Tagline:
Belief divides them, mystery surrounds them, but fear changes everything.

Wide Release Date:
November 21, 2007

Directed by:
Frank Darabont
Written by:
Frank Darabont
Based on the novella by:
Stephen King
Produced by:
Frank Darabont, Martin Shafer, Liz Glotzer

Starring:
Thomas Jane
Marcia Gay Harden
Laurie Holden
Andre Braugher
Toby Jones
William Sadler
Jeffrey DeMunn
Frances Sternhagen
Sam Witwer
Alexa Davalos
Nathan Gamble

PREGAME THOUGHTS

I figured I should squeeze in just one horror movie before Halloween. For some reason, out of every single horror movie that exists, out of all the good ones, the classics, the genre definers, I settled on the Mist. How’s that for fucking up?

I own Stephen King’s short story collection Skeleton Crew, but I’ve never read it. Even if I just STARTED reading it, even if I looked at the first page, I would’ve known that the Mist was based on one of his works.

Without that previous knowledge, then, why did I watch this? I haven’t watched many big budget horror movies in my life, but my semi-recent forays into American Horror Story and Black Summer (both of which I considered rather thought-provoking) piqued my interest in what the big screen had to offer with respect to psychological horror. The internet told me that The Mist had one of the saddest endings in movie history. Even if that was ham-fisted hyperbole, I was all for it!

BLURRRGHH BLARRRRGHH WELCOME TO THE MIST HURRRAAAHGGGH

THE 650(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

Since this is a Stephen King adaptation, and since Stephen King doesn’t know how to write any story that doesn’t take place in Maine, The Mist takes place in Maine. David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and his family weather a severe thunderstorm and find the house and yard in shambles! While observing the damage, the family notices a strange, pink mist descending down from the hills toward the lake. It looks weird! Anyway, have fun at home, Wife. David takes his eight-year-old son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), and joins his cranky neighbor, Brent (Andre Braugher) to drive into town and buy some groceries and supplies. On their way there, they notice an alarming slew of military vehicles speeding in the opposite direction toward the lake. It is eventually understood that the army was experimenting with otherworldly portals. The storm fucks with any failsafe that keeps this portal closed.

While in the small supermarket, David gets all cozy and friendly and home-y with the staff and the current shoppers. All is normal and well until a bleeding man named Dan (Jeffrey DeMunn) runs toward the store hollerin’ about the scary mist coming toward them. There’s something not-quite-right about that mist! There’s danger in the mist! The store manager Ollie (Toby Jones) helps barricade the store before the mist surrounds it, trapping everyone inside.

This is when shit starts to go down. A bagger named Norm is the first to die; he goes into the back loading dock to power up the generator and some pointy CGI tentacles grab him from under the dock door and hurt him a bit and then drag him into the misty depths. David is able to hack off a piece of a tentacle, which squirms a bit after separation, but serves as suitable evidence for any skeptics in the store!

This isn’t as fun as Hentai tentacles, waaahhh!!

Not only do the skeptics in the store purposely avoid checking out the evidence, but a group of them (including Brent) decide to say “fuck this shit” and brave the mist. We never see them again.

Local crazy religious nut Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) takes this opportunity to yell at everyone in the store about the End Times and how this mysterious, deathly mist is punishment for everyone’s sins and various debaucheries. She gains a cult following. Literally.

When evening comes, the bright lights of the store start attracting hideous, giant creatures. A lot of them look like regular insects. Some look like scorpions. Some of them look like a cross between bugs and pterodactyls. By the time everyone realizes that the store’s lights are to blame for this ambush, the creatures crash through the store windows and start terrorizing its occupants.

Oh hey, I already wrote a bunch of words about this. OK, so people keep getting killed, even larger creatures are believed to be lurking in the mist, it gets to a point where the only sane people left who aren’t yet dead or absorbed by the religious fanaticism of (the now dead) Mrs. Carmody attempt make a break for it and get in a car.

PRAISE JESUS, I’m immune to the bugs!

The only ones who make it to the car without dying are David (with Billy), Dan, Amanda (Laurie Holden), and Irene (Frances Sternhagen). David first drives back to his house to discover his wife dead. Then, attempting to drive their way out of the mist, David keeps going until the car runs out of gas.

The car of five realizes that it’s time to give up. The gun only has four bullets. David decides to be the one to brave a fate worse than getting shot in the head and volunteers to shoot the rest of them in the head, including his son.

Here’s the kicker: when David leaves the car and yells for the creatures to come kill him and get it over with, the mist starts clearing. Military personnel are burning down nests and hives while driving down the road. Having realized that he and the rest of the car had been literally two minutes away from assured safety, David collapses to the ground screaming like a wounded moose.

