Supermarket scare

>> The Mist is a faithfully creepy adaptation
of the Stephen King novella

FOGGY AND FREAKY: The Mist

by MARK SLUTSKY

I must have read Stephen King’s novella The Mist at least five times when I was a kid; I probably still have my raggedy copy of Skeleton Crew, the anthology where it appeared, lying around somewhere. This was one scary story. Say what you want about the prolific horror writer, but The Mist is King at his very best, taking a recognizable, mundane setting populated with lifelike characters and gradually introducing a creeping, horrible spookiness until everything goes completely to hell.

King understands that the more lifelike and familiar the backdrop, the scarier it is when giant fleshy bat things try to eat your face. That’s why the location for most of The Mist’s action—a supermarket—makes it so memorable. The story’s setting and action are so well-realized that it always seemed like a perfect fit for a movie adaptation, and that’s what Frank Darabont, whose association with King goes back as far as the ’80s and who wrote The Shawshank Redemption from a King story, has done.

The film version of The Mist, which Darabont has both written and directed, follows much the same plot as the original. Thomas Jane plays David Drayton, a Maine-based movie poster painter (check out the opening scene in his studio for plenty of horror movie in-jokes), who lives in a house by the lake with his wife and young son. One day, a violent storm sweeps in and leaves in its wake a strange, thick mist that hangs over the lake, slowly advancing towards the house.

Jane and the kid head to town for supplies, and while they navigate a crowded supermarket, they realize The Mist has followed them there. And what’s more, it seems to be otherworldly in nature—specifically in that it contains a multitude of horrible monsters who seem to really enjoy eating human beings.

They, and the rest of the survivors, barricade the supermarket and try to hold out as long as they can against the fleshy tentacles, huge spider-things and other monstrous fauna. Meanwhile, the townspeople left inside the market slowly go a little nuts, especially with the prompting of a mouthy religious fanatic (Marcia Gay Harden) convinced that judgment day has come.

The movie version of The Mist has a few things working against it. The film has a low-budget look more reminiscent of TV than horror movies—some of the special effects are particularly CGI-heavy and cheap looking, and the acting occasionally veers into complete howling hambone territory. Despite it all, though, Darabont has managed to make a convincingly scary movie. The FX work the best when they’re shrouded in The Mist—when the monsters are suggested rather than outright shown, they’re that much scarier.

For what it’s worth, Darabont has created a faithful adaptation of the original, and I have to say, it looks very much the way I imagined it every time I re-read the novella. Much to his credit, Darabont doesn’t hold back on the dark stuff. Things get very, very bad—major characters die, monsters do horrible things, the whole set-up is so hopelessly apocalyptic, and Darabont manages to keep up the bleakness to the end, which diverges from the original in a way I’m a little conflicted about, but which mostly works, despite some over-the-top acting. Above all else, it’s a gripping scary movie through and through.

The Mist opens this
Friday, Nov. 23

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