Why “The Mist” Is The Best Horror Film Of The Last Decade

*Spoilers Ahoy! Don’t read this if you haven’t seen the film.*

The Mist Poster

About ten years ago, in the throes of teenagehood, I read Stephen King’s collection of short stories entitled “Skeleton Crew”. His writing is as wonderful as ever, of course, and many of the stories are absolute belters. “The Mist” is the tale that opens the book. A good 150 pages long, it’s actually more of a novella than a short story. It tells the story of a group of small-town residents who find themselves stranded in a supermarket when the eponymous Mist appears, bearing within it all manner of nasty beasties.

Ostensibly, it’s a good boogeyman story, but it’s less about the monsters outside than how the people trapped in the supermarket react to these extraordinary circumstances. The plot focuses particularly on the hero of the story, David Drayton, who must contend with Mrs. Carmody, the local bible-basher who sees the monsters as manifestations of God’s vengeance for Man’s iniquity. In the same vein as Carpenter’s “The Thing” or Boorman’s “Deliverance“, the threatening environment is merely a stage within which the real drama of human conflict is played out.

Frank Darabont’s film version of the book, which was released this year, is actually his third King adaptation, after “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile“. And yet, it’s the first one that could be considered an out-and-out horror. So yes, it’s a big thematic change. But the resulting film suggests that Darabont can do horror. In fact, he absolutely knocked it out of the park.

Firstly, he nails the human conflict perfectly. The roaming camera picks up on stolen glances, casual comments that demonstrate the mounting fear in the crowd. Much of the film’s opening hour revolves around Drayton and his friends’ attempts to convince the others that something is in the Mist. Most react with typical incredulity, and the universal small-town spats and biases rear up; noone wants to be made a fool of.

The Mist

When the threat becomes readily apparent (in a series of brilliantly-staged attack scenes), the crowd begin to give more and more heed to Mrs Carmody. Played superbly by Marcia Gay Harden, she embodies the attractive power of religion purely as a means of rationalizing the unknown. At the outset, most people are laughing at her brooding piousness. But she makes a couple of lucky predictions about people’s deaths and the creatures being “sated” – and suddenly she is God’s unquestioned loudspeaker.

Towards the end of the film, she is holding sermons in the aisles; her followers baying for blood to appease the horrors outside. They find their scapegoat in Wayne Jessup (Samuel Witwer), who admits that the Mist and the monsters have been the result of military research into the existence of parallel dimensions. The were looking for a “window”, he says – but “they opened a door!”, says Carmody. Jessup is promptly thrown outside for the creatures to devour.

At this point, Drayton, his young son, and the few non-Carmodyites left decide to make a break for it. They get into his truck and try to get clear of the mist, though it may already be across the globe, for all they know. They keep going until the fuel in the truck runs out, but are still surrounded by the mist. There seems no end to it. With creatures ululating in the distance, Drayton takes the only action left to him, which the group have agreed upon; he takes a gun and shoots each of them, one by one, including his son (who he had promised that he won’t “let the monsters get him”).

The Mist

However, Drayton has no bullets left with which to kill himself. He stumbles out of his car, screaming for the creatures to come and get him. But instead of a monster, what emerges is a huge military cleanup operation, destroying the Mist and its denizens. Drayton falls to his knees and wails in despair.

Darabont cuts right to the heart of King’s story, and in doing so, takes the film way above and beyond the trappings of a standard creature feature, and mines the true meaning of “horror”. How does he do this?

Firstly, the struggle between religion and rationality is brilliantly played out. M. Night Shyamalan’s film “The Village” explored the need to perpetuate the idea of outside threats to maintain an internal order; allusions to Bush’s “Axis Of Evil” worldview were obvious. However, there’s an implicit suggestion that without the politicians who demonize these perceived threats, people could in fact function in a rational and self-sufficient manner.

“The Mist” dismisses this as wishful thinking. It looks at how, when faced with true terror, most people will willingly sacrifice everything they believe in, just to generate some semblance of social and psychological order. That’s one of the attractions of aggressive religious speech, as exemplified by Mrs Carmody. It breaks the world down into Manichean factions; black and white, good and evil. It offers the simplest type of order, a beacon in the climate of fear.

One scene addresses this issue directly. Drayton’s friend Amanda argues that “People are basically good, decent (….) We’re a civilized society.”

David replies, “Sure. As long as the machines are working and you can dial 911. But you take those things away, you throw people in the dark, you scare the shit out of them, no more rules…. You’ll see how primitive they get.”

