The Mist Review

David Drayton (Thomas Jane of The Punisher) is a commercial illustrator whose work on a new movie poster is interrupted when a freak storm tears through his rural Maine neighborhood, smashing windows and destroying Drayton's boat house. While cleaning up the mess of downed trees the next morning, Drayton and his family notice an odd mist spreading across the lake. He and his son Billy (Nathan Gamble), along with their neighbor Brent Norton (Andre Braugher), head into a nearby small town for supplies. As they make their way through the crowded grocery store, the mist sweeps into town, enveloping everything. A terrified neighbor runs into the store, screaming and babbling about their being "something in the mist."

Fearful of a terrorist attack due to the nearness of a military base, the group decides to stay indoors. When Drayton and a few of the locals decide to investigate a clogged generator intake in the back of the store, some sort of unearthly monster drags off a hapless bag boy. At first, most of the people in the store are unwilling to believe the monster story, but they're soon given more than enough reason to believe that something uncanny has invaded their town – and for all they know, the entire world.

The Mist covers some familiar territory. Groups trapped in isolation are a standard device in horror flicks, fromThe Cat & the Canary (1927) to Night of the Living Dead (1968), and King has made use of it in several of his works, combining it with unusual weather in The Shining and Storm of the Century. The Crawling Eye (1958) was about a group of people trapped in a ski lodge as tentacle creatures from another dimension reach out from a mysterious fog bank. John Carpenter's film The Fog (1980) concerned the phantom crew of a ghost ship attacking a port town out of a creeping fog – though it's uncertain if the film was released in time to influence the story ("The Mist" was first published in the horror anthology Dark Forces six months after the movie was released).

However, King and Darabont have a knack for bringing immediacy to clichéd situations. The viewer is drawn into the movie with a few simple dramatic devices, and it becomes easy to identify with the characters, even in such an unusual situation. A lot of people have been through storms like the one in the opening sequence, and we've all shopped in grocery stores or experienced power outages. Showing the characters dealing with these familiar situations gets you thinking about what you would do in their shoes, and that spirit carries through even when the blood starts to splatter. Wondering what you'd do in a horrifying situation – like an invasion of monsters from another dimension – is part of the fun of movies like this, and Darabont and the cast do an excellent job of keeping the audience involved.

The one misstep is an overemphasis on the raving of the religious zealot Mrs. Carmody, who builds a cult of followers within the store as things go from bad to worse. The horror is supposed to be divided between attacks by the creatures lurking in the mist and the panic of those trapped inside the store, and Marcia Gay Harden is supposed to be playing Carmody as a fruitcake, but she goes too far in making her despicable, and her followers turn into chanting drones all too easily.

The script sticks incredibly close to the original story throughout, adding a few extra characters to become victims, with the notable exception of the ending. King must have been a bit dissatisfied with his original ending, even referring to its ambiguity in the text as a "cheap shot." Darabont extended the ending – with King's blessing – and it truly pulls no punches.