original…Doug is the ineffectual son-in-law that no one expects to man up…But in this one…He’s a little nerdier…A little weaker…And a little less likely to survive these mutant freaks.
Hey, here’s Doug now…
Striking a natural, yet completely chicken-shit pose
Hush (2016) – In this film directed by Mike Flanagan (Oculus)…And co-written by his wife, Kate Siegel (who just so happens to play Maddie, the unlikely survivor in this film)…They put a totally fresh spin on the home invasion horror movie in this one…The victim of the homicidal home invasion is a deaf woman named Maddie…I mean talk about a disadvantage…You cannot hear your attacker approaching…And you cannot hear yourself making a shit-ton of noise while trying to hide…It ended up taking the film to a much higher tension level than I was prepared for…But through it all…As the psychotic intruder played to chilling perfection by John Gallagher Jr. (10 Cloverfield Lane)…Is killing the handful of people that surround this woman’s rural home…Maddie does almost as impressive a job in striking back at her assaillant…As she does at fucking up along the way.
Now do you understand…
Why I didn’t think Maddie would survive?
The Shallows (2016) – Jaume Collet-Serra, the director of Orphan showed me that he could finally find something out there…Almost as scary as a psychotic Russian orphan…A killer shark…Now right off the bat…I need to tell you that I was ushered into the idea of the killer shark in the most correct way possible…Through the viewing of Jaws…So you can imagine without the surly, and cantankerous Quint…The brave, and relentless Chief Brody…Or the knowledgable, and courageous Hooper…I have a hard time imagining young medical student, Nancy standing a chance at all…I mean, come on…Quint was hands-down, the biggest bad-ass in Jaws…The man with more face to face shark battles under his belt than anyone else alive…And still…Jaws ate his ass up, like he was cranky and needed a Snickers bar.
Oh yeah…This should be no problem, Nancy…
You got this.
Here’s some Honorable Mentions…
Terry, Glen, and Al…
From 1987’s The Gate
Kirsty and Tiffany…
From 1988’s Hellbound: Hellraiser II
Fool…
The Video Store Clerk 
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