{"id":1229,"date":"2008-10-14T21:08:07","date_gmt":"2008-10-15T01:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/?p=1229"},"modified":"2022-10-17T12:43:30","modified_gmt":"2022-10-17T16:43:30","slug":"mist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/mist\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s Something in the Mist: Frank Darabont’s The Mist"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Has writer\/director Frank Darabont been weighed down by the heavy legacy of his first feature film? The Shawshank Redemption<\/em><\/a> remains one of the most popular movies ever made, if not quite (yet?) accepted into the canon. The Mist<\/em>, after The Green Mile<\/em>, is Darabont’s third Stephen King adaptation, so far only having made only one feature not derived from a King work. After two prison yarns (one set very much in the real world, the other with a dash of the supernatural), Darabont now turns to one of King’s more characteristically gruesome horror tales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

King writes at great length about classic horror movies in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre<\/em>, and The Mist<\/em> squarely fits into one kind of classic b-movie structure. We open in a seemingly bucolic lakeside town with simmering tensions between local residents and wealthier weekenders summering in lovely lakeside homes. A mysterious, mostly unseen, and definitely hostile alien force traps a random assortment of local personalities in a supermarket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The horror works best before we actually see any evidence of the supernatural; for example, a character bolts into the store, full of nervous but not yet terrified citizens, crying the simultaneously eerie and hilarious line “There’s something in the mist!” For home viewers, a big reveal was spoiled right in the DVD menus: one of the adversaries is a very biblical swarm of giant beastly locusts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
They’re heeeeeeere…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Like virtually every zombie movie ever made, a cross-section of society is trapped in a confined location, under siege by unstoppable forces. The microcosm includes representatives of all the usual suspects, including a top New York City lawyer (because we all know NYC sharks are more venal than the regular kind) Brent Norton (Andre Braugher), a couple of good ol’ boys, the town cutie pie, a few handsome young lads from the nearby military base, and the resident looney fundamentalist Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Mist<\/em> is not above another classic horror movie cliche: the virginal good girl kisses a boy and immediately dies horribly in the very next scene. The heroes that arise are, of course, unlikely: a grocery bagger (an interesting character with a lot left up to us to fill in: he’s not a young man, and he’s got brains and skills, so how did he end up in such a dead-end job?) and a relatively wealthy artist David (an outsider to the town, viewed as elitist).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
Cthulhu… gesundheit!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We first see “our hero” (more on that later) David (Thomas Jane) in the very first shot. He’s an illustrator of movie posters: I spotted three shout-outs to genre movies both actual and potential: Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth<\/em>, John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing<\/em>, and Stephen King’s own Dark Tower<\/em>. He’s a macho, badass painter, using the back of his own hand as a palette, and bitching about studios cobbling together cheap posters in Photoshop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of craven movie studios, sometimes studios whitewash action and horror movies to cater to more lucrative PG-13 audiences (like Blade III: Trinity<\/em>, extraordinarily lame & tame compared to Guillermo Del Toro’s outrageously gory Blade II<\/em> – vampire autopsy, anyone?). The Mist<\/em> is one of the few R-rated horror movies I’ve seen that might have been better with less gore and profanity. Most especially the profanity – I’m certainly guilty of salty language in my own vocabulary, but the overall F-bomb count in The Mist<\/em> is so absurdly high that it becomes eye-rolling; as if the filmmakers were deliberately striving for a record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Thomas
Play misty for me?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Overall, I’d have to say I really did not care for the movie, finding it overwritten. At numerous points, characters explicate the plot, elapsed time, and character arcs – to paraphrase an example: “It’s only been two days, and Mrs. Carmody has already turned everybody against us… in only two days<\/em>!” It’s also too reliant on CG gore for a story than depends on the horror of the unseen (also where M. Night Shyamalan’s otherwise great Signs<\/em> falls down). But the best bits of the movie are squeezed between the CG set pieces, and the entire affair is redeemed by an utterly astonishing ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although I normally don’t concern myself with spoilers on this blog, it would be cruel of me to reveal the ending here. Suffice to say, it’s impossible to imagine how a script this bleak was financed and distributed (by Dimension Films). I also wish I had seen the movie in theaters so I could see firsthand how an average audience would react to such an ending. The big downer at the end of Cloverfield<\/em><\/a> did not go over well with audiences, to say the least, and The Mist<\/em> makes that one look positively wimpy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Signs<\/em> and Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds<\/em>, The Mist<\/em> depicts a massive alien invasion from the perspective of regular folk, as opposed to the global view taken by movies such as The Day The Earth Stood Still<\/a><\/em> and Independence Day<\/em>. But The Mist<\/em> has a truer ending than any of these examples. The core theme is of the roles people assume under extreme duress. Their illusions about themselves are amplified and they believe their own myth. Just as the fundamentalist Mrs. Carmody compensates for a lifetime of exile from healthy human interaction by elevating herself into a demagogue (I’m reminded of the characterization of the young Adolf Hitler in the movie Max<\/em>, as he first finds the mass adulation he desires as he rallies a crowd into a racist frenzy), David falls all too well into the role of hero. He never complains when people turn to him for strength and leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The so-called “hicks” that fight him in the beginning of the film were right; he does<\/em> think he’s smarter than everybody else. In movies, he’s exactly the kind of guy other characters automatically defer to in dire situations: So-and-so’s dying of third degree burns? Tell David! What do we do next? Ask David!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The utter demolition of the stock hero character type is so surprisingly strong that it’s practically subversive. I had thought postmodern genre films had petered out after their late-90s golden age of Scream<\/a><\/em>, Starship Troopers<\/em>, and Wild Things<\/em>. But The Mist<\/em> is a new entry in the postmodern genre cycle, in the sense that it comments critically upon the horror movie genre, and yet still actually is<\/em> a horror movie. The Mist<\/em> may be a monster movie, but it’s not about a Thing, an Alien, or a Creature from a black lagoon; it reveals the standard hero character to be a kind of monster himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Has writer\/director Frank Darabont been weighed down by the heavy legacy of his first feature film? The Shawshank Redemption remains one of the most popular movies ever made, if not quite (yet?) accepted into the canon. The Mist, after The Green Mile, is Darabont’s third Stephen King adaptation, so far only having made only one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,2],"tags":[236,164,90,237,85,163,235],"class_list":["post-1229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2-stars","category-movies","tag-andre-braugher","tag-frank-darabont","tag-horror","tag-marcia-gay-harden","tag-science-fiction","tag-stephen-king","tag-thomas-jane"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/the-mist.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sa9lhB-mist","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1236,"url":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/happening\/","url_meta":{"origin":1229,"position":0},"title":"Thinning the Herd: M. 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A mysterious mass hysteria strikes the idyllic Bethesda Terrace (a place I walk through several times a week) in Manhattan's Central Park, and quickly\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "2 Stars"","block_context":{"text":"2 Stars","link":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/category\/ratings\/2-stars\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"The Happening","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/the-happening.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/the-happening.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/the-happening.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/the-happening.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/the-happening.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":986,"url":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/shawshank-redemption\/","url_meta":{"origin":1229,"position":1},"title":"Get busy living or get busy dying: Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption","author":"Chad Ossman","date":"August 24, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"It's hard to believe now, but The Shawshank Redemption was a relative flop at the box office, and overlooked in all seven of its Academy Award nominations (losing the 1994 Best Picture to Forrest Gump). 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