Another character continues, “You scare people badly enough, you can get them to do anything. They’ll turn to whoever promises a solution. Or whatever.”

The Torture Of Prometheus

Another standard horror theme that the film addresses brilliantly is that of the Faustian pact. The military, in their search for biological weaponry, have opened the door between two dimensions and caused the creatures of another to spill out into ours. Of course, this idea is nothing new; humans messing with what they don’t fully understand has long been an archetypal fear. Prometheus took fire from the Gods, Victor Frankenstein destroyed God’s position as sole giver of life.

(That fear of the unknown has never left us. The CERN hadron collider at Geneva has recently been the subject of scrutiny, since it was revealed that microscopic black holes could appear during their newest experiments into the origins of the universe, which will recreate the conditions of the Big Bang. A former Nuclear safety officer from Hawaii unsuccessfully filed a suit against the organization in an attempt to stop the experiment from taking place.)

Mrs Camody exploits this fear explicitly when she accuses the military of continuing the long tradition of “…going against the Will of God …. walking on the Moon! Or splitting his atoms! Or stem cells and abortions! Destroying the secrets of life that only God above has any right to!”

Horror has been arguing this since time immemorial; but what is so astonishing about “The Mist” is the feeling of utter finality of what has happened as a result of Man’s hubris. This thing is upon us, and there is little or no explanation as to its origins. In a stunning scene near the film’s end, Drayton, with his son and friends, stop their truck and watch a gargantuan creature stride past. It is impossibly huge, a skyscraper, and its footsteps are like earthquakes. The looks exchanged afterwards say it all. This is ultimate horror; not the loss of civil liberties or even a loved one; but the loss of reality itself. Every book ever written, every discovery ever made, every human advance ever achieved is instantly forfeit, and these monstrosities are all we are left with.

Towards the film’s climax, Darabont uses the funereal “The Host Of Seraphim” by Dead Can Dance as a recurring theme. He himself described its use as “a requiem Mass for the human race”, and the film’s tone captures that perfectly. This isn’t the slow-burn apocalyptica of “Independence Day” or “28 Days Later”, where humanity can and must fight back. This is after the fact; the End of Days has been visited, and that’s that. We’re done, it’s already finished. And in that sense, The Mist is not just scary – it’s also brutally melancholic, something that most horror never achieves.

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Dead Can Dance: “The Host Of Seraphim”

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And then there’s the film’s conclusion (which is actually more downbeat than King’s own ambiguous ending). When Drayton, seemingly left with no other option, shoots his son and friends, he is doing the right thing. He is sparing them a much worse fate at the hands (claws?) of the monsters. But when the military appear, dissipating the Mist, it turns out that all his goodness has been for naught.

In fact, it has been precisely Drayton’s bravery, his virtue, and love for his son that has led them to his situation. Had it not been for him, they would all have stayed at the supermarket and been rescued by now. Mrs Carmody’s followers, for all their shrieking fervour, are now safe and sound. Despite their fundamentalist idiocy, their judgement was correct. Drayton has taken the route of every classic hero; he stayed calm and collected, thought rationally, tried to save as many people as he could, did the right thing at every point. But those choices have led him to voluntarily slaughter four people, including his son. In that single shot of the military emerging from the Mist, Darabont takes this seemingly incomprehensible horror and condenses it into Drayton, creating for him an entirely new nightmare, arguably worse than the one he has just escaped.

(The fact that Darabont handles each of these old horror tropes with such subtlety and dexterity makes it all the more astounding that this is the same guy who directed The Shawshank Redemption. Not only that, but he worked for a year on a script for Indiana Jones 4, but which was rejected by George Lucas and replaced with the work of resounding mediocrity that was eventually released.)

I think that special mention has to be given to actor Thomas Jane (who plays Drayton), as his performance is these final scenes is stunning. His crushing, guttural screams are punctuated with brief moments of jaded, accepting calm, and seem much closer to a state of total despair than any more classically theatrical turn could convey.

It is the introduction of this type of horror in the final minutes that drives the film home and cements its position as an instant classic of the genre; the idea that being a good person and taking the noble path will not always lead to a happy ending. It’s like Lao Tzu says: “Heaven and Earth are cruel; They treat all living things as straw dogs.” No matter how much you believe in your ideals, how noble you consider yourself, it’s all dangerously relative. Because under great duress, even a seemingly infallible moral compass can lead people to do the most terrible, insane things imaginable.

