“It appears we may have a problem here of some magnitude.”
Some people hate The Mist. And I get it. I do. My friend and colleague Nate Tensen, for whom I have an enormous amount of respect, called it a “grim, facile experience,” and even if I disagree, I can understand the sentiment. The Mist is aggressively, unrelentingly grim, and at times deeply uncomfortable. It’s a polarizing film, one that people either love or hate, and I think that’s the point. It says some upsetting things about the nature of humanity, the nature of evil, and how the two intersect.
The film is based on a novella by Stephen King (from 1986’s Skeleton Crew), which in turn was inspired by an episode of The Twilight Zone called “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” which showed the hideous lengths normal people will go to in order to secure room in a bomb shelter. The main difference between “Monsters” and The Mist is that in Frank Darabont‘s film, the monsters are horrifyingly literal as well.
The Mist takes place in the period of a few days following a tremendous storm in Maine, which left homes devastated and an ominous mist rolling in from the lake. David Drayton (Thomas Jane), his son Billy (Nathan Gamble), and their neighbor Brent Norton (Andre Braugher) all head to the store to get supplies. Soon Dan Miller (Jeffrey DeMunn) runs in, nose bloodied, screaming that something is in the mist and demanding that the doors be locked.
The structure of The Mist is pretty much that of a B-movie; when Norton is told of a bagboy being killed by tentacles creeping in to the loading dock, he references this fact by dismissing them as “Tentacles from Planet X.” And if that’s all The Mist wanted to be, it would still be a perfectly fine horror film. There are scares here, and they come at you fast and hard. The design of the monsters is particularly impressive. Their bodies are close enough to creatures on Earth (bird, insect, squid) that we have a visual reference point, but they’re off in just enough ways to be not only frightening but upsetting (my favorite shot is of a massive six-legged creature, easily thirty stories tall, which is Lovecraftian in its scope and implication). There are arachnid creatures the size of dogs with what look like human teeth, for Christ’s sake. Darabont worked with half of his requested budget, which kept him from showing many of the monsters in close-up, which I think actually improves the film. The spiders feature prominently in the film’s finest set piece – one of my favorite in any horror film, even scarier in black and white, which is a great way to watch this film – when David and a few other survivors venture out of the store to get medical supplies from a pharmacy. Ask any fan of The Mist about “the pharmacy scene” and watch them shudder.
The real horror of The Mist is human. The dissolution of society, and the perversion of normalcy, has been a staple of King’s writing since The Shining, and religious fanaticism has been a source of evil in many of his works like Carrie, The Talisman, Under the Dome, and Revival. Here it’s embodied by Mrs. Carmody, played by Marcia Gay Harden, who I think was designed in a lab to play characters like this. As she preaches about judgement and the end times, she inspires a growing congregation, who are committed to the point of violence, even feeding Private Jessup (Sam Witwer) to a towring mantis-like creature outside, as something akin to a sacrifice (“Feed him to the beast!” she cries, like a biblical despot. This makes The Mist startlingly prescient; it was released in 2007, but Carmody’s rise to power eerily mimics that of Donald Trump. Here is a person preaching patently insane ideas, which make a lot of sense to people who feel they have no other options. It’s as frustrating to watch in the film as it is to watch on the news.
Darabont was smart to not use big-name movie stars for any of the roles. The closest thing to a movie star here is Thomas Jane, who appeared in The Punisher three years prior, but The Mist was actually filmed in 2002, when he was unknown. Character actors like DeMunn and Laurie Holden (making her second appearance in 31 Days of Fright) bring an everyman quality to their roles that would be hard to achieve with big-name stars. Toby Jones is terrific as Ollie Weeks, the unlikely badass who delivers the film’s only cathartic moment of release, when he shoots Carmody in the head. Darabont shot The Mist in six weeks, using the camera crew from The Shield (which he directed several episodes of); the handheld camerawork never lets you view the horrors from afar, and puts the audience in the uncomfortable position of a fellow survivor.
The ending is what really turns people off of this film. Half a dozen viewings in, and it’s still tough to sit through. Watching David pointlessly shoot four people, including his son, so they don’t have to live in a world with these monsters, only for the Army to show up minutes later, is a bridge too far for a lot of viewers. And again, that’s fine. I get it. It’s no reflection on anyone as a viewer, because the ending of The Mist is absolutely horrific. But to me it’s the most honest ending possible. The Mist doesn’t play nice, and in it, the world teeters on the brink of chaos, society on the brink of collapse, and decency on the brink of corruption. It makes sense, then, that a flawed but decent man like David would take what seems to be the only thinkable option, only to be proven immediately, horribly wrong.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead (2004)
10/2: The Exorcist
10/3: Pontypool
10/4: Hocus Pocus
10/5: The Orphanage
10/6: Rosemary’s Baby
10/7: Alien
10/8: Scream series
10/9: Scream series
10/10: Cujo
10/11: The Cabin in the Woods
10/12: Pulse
10/13: The Babadook
10/14: Friday the 13th
10/15: The Last House on the Left (both versions)
10/16: The Thing (both versions)
10/17: Little Shop of Horrors
10/18: Hush
10/19: Silent Hill
10/20: The Shining
10/21: Funny Games (2007)
10/22: Evil Dead series
10/23: Evil Dead series
10/24: The Mist
10/25: The Ninth Gate
10/26: The Fly
10/27: A Nightmare on Elm Street
10/28: The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/29: 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later
10/30: It
10/31: Halloween (either version)
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