Stephen King movie adaptations have had a strange habit of becoming larger than the books that inspired them. The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile gave director Frank Darabont two of the most beloved King adaptations ever made, while films like The Shining, Misery, and Carrie have become foundational pieces of horror cinema. Of course, King adaptations are notorious for taking massive liberties with their source material. The most famous example is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which King has spent almost 50 years complaining about, but no cinematic departure has proven more devastating than those final few moments of The Mist.
Darabont’s 2007 adaptation of King’s 1980 novella appears at first like a conventional monster movie with a bit of Silent Hill baked in, but it devolves into a psychological windfall unlike many other King projects. The story kicks off after a violent storm damages the home of David Drayton (Thomas Jane), who decides to take his young son Billy (Nathan Gamble) and his neighbor (Andre Braugher) into town for supplies the next morning. Almost immediately after they step inside a local supermarket, already jam-packed with dozens of residents looking to stock up in the wake of the storm, an eerie mist rolls in and blankets the outside world in a dark white smog.
The Mist wastes little time establishing that its central subject is hiding awful monsters within its white embrace. One of its best sequences happens near the start of the movie, when David and a group of men investigate the back of the supermarket, only to find several enormous tentacles pushing through the opening. Norm (Chris Owen), a young stock clerk, is one of the first to go, and it’s utterly brutal. The creature wraps its tentacles around Norm, its tentacles protruding sharp blades that slice through skin like butter. David, Ollie Weeks (Toby Jones), and the other men desperately try to pull Norm back into safety, but the tentacles quickly overpower them. The young store clerk is dragged into the fog screaming in a bloody mess and killed while the others can do nothing but watch in horror.
It’s a nail-biting introduction to the movie’s central threat: a menagerie of Lovecraftian creatures whose designs are often more unsettling for how little Darabont reveals of them. He rarely gives you a clean look at the larger monsters lurking in the mist, instead allowing the frantic camera pans, screaming, blood, and those enormous tentacles to do most of the heavy lifting. Fairly early into the movie, the scene already establishes the supermarket as more of a cage than a refuge. David and the other survivors have no idea what else might be lurking in the fog, and whatever comfort that wall of glass at the front of the shop offers is already beginning to wane.
What’s fascinating is how the monsters eventually become far less frightening than the people hiding from them. As time slowly ticks away inside the supermarket, fear within the remaining survivors starts to break down every sense of community they might have had before. Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) is the worst among them, becoming increasingly disillusioned by her faith, hunting for an explanation for the atrocities in the divine. While David and the others struggle to understand the true nature of their situation, Carmody’s interpretations gradually spill out and influence the frightened survivors into believing it’s some form of divine punishment.
It’s written into the tagline: “Fear changes everything.” Although the line is never outright spoken by any of the characters — nor is it even brought up in King’s novella, made up entirely for the movie’s marketing — it’s the central thesis of everything The Mist is trying to say. Watching people argue over whether the creatures exist is disturbing, but seeing Carmody weaponize that fear into a fanatical movement is far more devastating. Darabont taps into how humanity’s desperate need to extract meaning from senseless catastrophe can often be even more horrifying than any building-sized Lovecraftian entity looming in the white nothingness.
King’s narrative and Darabont’s filmmaking aren’t quite enough to hide the poor CGI, a byproduct not only of its era but of a minimal budget. Made for somewhere between $13 million and $18 million, The Mist definitely looks rough around the edges. Take the aforementioned scene in the supermarket’s loading dock, where Lovecraftian tentacles slither out of the fog to drag away the young bag boy, Norm. The digital appendages look flat and rubbery, lacking the texture and proper shadow integration needed to anchor them in the physical space. Even the lighting on the tentacles completely doesn’t match the harsh glare of the garage. Most of the CGI in the film looks dated by today’s standards, and frankly, it was jarring even back in 2007.
There is an oddly enduring appeal to that jankiness, however. Darabont has talked about having to shoot the film on a dramatically reduced budget and an unforgiving schedule, which meant constantly shifting where to spend his already limited resources. Although the rest of the digital bestiary doesn’t fare much better than the tentacles, the poor effects give the film a distinct B-movie energy. It’s also easy to look past those dated visuals when the real terror is driven by the human cast, anchored by powerhouse performances by Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, and Toby Jones.
One of horror cinema’s bleakest endings
The most striking difference between Darabont’s movie and King’s novella is the end. The filmmaker stays surprisingly close to the source material for most of the runtime, preserving the supermarket setting, grotesque monsters, religious fanaticism of Mrs. Carmody, and David’s desperate attempt to protect his son. However, Darabont decided to give the story definitive closure as opposed to King’s more open-ended finale, imbuing the story with an emotional impact that’s hard to replicate. Darabont had been thinking about the ending for years and fought to keep it when the movie was being financed. King ultimately praised the change, with Darabont recalling that the author told him he wished he’d come up with it himself.
Spoilers for a 19-year-old movie, but David and the remaining survivors eventually escape the supermarket and drive until their car runs out of gas, leaving them stranded in the middle of the mist. With nowhere else left to run and no clue where the mist truly ends, David makes the only decision he believes he has left. Down to just four bullets, he shoots the remaining survivors one by one, saving his own son Billy for last. The boy’s death is especially brutal because David spends the entire movie trying to protect him from the horrors outside, only to become the person who kills him. In the aftermath, David climbs out of the car and prepares to face the creatures himself, screaming into the fog in absolute pain. What emerges from the unknown isn’t a monster, but a military convoy sporting soldiers, tanks, and trucks filled with survivors. David watches in stunned horror as the mist dissipates and the convoy rolls past. In the span of a few seconds, he realizes aid was just a few moments away.
Those closing moments are the reason The Mist has stuck with me for all these years. The CGI creatures might look ripped from video game cutscenes, and the supermarket setting might get repetitive after an hour, but none of that detracts from the overall feeling it leaves you with. Darabont takes a tale about monsters emerging from an inexplicable mist and turns it into a meditation on the terrible things people can convince themselves to do when there is no hope left.
The Mist is streaming on Roku.