Frank Darabont is the director of such films as The Green Mile, The Majestic and one of the greatest films of all time, The Shawshank Redemption, but he claims that all of this success has given him a much classier reputation than he deserves, as he is a huge fan of genre pictures and he's been dying to do a horror movie. I'd say he's done a bang-up job of making a horror movie respectable here. Keep in mind that both Shawshank and Green Mile were based on Stephen King stories, so it makes sense that Darabont would eventually tap into the main body of King's works to freak people out.
The Mist was the first Stephen King story I ever read. There was a copy of the short story compilation "The Skeleton Crew" floating around my house while I was a young lad, and being the lazy sort that I was, it took years for me to decide "you know what, I think I will read this book." I can't remember if this was before or after "The Scarlet Letter" nearly put me off books forever.
The first story in the book, and easily the longest, was The Mist. True, there were stories of creepy cymbal-smacking monkey toys, a man eating his own fingers on a desert island and a weird black goo floating on a lake that ate swimmers (which was included in Creepshow 2), but The Mist is the one that stuck out the most in my mind.
Why? Because there was never any resolution to it and it let your imagination run wild, like the best horror movies do. Gore is overrated - it's the creepy concepts that really get you worked up. Watching Dawn of the Dead gave me dreams about the Zombie Apocalypse for days, and reading The Mist gave me the same kind of chills and worrisome flights of fancy.
The story is simple, yet mysterious. One day in Maine, a strange foggy mist appears over a lake and soon covers the land. No biggie, until it's revealed that the mist is chock full of horrible monsters that kill people instantly. Tentacled things, spider things, giant bugs and land-stomping crustacean beasts. The bulk of the tale, however, is focused less on watching monsters kill people, as it would be in most horror movies, but more on a group of people trapped in a supermarket when the mist hits, and how quickly the social constructs disintegrate.
This evaporation of common sense in the face of mind-numbing fear is hurried along by Mrs. Carmody, an unstable religions fanatic played with a frightening zeal by Marcia Gay Harden. She's known as the town kook, but as David Drayton (Thomas Jane) says, civilized society only lasts as long as the phones work and people can dial 911. Isolate them and scare the crap out of them, and 'civilization' doesn't last long. This is illustrated by how quickly those scared people in the supermarket get converted to Carmody's touting of the Book of Revelations - and it's not helped by the fact that events transpire that can easily be ascribed to the Bible. Then again, just about anything can be twisted into a Biblical reference - Pat Robertson and his ilk prove that.
The only issue I had with the film was the special effects, but I saw an early screening where the CG wasn't finished, so I should hope that the following weeks have cured that problem, and will leave me with nothing to complain about at all.
As I said, there wasn't any resolution to the original story, which made me wonder how it could be made into a film. I'd say more about this, but a chilling threat from the author will leave me mum. Stephen King has stated, "Frank wrote a new ending that I loved. It is the most shocking ending ever and there should be a law passed stating that anybody who reveals the last 5 minutes of this film should be hung from their neck until dead." I wasn't going to do it anyway, but still... go see it yourself.