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — The Acting

When your movie’s biggest star is Tom Fucking Jane, it’s time to get wary. For obvious reasons, The Mist isn’t supposed to be taken super seriously, but the over-dramatic over-the-top acting is something I’d expect more from an episode of a ’90s horror TV than a mid-budget thriller from 2007. As the lead, Tom Jane is involved in every circumstance, mission, and conversation. His demeanor ranges from brow-furrowingly calm to brow-furrowingly upset. This guy works at home painting for a living and he’s portrayed as a skilled leader, planner, and a Jack Bauer badass. He thoughtfully knows how to act in any situation, he keeps his cool during even the most frightening, life-threatening situations, and he is presented as the constant rational thinker. A tree smashes through his window, he watches people die, he returns to his house to find his dead wife, he shoots his son in the head, and the absolute most he is able to emote is through demented, unconvincing moaning and screaming.

Everything plays out like an episode of CSI. I understand that the situation is dire and everyone stuck in the store needs to keep their head on straight, but there is very little actual panic. People talk to each other like they’re collaborating on a work project. The fat little nerd middle manager is an expert sharpshooter who has perfect aim during all the chaos. Andre Braugher’s character is an insufferable skeptic who refuses to even go into the next room to look at the evidence, preferring to shout about how dumb and manipulative fifteen people are — who were also skeptics, by the way, until they went into the next room to look at the evidence — when trying to get him to believe the severity of the scary bug/dinosaur-creature mist problem.

No window shopping, Bug Jones. Either buy something or get the fuck out of here.

There are only two actors I found adequate in their roles: David’s son, Billy, who was surprisingly believable the entire time as a terrified, sad kid, and Mrs. Carmody, the obnoxious religious nut who forms a little cult of followers in the store. That being said, I was glad when the latter was shot through the forehead. Not too glad about the death of the kid, but hey, shit happens!

TOPIC 2 — The Ending

I liked the ending. Once David left the car and started shouting, I had a feeling that the mist was going to start clearing out. Tom Jane somewhat ruined it with his feral yelling, but the decision to kill everyone in that car , including his son, literally one minute before safety is pretty heartbreaking. It did make an otherwise by-the-book horror/thriller story somewhat worth the watch.

The novella ended differently. Even Stephen King was too much of a wimpy pussy to end his story with a dad murdering his son, but in his version the mist doesn’t go away. They drive and drive south through New Endland, checking the radio band in the evenings for any sort of broadcast. David hears the word “Hartford” over the radio amidst static and stays optimistic.

Frank Darabont didn’t want that. He wanted a child to get murder two minutes before everything was going to be ok! And that’s a better ending as far as I’m concerned.

BAAAHH!!! WAAAAHHHH!!! THE MIST!! HARRUAHAHAH!!

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

Stephen King says that he was genuinely frightened by this adaption of his novella. Frank Darabont described that as the happiest moment of his career.
Stephen King is kind of a pussy, then. By 2007, cheesy CGI ain’t cutting it anymore so I maybe he’s legally blind and kind of had to squint while he was in the theater? Perhaps we was genuinely frightened by Tom Jane’s sweating and moaning.

Stephen King got the idea for the source novel when he was in a Maine market. When he noticed the front window was made of plate glass, he wondered what would happen if giant insects flew into it.
Remember that early Family Guy skit with Stephen King pitching the lamp monster? This is the level we’re at here.

It took a while to configure, but the loading dock effect of having the mist stay at the open roll-up door without spilling in “had to do with temperature in the room and air pressure,” and they could control it by adjusting the temperature.
A science consultant got paid $130,000 to explain PV = nRT

When Marcia Gay Harden received the script, she was resistant at first having never done a horror film. She apparently called Braugher to talk about it, and he encouraged her to take the role saying to “view it as an actor’s piece and not just a monster movie.”
Marcia Gay Harden was worried about acting, so she consulted fellow actor Andre Braugher who told her to try acting.

Andre Braugher is not fucking havin’ it.

At 59 minutes, the window impacts were accomplished by hurling baseballs at the glass, and then digitally removing them and/or hiding them in the flying creature attacking the store.
Here little nine-year-old Nathan Gamble, please stand by this window while Roger Clemens throws a baseball at your face at 100 mph.

The game Half-Life was inspired by the novella, ‘The Mist’. In the game the main weapon of choice is a crowbar. When the group entered the pharmacy, one of them was using a crowbar as a weapon.
Imagine that one of the best and most popular games of the nineties was inspired by “this guy uses a crowbar”.

Amanda has an empty six-shot revolver and two full speed-loaders in her purse. This means there are twelve rounds of ammunition for the revolver. During the course of the movie, exactly twelve rounds are fired before the revolver is out of ammunition.
Thank God that the absolute bare minimum of thought and continuity awareness was taken into consideration during production.

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

Yeah, I suppose so. People sell this movie on the ending alone, but I had to admit that I wasn’t surprised by it. When Tom Jane left the car and started screaming his lungs out like a baboon in heat and nothing happened for a minute, it’s hard not to predict that the mist would be clearing out. Sucks for his son, though!

I’d say it’s worth a watch if you didn’t read this section and allowed me to spoil it for you. If you already read this section and had it spoiled for you, then you should watch it anyway because maybe I’m fucking lying to you. Happy Halloween, bitch.