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Photo Gallery 11/08/08

These photos were taken in Germany and Austria in July of 2008.

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My First Scientology Audit

On a recent trip to Germany, I was walking around the beautiful city of Hamburg, when I happened upon the local Scientology church. I was approached by a friendly, English-speaking guy who invited me in to the building for a “chat”. Since I had seen most of the city already, and had a few hours to spare, I went in.

Hamburg Church Of Scientology

After a few questions about my religious beliefs etc (I stayed as neutral as possible), I was ushered downstairs into a impressive private cinema, which I had all to myself. There I watched two Scientology induction films. The first was about a young American football player who, after suffering an (evidently psychosomatic) back injury, is given an array of useless treatments by nasty doctors and a hilarious, scenery-chewing evil psychiatrist. Eventually, when he hits rock bottom, he discovers “Dianetics” by L. Ron Hubbard, and promptly makes a miraculous recovery. He struts out of the hospital, past the seething doctors and psychiatrist. Scientology saves the day.

Dianetics

The second film was an induction for Scientology newbies regarding the organisation’s structure. The production values were high, but featured that unique brand of sloppy editing in corporate presentations that has people either waiting far too long to do something, or doing it twice. It concluded with the blow-dried presenter speaking directly to the viewer, saying something like:

“You could walk out that door right now and never think of Scientology again. It would be incredibly stupid of you, but you could do it”…. “It’s your choice: An eternity of freezing agony, or total bliss.”

I was astonished by the nerve of these statements. This was Book of Revelations stuff. However, I maintained calm as I left the cinema and spoke further with my designated acolyte / interviewer. Funnily enough, the next group to go the cinema were a bunch of teenagers, obviously there for shits and giggles, who had to be kicked out, laughing their heads off. As my interviewer sat back down with me after performing this duty, he said, in English, “Jesus Christ!!”. I remember thinking, “Shouldn’t that be ‘L. Ron’?”

The interview continued, and though I was freaked out by what I had just seen, I still wanted to be “audited”. For those of you who don’t know, this is purportedly a “personality test” in which the Church detects which parts of your being are flawed and can be improved by induction proper.

Before being allowed to do this, however, I had to watch another film, this time an introduction to the auditing process. I don’t think that this film is usually shown to people who want to participate. The reason I say this is simply because the concepts outlined in it were absolutely bizarre and certainly off-putting to any reasonable individual. Personally, I was most confused by the video’s theory that unconsciousness or intense emotion were the states in which people were most likely to absorb information.

Reactive Mind

For example, if someone was involved in a car crash, and was unconscious in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, there should be no negative pronouncements – and preferably, no speech in general – by anyone else in the ambulance. The injured party, though unconscious, is acutely aware of their surroundings, and any information relayed here could affect them negatively for life. The same goes for anyone who has suffered a lesser injury, like a fall off a bike (and not necessarily been knocked unconscious). Everyone around must stay quiet.

What knocked me out of my seat altogether, however, was the scene in which a woman giving birth was surrounded by doctors who held fingers to their lips and said “Shhhhh!” – so as not to unintentionally place negative thoughts in the baby’s mind which would generate future neuroses. It seemed moot to point out that the infant brain’s as-yet undeveloped linguistic centre would be unable to recognise any structured language ( I wondered if I’d ever encountered anything else that supported the Scientologists’ bizarre pre-lingual theory, and I realised that I had: the film “Look Who’s Talking“…. starring über-ologists John Travolta and Kirstie Alley…! ).

I was informed that I would have to return the following day to have my audit performed. I thought, well, I’ve come this far. So return I did. I was introduced to an older lady with an hilarious name who would be my auditor. We took a lift to one of the building’s upper levels, stepped into a sterile office, and began. She decided, for reasons unknown to me, that I wouldn’t need to be hooked up to the infamous E-Meter machine, and we started into it.

E-Meter

The audit, such as it was, consisted of a huge range of questions, each of which had to be answered three times, and each of which had a particular emotion or tactile sensation attached to it. For example, I would be asked, “Can you think of a time when you felt angry?”, and the prescribed sensation would be “Light or Heavy”. So, you answered the question, explaining the memory in detail, and then had to say whether the scene “felt” light or heavy. Then, she would ask, “When was another time you felt angry?”, and finally, “When was the first time you felt angry”, each one a full scene description with the Light / Heavy parameters.

