Horror Movie Makeover: Titanic

A ship at sea. A floating fortress, created by the hubris of man, and thought to be indestructible. And yet, on its maiden voyage, this testament to modern technology would be dashed upon the rocks of fate, and wind up at the bottom of the icy North Atlantic, the bloated corpses of its hundreds of passengers littering the waves like so much flotsam and jetsam. True love would blossom on this voyage. But true love would not be enough to save them...

Jack Dawson was a shiftless drifter, and it was random fate that put him on the massive British ocean liner, and directly in the path of certain death itself. On board the Titanic, Jack would encounter Rose DeWitt-Bukater, a restless socialite who yearned for something more out of life--yet who could never have known that the road to the love of her life also led to the most horrific and infamous calamity of the 20th century.

What they also didn't count on was the presence of pure evil on board this vessel--an evil better known as Cal Hockley, Rose's psychotic fiance. A man who would rather see her dead than in the arms of another. As he watched the young romance blossom before his very eyes, hatred seethed within his very soul--a hatred punctuated by murderous scheming on a grand scale.

They said that the Titanic was unsinkable. But it wouldn't be the iceberg that proved them wrong. It would be the overwhelming momentum of man's animosity. Feeling the woman betrothed to him slipping away, the deranged Hockley struck a secret pact with the enigmatic Capt. Smith to see to it that the RMS Titanic never made it to the safe haven of New York harbor.

Who knows what deep-seated antipathy led Smith to agree to Hockley's plan and doom his crew and passengers to a watery grave? On his final run, perhaps the good captain wished to go out in dramatic fashion. Whatever the reason, history would fail to record Smith's nefarious complicity, perhaps because all who even suspected it would shortly have their lungs filled with icy seawater...

Flush with the excitement of newly discovered romance, Jack and Rose proceed blissfully down the path of young lovers, unaware of the cold and calculating plots being hatched. Spicer Lovejoy, Cal's brutal right-hand man, stalks the innocent couple below deck. And when he finally has Jack in his sights, he pounces with an explosion of animalistic violence. This, coupled with Cal's devious maneuverings, see to it that Jack is in the custody of authorities when the unthinkable plot unfolds.

The mighty ship sabotaged, its steering mechanisms hopeflessly ruined, the lookouts and helmsmen are helpless to do anything but point, scream and strain fruitlessly once a massive block of ice emerges from the impenetrable fog directly before the vessel. There, in the middle of the blackest expanse of ocean on the planet, above countless fathoms of liquid emptiness, the Titanic collides with the iceberg, its hull ripping open as the sheets of metal scream like cattle being slaughtered.

Intent on seeing his unfaithful fiance and her common paramour snuffed out utterly, Cal makes a hasty retreat, escaping on one of the pitifully few lifeboats the ship's arrogant creators thought to outfit her with. As the sociopathic Smith commits suicide by drowning, Jack and Rose cling to life aboard a structure slipping further and further into watery oblivion.

The ocean welling up around him, Jack offers up a life-saving makeshift raft to Rose, choosing the chivalrous route of remaining in the water as the hulking Titanic descends to the ocean floor. It is only then, as the screams of the dying rise up around him, that the doomed young man truly understands the feeling of being suspended in sub-freezing ocean waters--the sensation of icy daggers penetrating his flesh, the sickening numbness as the sea literally saps away the lifeforce of his body.

Although spared a similarly grisly end, Rose has to suffer through watching her lover's body slip away and sink into the inky abyss, never to be seen again. Thanks to his sacrifice, she would know a long life--yet ironically, without the one with whom she wanted to spend it.

And the man responsible for this vast atrocity? Cal Hockley? He eventually chose the coward's way out, hurling his body from the heights of his Manhattan offices at the outset of the stock market crash some 17 years later. And for the crimes he had committed in the service of his twisted ego, his soul traveled to a very different place from that to whence he had sent the soul of Jack Dawson...

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