The Mist Review

When I was a freshman in college - back in the mid-1980s - and still in my "rabid Stephen King fan" stage, I bought the hardcover edition of the best-selling "Master of Horror's" anthology of short stories Skeleton Crew, which not only featured stories along the lines of "Word Processor of the Gods," "Survivor Type" and "The Monkey," but showcased a novella titled The Mist, in which a cross-section of a small Maine town's population is trapped by unearthly monsters in a supermarket after a storm knocks out the electricity and a strange mist envelops the town and the surrounding countryside.

Like many of King's stories, the novella works on two levels - the visceral, creepy horror one which focuses on the surreal Boschian creatures that inhabit the mist, and the more intellectual, psycho-cultural one that examines just how fragile our civilized nature really is when, as Frank Darabont and King himself both say, the lights go out and we lose all the trappings of our modern technology-driven society.

Because the novella's concept is so tightly wrapped and the "action scenes" in the supermarket were so visually vivid, it's not surprising that a guy like Frank Darabont would be attracted to The Mist's unnerving mix of B-movie horror chills and the even scarier psychological underpinnings, i.e., the uneasy and often blurred division between science and religion, particularly in a situation that seems, well, Apocalyptic.

Starting Point - Adapting The Mist:

The first director I thought would attempt this project was Rob Reiner, who had successfully directed Stand By Me (based on King's novella The Body) and Misery, two films which have earned popular and critical acclaim as being among the best non-supernaturally-themed adaptations of King's works.

The other name - Darabont - that I mentally placed on my list of putative directors who could pull off the tough task of bringing this very challenging story to the big screen came easily to mind because he has done two well-regarded adaptations of King's non-horror stories, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. I figured that his affinity for Stephen King's stories and characters made Darabont almost uniquely qualified to handle the mix of 1950s-style monster tale and penetrating character study that makes The Mist one of the novelist's most interesting yarns.

Interestingly, as Darabont says in the featurette "When Darkness Came: The Making of The Mist," the acclaimed writer-director had been wanting to adapt the novella into a feature film ever since he read the first version in an 1980 anthology titled Dark Forces. As he puts it, King's tale "was muscular, kick-ass, insane, written by an author who was clearly having the time of his life not caring what damage he did to your psyche along the way."

Indeed, before he started working on Shawshank, Darabont was in a mental tug-of-war regarding his choice of which project to do as his directorial debut - "Shawshank...The Mist...Shawshank....The Mist....Shawshank...."

In the end, Shawshank eventually won out, failing miserably at the box office but winning viewers' hearts and minds when it hit the various cable networks and home video markets. Then The Green Mile got more critical and popular acclaim for Darabont's now-famous leisurely-paced and carefully choreographed adaptations of King-authored non-horror character driven stories with little or no supernatural undertones to them.

"There's something in the mist!"

"The story is less about the monsters outside than about the monsters inside, the people you're stuck with, your friends and neighbors breaking under the strain."-  Frank Darabont on The Mist

2007's Stephen King's The Mist is a radical departure for Darabont in many ways; the only things it has in common with its two Kingian forebears are:

1. It's a more-or-less faithful adaptation of a literary work by Stephen King

2. Some of Darabont's favorite actors from previous films, including William Sadler, appear in the cast

3. Ir's very well-done and incredibly well-acted.

If you missed this movie when it was in theaters in November of 2007 but have seen (and liked) either The Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile, the first thing you'll notice is that the leisurely and very carefully shot pace and look of those films is nowhere to be seen in The Mist.

Where those movies both tend to tell their over-the-decades stories in running times that come close to exceeding the three-hour mark, Darabont challenged himself to tell this story in a bit less than two hours (without taking into account the end credits, which few people ever watch).

Darabont also eschews his normal style of shooting a movie, which of course is normally geared to the slower pace of his epic-length character dramas.

Where in The Shawshank Redemption the camera moves slowly and seems as though everything from lighting to camera angles have been planned for years, The Mist's cinematography is more freewheeling and done with very mobile rigs that are employed almost in an improvisational way to capture a documentary-like feel that's unpredictable, gripping, and more appropriate for a true scarefest like The Mist.

The film, which stars Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Andre Braugher, Laurie Holden, and Toby Jones, both follows King's original premise and gives it a memorable twist which even long-time fans of the novella won't expect.

