Horror-101

Lose Yourself in ‘The Mist’

Frank Darabont, as usual, does justice to the King

written and directed by Frank Darabont

Botched Stephen King movie adaptations have been par for the course for years. Sloppily scripted and directed. Under-funded. Poorly cast. In some cases, completely turned into other beasts (Remember The Lawnmower Man?). One man seems to able to nail King consistently: Frank Darabont. His 1994 adaptation of The Shawshank Redemption gets name-dropped consistently as the best King film ever made, and 1999’s The Green Mile was critically acclaimed as well. When I heard that Darabont had decided to tackle The Mist, one of King’s much beloved novellas, I rejoiced. I’m happy to report that the result doesn’t disappoint. The Mist is a faithful-in-tone, frightening, and ultimately heart-wrenching horror film.

David Drayton protects his son, Billy, from the titular mist

After a stormy night, David Drayton (Thomas Jane) heads to his local, sleepy-town supermarket with his son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), and Brent Norton (Andre Braugher), a lawsuit-happy neighbor with whom he’s not on the best terms. No sooner they arrive that a dense fog spreads all over town. Immediately something is terrible wrong, as screams can be heard from those caught in this mysterious mist. David, along with a group of other locals, becomes trapped in the supermarket, as it becomes obvious that venturing out in the fog means a near-instant, terrible death.

It’s not the freshest premise, but it’s based on the classic King novella, and what makes it work so well this time is Darabont’s assured direction. The film is slowly paced, giving time to fully flesh out the many characters trapped in the supermarket, as well as develop the rising tensions between them. A local blue-collar mechanic, Jim Grondin (William Sadler), shows nothing but contempt for David and his ‘college-educated’ ways. The neighbors fued, as Jim is an insufferable prick who refuses to believe that a supernatural disaster has taken place. Meanwhile, Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), the local religious nutso, starts gaining frightful credibility with the market folk. Her crazed, end-of-days rantings slowly turn the scared group into a Jim-Jones zealot army. In effect, religious fanaticism is one of the themes in the film, brought to full, scary display in a sequence late in the film.

With servants like these Mrs. Carmody, Jesus don’t need no help

The excellent cast also makes this film tick in good time. Jane (The Punisher) fits perfectly in his role as the ‘every day’ masculine hero of this tale. Braugher, as the uptight lawyer, also brings up the acting chops. I have to single Harden here. She won an oscar a few years ago for her supporting role in Pollock, and her villainous performance here is tremendously effective. She’s manipulative, intense, and bat-shit crazy. I found myself hating her character intensively; a sign that she was doing her job as actress. There’s also a cast of noteworthy smaller characters, including Toby Jones as Ollie, a nebbish supermarket worker who happens to hide within an expert marksman. Darabont understands that one of King’s memorable staples are his all-American characters and their peculiar inner workings. What makes them act or what makes them snap has to be carefully delineated and developed. This is an area in which many other King adapters trip and fall. In The Mist, the characters are given that room to grow into their neuroses and actions. Most of this done in wonderfully scripted scenes with no soundtrack music whatsoever. Bravo, Frank!

You do not want to step outside

The horror sequences are some of the best I’ve seen in a while. In particular, the pharmacy sequence, in which a group of brave survivors decide to venture into the pharmacy next door to the market to get badly needed supplies. For the first time in years, I saw a truly frightening King horror sequence brought to life in the big screen, the type of sequence that made me fall in love with King’s writing when I was a teenager. The survivors walk into the darkened pharmacy, find their supplies, and just as you think they’re out of danger, they start to see wide spiderwebs stretching all over the place. I don’t think I need to go any further. You will have to see the movie to fully experience the horror that happens next. The CGI effect creatures designed by Greg Nicotero and KNB Effects must be noted here. This is one film in which the CGI works. The creatures are overwhelmingly frightening.

Society is just a couple of steps away from going to hell.

King book purists have begun to complain about the end of this film adaptation, but I think they’re in the wrong to dismiss this whole film due to Darabont’s choice of an ending. Without going into spoiler details, the end of this film is one of the most tragic, ironic, and heart-wrenching in recent history. It’s also a powerful, cinematic ending, scored to a moving piece of music. The resolution chosen makes sense in sight of the catastrophic horrors faced by the survivors. Do you give people a happy ending for the sake of it? That would be a cheat. Do you give them no ending? Ambiguous ending work better in books, not in movies. And, specifically, ambiguous endings don’t work in films which rely strongly on the question of the survival of characters. So how about giving them the sobering, tragic ending, the one that would very likely happen in life? The Mist is the best Stephen King adaptation in a long time, another confident directorial turn from Frank Darabont, and one of the best horror films of the year.

Horror 101 gives The Mist a 91 out of 101

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