Five Horror Movies that Resemble the Cleveland Browns 2009 Season

It could be worse.

Four words that usually become an ironic prophecy in any horror movie.

With Halloween upon us, and with the Browns sitting at a dismal 1-6, it's appropriate to compare this team to several different horror movies that have graced the Silver Screen over the years.

Horror movies tap into our base fears and play up those fears to achieve a dramatic effect. That effect usually results in a scream or a jump and gets the adrenalin pumping.

Sports tap into our competitive nature and play up that competitiveness to achieve that adrenalin rush our day-to-day activities usually deny us.

The Browns' 2009 season has resembled several horror movies. The Browns' defense has given up more than 1,000 yards in its' last two games while the offense has only gained 336 yards.

That's not just bad, it's terrifying.

Browns fans now are falling into two camps, those who counsel patience with a bad roster and lack of talent, and those who are sick of the excuses and want somebody to do SOMETHING positive with this team.

The former group believe head coach Eric Mangini needs more time and that it's not all his fault. The latter believe Mangini is the root of all evil and only his head on a platter will release the demons that have possessed the team.

Whatever camp you fall in, here are five horror movies to watch on Halloween that resemble the 2009 Cleveland Browns.

Friday the 13th

The Friday the 13th series follows the exploits of Jason Voorhees. The conceit of the series over time became that Jason essentially was unstoppable. No matter how many times he got killed, he'd come back for more.

Quarterback Derek Anderson has become the Browns equivalent of Jason Voorhees. Behind his facemask lurks the soul of a tireless killer. Anderson will turn the ball over, overthrow receivers and generally make poor decisions.

You can't stop him. He will rise again.

It doesn't matter if he's benched or injured, he somehow finds a way to come back and keep on killing the team.

Like Anderson's 2007 season, the Friday the 13th Series has had it's great moments, the kinds of moments where you're glad you plunked your money down. It's those moments you want to see every time you hear a new entry in the series is coming out.

Unfortunately, what you end up getting a lot of the time is "Jason X," or "Jason Takes Manhattan."

To put this in terms of stats, Anderson has an overall 40.6 QB rating, 10.3 rating on third downs and only three touchdowns in 18 quarters at the helm.

That's awful enough to make "Jason X" look watchable (it isn't).

Saw

This series actually has a moral to it, even though it increasingly got lost in its focus on torture and gore.

However, the first movie did have a point—live life to the fullest, don't waste it, and more importantly—don't anger the psychotic cancer patient.

The Browns season most resembles the sequels, though, with the emphasis being turned to the Torture Porn aspect of the franchise. The Saw movies represent the Cleveland Fans.

The fans are the poor, misguided souls who tune in every week, hoping to see something different, but instead are punched in the face, handcuffed, and then forced to choose which limb they're going to cut off in order to survive.

Looking at this season, the Browns don't just lose, they lose badly. With the exception of the Bengals game, the Browns have been outscored by more than 10 points in each of their other five losses.

The only win was a soul-crushing 6-3 field goal battle that only was won because Buffalo made more mistakes than Cleveland did.

Somebody gouge my eyes out to save humanity, already.

Exorcist III

"Exorcist III" is a study in how the Hollywood machine can take a potentially great movie and ruin it through complete mismanagement.

Writer/Director William Peter Blatty took a minor character from his original "Exorcist" movie and crafted a very intelligent horror/suspense film around him.

The original title of the film was "Legion" with the main character being Lt. Bill Kinderman. The actor who portrayed Kinderman in the original "Exorcist" passed away a few years after the movie came out.

When Blatty went to make "Legion" in 1989, he cast the brilliant George C. Scott as Kinderman.

However, the studio insisted the movie be titled "Exorcist III" for marketing purposes. The problem was, there was no exorcism in the original script. So Blatty had to go back and shoehorn an exorcism into the third act and the movie suffers greatly for it.

That being said, this is one of my favorite horror movies to just sit and watch purely for the performances of Scott and a much younger Brad Dourif.

The 2009 Cleveland Browns are playing this drama out for America as we speak.

Mangini was supposed to bring better, smarter football to Cleveland. But somewhere along the way, the production got twisted and the true goal got lost.

Instead of having a better product on the field that still may not win a lot of games but shows promise, the Browns still look just as lost as they did under Romeo Crennel.

Last minute changes seem to be made every week to the offense resulting in a putrid mess that ruins any good feeling you had going into the season.

Bottom line is Mangini turned over half the roster, imported a lot of his guys from the Jets, and the team is worse for it. The record reflects that and the play certainly shows it.

Mangini can't blame this season on former GM Phil Savage or Crennel. This is Mangini's team and it is his responsibility to answer for just how bad the team is.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

The Browns entire 2009 season has been a nightmare, unending.

Every time you think the bad football is just a horrible dream, the team goes and does something even worse, like not score touchdowns in the red zone on a consistent basis.

Offensive Coordinator Brian Daboll is Freddy Krueger, destroying offensive schemes with his chilling laughter and scissor hands.

This is far too scary...next!

Halloween

The original film by John Carpenter is the slasher movie every other slasher movie wants to be. His killer, Michael Myers, is only referred to in the script as "The Shape."

Myers is evil personified. You can't stop him. There is no coherent reason for what he does, he acts more like a force of nature.

His disappearance at the end of the first movie is greeted by Dr. Loomis not as a surprise but as an inevitability.

Eric Mangini has become Michael Myers, killing one reason after another as to why anyone would want to watch this team. He took a bad product and somehow made it worse.

His press conferences, which I once considered "must reads" at the end of the day, have turned into meaningless babble that have far more excuses spread throughout them than reasons why he's failed so miserably in his promise to bring Cleveland back from the depths of the Abyss.

Owner Randy Lerner has done the unthinkable and made some public comments lately about how upset he is over the current situation. Bernie Kosar has been hired and reports directly to Lerner.

What this means for Mangini and the Browns at this point is unknown, but Mangini, a man who clearly covets all the power for himself, cannot be happy about this.

However, Mangini is making it harder and harder to support his cause. I still am not in favor of firing the guy, but he needs to be collared.

He is wielding far too much power in Berea, and the team is collapsing upon itself the same way it did when Butch Davis ran the joint earlier this decade.

It's time for Mangini to focus on coaching the team and let other people handle the rest of the work that goes into putting an NFL product out on the field.

A good example of this would be if Mangini benched Brady Quinn purely to save the team $9 million. If that is true, and looking at Derek Anderson's stats it certainly appears to have merit, my response is: I hired you to coach, not be an accountant.

The list of bad decisions Mangini has made since taking over in Cleveland are longer than the victim list for any "Halloween" sequel. In trying to do everything, Mangini is accomplishing nothing.

That is what makes Mangini so scary to people. He is smart and he is driven. But for whatever reason, he can't seem to put everything together. If he can't find a way to make things work, it'll be nothing but bad horror movie sequels in Cleveland for another couple of years.

Happy Halloween everybody.