Set in Maine (but filmed, albeit convincingly so, near Shreveport, Louisiana), the movie begins abruptly without a complex "main title" sequence when we look in on commercial artist David Drayton (Jane) as he works on a Drew Struzan-like movie poster. (If you're a long-time Stephen King fan and study the poster closely, you'll know what the poster represents.)

Suddenly, as lightning flashes and thunder booms, the power goes out, and as a vicious storm slams into the area, a tree comes crashing into David's studio just after he leads his wife Stephanie (Kelly Collins Lentz) and son Billy (Nathan Gamble) into the basement.

When the sun comes up, the Draytons emerge and examine the damage; a tree which was planted by David's grandfather has been uprooted and has damaged part of the main house, while the neighbor's dead tree has totally destroyed the Draytons' boathouse.

Billy Drayton: [running towards his parents] Mom! Dad! You gotta come see!
Stephanie Drayton: Hey Billy, take it easy, alright? I really don't want you running all over the place.
Billy Drayton: You gotta come look at... the boathouse smashed. Holy crap!
Stephanie Drayton: Billy...
Billy Drayton: Sorry, Mom, but you just gotta... come on, come on... whoa!
Stephanie Drayton: Whoa.
David Drayton: Whoa.

The latter situation is more vexing than the tree which wrecked David's studio; it seems that this neighbor, a not-so-nice New York attorney named Brent Norton (Braugher), has had legal issues with the Draytons and others in town before, and that the dead tree has been a source of conflict between them for a while. Still, David is sympathetic when he sees the storm did not leave Norton's property unscathed, and in an effort to bury the hatchet, he even offers the pugnacious lawyer a ride into town to buy supplies while they all wait for the power to be restored.

It's during the ride into town that we're not only given a few hints at Norton's "outsider in a small town" attitude, but also a few tantalizing bits of information which may explain some of the bizarre things David, Billy, and Norton have seen so far, including a strange whitish mist which was beginning to creep over the lake close to their homes.

David Drayton: [seeing a bunch of soldiers speeding past them] Guys from the base.
Brent Norton: From up the mountain?
David Drayton: Uh-huh.
Brent Norton: The Arrowhead Project? Well, you're a local - any idea what they do up there?
David Drayton: Missile defense research, you know, I'm sure you've heard the stories.
Brent Norton: I'm sure the woman at the laundry mat says that they have a crashed flying saucer up there with frozen alien bodies.
David Drayton: Right, Ms. Edna. Yeah. Ms. Tabloid! "I had Bigfoot's baby". "Satan's face appears in oil well fire". You know, real reliable stuff.

Things start going sour for the characters as the David-Norton-Billy troika arrives at the strip mall in town just ahead of that milky white mist. As David parks the car somewhere in front of The Food House supermarket, they see a bloodied Dan Miller (Jeffrey DeMunn, who has appeared in many of Darabont's films, as well as Stephen King's The Storm of the Century) shouting somewhat incoherently about something in the mist...something monstruous...something that grabs and kills people.

My Viewpoint:

What happens next, of course, is best left to the reader to discover by either renting or buying the DVD or Blu-ray and watching it on his or her own. Suffice it to say that inside the mist there isn't just one horrible thing but many, many horrible things, and that goes on within the besieged Food House is both a classic examination of human nature under extreme stress and one of the best horror movies ever made.

Considering the number of genuinely dreadful book-to-movie adaptations of Stephen King's works Hollywood has foisted upon us, it's perhaps a reviewer's cliche to say this, but I think that if anyone else but Darabont (or Rob Reiner) had attempted to do The Mist, I'm not sure if I'd have wanted to see it, much less get it on Buy It Now at eBay. The acting is great; you like/love/loathe the various people trapped in the supermarket, and you find yourself wondering who will survive, who will die, and who will have the guts to stand up to the apocalypse-now, Bible-quoting and rabble-rousing Mrs. Carmody (the deliciously good actress Marcia Gay Hardin), who is almost as dangerous to the people in the supernarket as the monsters in the mist.

Interestingly, Darabont intended to shoot this film in black and white as a tribute to the scary movies he watched when he was a kid, but the studio didn't think modern audiences would have watched it in any format except color, so the feature film was shot and released in color. However, the two-disc Collector's Edition of Stephen King's The Mist includes a complete black-and-white edition of the movie on the second disc.

Darabont prefers that version because it has a mid- to late 1960s Night of the Living Dead vibe to it. I haven't watched the whole thing in black-and-white yet, but from the first 10 minutes that I have seen, I understand exactly what he is talking about.