Halloween Horror: The Mist (2007)
It’s hard to discuss Frank Darabont’s The Mist without focusing on its famously downbeat ending. But I’ll try my best, as the supernatural horror thriller, adapted from the Stephen King novella, is more noteworthy in 2024 for how it set the template for The Walking Dead, Darabont’s smash hit zombie TV series, in 2010. As much as it is a dour monster-fest, The Mist is also a compelling snapshot of a civilization in disarray. The supernatural scenario at its centre gives the film the form of a moral fable, testing the characters to see whether they will succumb to chaos and despair when the odds are against them.
Set in rural Maine (like so many Stephen King works), the movie follows Thomas Jane’s painter David Drayton and his son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), who hole up in a supermarket with fellow townsfolk in the aftermath of a massive storm that trashes the region. After the storm, a mist sweeps through the small town, concealing horrifying, Lovecraftian monsters who use its cover to attack the townsfolk. Stuck in the supermarket, David and his fellow survivors struggle to think of a way forward. Thus, the movie poses the same question as The Walking Dead does: in the aftermath of the apocalypse, how does a person keep living?
The survivors in the supermarket are a microcosm of western society and Darabont, who also wrote the screenplay, uses them to examine the possible paths forward for people in such a crisis. Some survivors, such as David’s crabby neighbour, Brent (Andre Braugher), refuse to believe the supernatural situation playing out before them, their lying eyes be damned, and storm off into the mist never to be seen again. Others quickly succumb to gloom and doom, such as Marcia Gay Harden’s Christian fanatic, who believes the mist signals the End Times and that the monsters are demons who have come to punish the wicked. However, a few scant survivors rally around David, such as Laurie Holden’s Amanda, Toby Jones’ Ollie, and Jeffrey DeMunn’s Dan, and together, they try to think of a way to survive the mist and escape the supermarket alive.
As in so many Stephen King works and Darabont’s The Walking Dead, which came after, The Mist pits both supernatural and human threats against its protagonists. In some ways, the human ones are more pernicious. For instance, Brent’s disbelief of David, driven by a past legal dispute with him, leads him to convince others that David is lying to them about the monsters in the mist. His petty dislike of David leads him to endanger the lives of others. Darabont weaponizes Braugher’s no-nonsense authority and uses it to sow chaos in the situation.
Brent’s dislike of David also speaks to the film’s deft handling of exposition and backstory. We meet all these characters either on the night of the storm (such as David) or the morning after, with no flashbacks and little set-up, and yet we still come to understand their relationships to each other and how their shared history informs their choices within the supernatural situation. The characters are serving narrative functions and broadly conforming to some conventional types that Stephen King loves to deploy in his works (the working class bully, the religious fanatic, the snooty professional), but there’s more depth to them than there is to typical horror movie characters. Darabont’s work here is inspired by the character work in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (which features a similar scenario) and will come to inform his first season of The Walking Dead, where character building is as important as action or horror set-pieces. Thus, The Mist is literate in the horror genre, paying homage to the past, while planting the seeds of the genre’s future.
The movie is also effective purely on a visceral level. Darabont and cinematographer Rohn Schmidt offer a nice balance between Spielbergian teasing (we get tentacles early on, but never any full-on shots of the monsters) and out-and-out freakshow (the later shots of the massive creatures above the road are truly uncanny and impressive). The CGI has dated (as most CGI from the time period has), but the filmmakers are smart enough to blend the VFX with prosthetics to lend them a credible, gooey tactility. The monsters themselves are bizarre, Lovecraftian creations. Unlike so many works inspired by Lovecraft from the mid-2010s (I’m looking at you, Stranger Things), the monsters here don’t conform to one visual approach. Not every monster is trying to be Cthulhu, but rather are a gorgon blend of limbs and mouths that congeal into a nightmarish whole. You don’t really know how the monsters function and that’s to their advantage as their logic works on the level of dreams, or rather, nightmares. The monsters are perhaps more creepy than scary, but scares can be rather subjective, while creepiness is a deliberate quality injected by the filmmakers.
So, if The Mist is compelling as a post-apocalyptic morality play, a character drama, and a creature feature, what holds it back? It has to be the ending, which, if you don’t know about at this point, there’s no better time to pause, go watch the movie, and rectify this before continuing to read on.
After David, Billy, and a few others successfully escape the supermarket in his Land Cruiser, they run out of gas while surrounded by enormous beasts in the mist. They know they’re done for, but don’t want to suffer the fate of the others they saw: either cocooned into the monsters’ strange webs (a clear reference to Aliens) or torn apart in a bloody feast. So they decide suicide is the only way out. David counts out the bullets, four, one for each of his companions, including his son, and shoots them in the head in mercy killings. But just as David leaves the vehicle to give himself up to the monsters to be killed, the mist clears and the army rolls down the road, burning any monster fragments they find in their way. David killed the others for naught.
It’s a famously downer ending, notably changing the ending of the novella to hit home and leave the viewers devastated (and David in abject horror at what he did). In some ways, the ending makes thematic sense. It shows that in the end, even David fails the moral test of the apocalypse. He cannot stay hopeful, or keep the light burning inside him, to paraphrase from language used in Stephen King’s magnum opus, The Stand. As well, David is left mad in the end, fitting for a man who has suffered Lovecraftian terror; so many Lovecraft protagonists, like Poe protagonists before them, are left insane in the aftermath of their encounters with the Weird.
And yet the ending also feels a bit cheap, a bit rushed. The characters suffer a lot on the road to this decision, but it also seems abrupt. They don’t try to flee the vehicle and see if they can make it on foot. They don’t relent in the face of surefire, grisly death, shooting themselves in advance of their consumption by some monstrous being. Rather, they run out of gas and then quickly decide, nope, this is the end for them.
I’m open to being convinced the ending is more fitting than it seems, but despite being the most famous element of The Mist, it’s also the element holding it back from being one of the true horror standouts of its decade. Nevertheless, it’s still an engaging, creepy, well-constructed film. Many horror movies, even great ones, don’t stick the landing, so The Mist is in good company as a film with a compelling vision of post-apocalyptic terror, if not a satisfying conclusion of said terror.
8 out of 10
The Mist (2007, USA)
Directed by Frank Darabont; written by Frank Darabont, based on the novella by Stephen King; starring Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Laurie Holden, Andre Braugher, Toby Jones, William Sadler, Jeffrey DeMunn, Frances Sternhagen, Sam Witwer, Alexa Davalos, Nathan Gamble.
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