And yes, it was every bit as boring as it sounds. At the beginning, I sincerely tried to give honest answers, wanting to actually see proper results of this “personality test”. But after about 45 minutes of these triple – barrel questions, with seemingly non-sequitur addenda to every single one (Was the memory light, heavy, black, red, big, small, fast, slow etc), I found myself making up stories just to answer the questions as quickly as possible.

But even at that, I couldn’t seem to make any headway. At around the 1& 1/2 hour mark, I asked how much longer the session was going to take. At this, my auditor became quite concerned, saying that being in a hurry was not a psychic state conducive to accurate results. It seemed that the audit was going to take as long as it had to. I relented and continued. But after 2 hours I couldn’t take any more. I told her that I had another engagement (which she wanted to know all about) and simply had to leave.

I promised that I would return the following day (I did not return). And to be honest, the only reason I think they let me leave without a big scene was because I had expressed genuine interest in the religion, and seemed to have been fascinated by the audit. Still, I left the building and felt relieved.

Time Magazine Scientology

Thinking back on the audit, I noticed at least one huge fallacy in their beliefs. These are people who famously abhor psychiatry and psychotherapy as a means of personal growth, disregarding utterly the huge medical advances accomplished in these fields. And yet, in the audit itself, they used methods that pertain almost directly to psychotherapy.

For example, the whole idea of getting someone to recall vividly a memory, and it’s associated sensations, is a very powerful psychotherapeutic technique. NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming), one of newest branches of psychotherapy, uses it extensively, and is based on the idea of bringing the client into different “states”. The goal is to train people to access them at will, thereby allowing them to bypass anxious or depressive states.

The Scientology audit uses these exact same principles, but instead of moving towards a pure goal of personal development, the intent here is to get the client to associate the powerful experience of re-living memories to the auditor, and to the religion. This generates the false belief that the auditor has somehow accessed your deepest personal issues, the same issues that the religion can help fix (for a fee). The fact is that the auditor has done nothing more then encourage a self-induced semi-hypnotic state. They are covertly using the very same psychotherapeutic principles that the religion fervently claims to have debunked.

Indeed, the Scientologists’ dismissal of psychotherapy as a means of self-development is actually a typical cult tactic – the isolation of the individual. Just as Charles Manson kept orphans in a shack in Death Valley and Jim Jones took his subjects out of the US and into Guyana, Scientology must keep people isolated from, and resentful of, outside influences. They breed the idea that noone else can help you but “us”, that your mind and soul will be lost without “us”. (In fact, in researching this article, I learned that Charles Manson himself actually read and taught principles of Scientology).

David Miscavige

So yes, the whole auditing experience was bizarre, and quite unsettling. But I think what is so frightening about Scientology, to me at least, is not strictly the cultish nature of the religion, but the slick way that it’s presented. They sell this thing like it’s the new must-have product. And they do so using the worst type of corporate techniques; cheesy 3D graphics, suited guys, Stepford girls, and horrible, horrible editing, animation, posters, voiceovers etc. This is a business, pure and simple. There is not an ounce of the sincerity, tact or true compassion that people actually need when they find themselves in an existential crisis and searching for spiritual guidance.

Scientology is the ultimate form of bully-boy advertising:

“Buy this product…or your soul will perish!”

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Note: There is a ton of information available on the Internet about how Scientology is a highly dangerous organization, and how they exert massive pressure on anyone who speaks out against them, especially people who have left the religion. Here’s a selection of my favourite videos on the subject:

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“The Bridge” is an great low-budget movie that is highly critical of Scientology. Directed by the then 18-year-old Brett Hanover, the Church of Scientology tried to bury it. It’s fascinating in particular for it’s striking use of official Scientology videos within the narrative. Here’s the full movie on Google Video:

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In 2007, an episode of the BBC’s documentary series Panorama focused on the reality of the Church of Scientology. The investigator, John Sweeney was harassed at every turn as he tried to speak to interviewees who had left the church, and witnessed first-hand the brutal character assassination in which the church regularly engages. The documentary concludes with the now-infamous scene in which Sweeney loses his temper with the Church Rep who has been intimidating him.

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Jason Beghe, an accomplished actor, spent years dedicating his life to Scientology and rose to the higher levels of the religion’s hierarchy before becoming disillusioned and quitting it. In this interview, he talks about how he came to the realisation that the teachings were “retarded” and that he had invested years of his life in something “empty”. An intelligent and articulate man, Beghe’s discussion of Scientology from the inside is fascinating.

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And of course, how could I leave out the overview of the religion’s mythos as portrayed by the always-brilliant South Park?