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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How To Slow Down Time And Live Longer

In his article in New Dawn magazine, Steve Taylor outlines the human experience of how, bizarrely, time seems to pass more quickly as you get older.

We all know the anecdotal evidence; As we age, the birthdays come around faster every year, Christmas seems to blindside us altogether. But there is much more to verify this as a concrete phenomenon. For example, scientists have long been aware of the psychological effect known as ‘forward telescoping’, or “our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have.”

This occurs with alarming consistency; when questioned on the chronological proximity of a memorable event, say,the death of a public figure or a major international incident, people generally tend to consistently underestimate the length of time involved. Not only that, but the greater the age of the individual, the greater that underestimation tends to be. Put simply, the older you are, the more likely you are to think that events distant in the past have happened more recently.

The opposite seems to be true of children and younger people in general. The example Taylor uses is that of a restless child stuck in a car on a long journey – the trip will seem to them like a massive, neverending expedition. The space between each “Are we there yet?”, while mere minutes to the parents, seem like wide temporal gaps to the youngsters, who judge it as a perfectly reasonable interim after which to pose the question yet again.

There are multiple theories that attempt to explain this phenomenon. The first involves the human metabolism: A child’s body operates at a much faster rate than an adult’s in terms of blood flow, heart rate, expansion etc. The theory asserts that this directly affects the child’s perception of the world; the child’s metabolism is moving like a cheetah, and the mind is analogous. So if what happens around the kid is anything less than whizz-bang, then boredom sets in and time seems to move more slowly than usual.

The second theory appears more feasible to me at least, and yet not incompatible with the first. This one focuses purely on the psyche and says that how the perceive the passage of time is directly related to how much information we are experiencing at any given time. As Taylor says, “The speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process – the more information there is, the slower time goes.” He refers to an experiment in which students were played two pieces of music; one, a sparse Brian Eno composition, the other a frenetic Rachmaninov arrangement. Asked to guess the running times, the students overestimated the length of both – the Eno by 32 seconds, the Rach by over a minute.

The conclusion would seem to be that when we take in more information, time slows down. Our cognitive processes seem to pull back and allow the data to wash over them, absorbing it. And yet, the neurons are firing like crazy, generating new associations, assimilating the new information. It seems as if this joyous participation with the universe, this tiny step closer to oneness, can slow down time itself.

You might say, “Ok, but that’s not really altering time, is it? Folks around you aren’t going to start walking in slow motion or running at 10x normal speed.” But think about it for a second. How is it that we experience time? We, as humans, only ever experience the here and now. Ideas of the “past” and the “future” are nothing more than constructs and exist nowhere outside of mental abstractions. Much of the science of Buddhism is based around ridding oneself of those tangential thoughts and simply living in the moment (but, of course, that’s a lot harder than it sounds).

So if we think of “time” as nothing more than a way to describe our moment-to-moment existence, then what have we? Well, if we can alter the feeling of how much time has passed between one glance at your watch and the next (the connection to the construct), then, we have altered our moment-to-moment existence, right? And, by that rationale, we have altered time. You don’t need to get into wild notions of Matrix motions; you have the full ability to slow down time, in a perfectly literal sense.

As already mentioned, this should ideally be done by the absorption of information. That sounds awfully dry; what I mean is the act of throwing yourself into the world around you; literature, media, politics, film, psychology, sex, music, society, everything. Sometimes, you get bit by the creative bug and become a filter for this information, pulling data out, connecting it, making fun new things just like you did with Lego and Plah-Doh when you were a kid (Keep the Play-Doh of the sex, though. Just a suggestion.). If we can fill our little worlds up with these things, then time slows down. Life becomes a matter of urgency; there is no time to waste when there’s so much going on, and it’s essential to squeeze the juice out of every last minute.

The effect can also be pharmacologically induced. For example, the psychedelic experience (LSD, Mushrooms) has often been compared to feeling the wonderment of infancy again. One tripper states, “My trip on mushrooms is simply indescribable. The only way I can relate it to people who haven’t done it is that I felt like a child again. Everything was new, beautiful and had some deep and significant meaning.” Indeed, the psychedelic experience seems to be an intense compression of experience; diving through vast volumes of information, whether good or bad. It opens up the creative pathways of the mind, blows out the accumulated cobwebs of cynicism and allows one to interact as excitedly with the world as one did before the jaded mores of state education took root. The only problem is that, if you don’t feel comfortable with this experiential compression, it can quickly become terrifying beyond reason. Suddenly, the information makes no sense, the thoughts become pure staccato, and the feeling of connectedness is reversed to a feeling of utter isolation – a bad trip.

(Just as a side note, I recently watched the original version of The Hitcher, a superb 1986 thriller about a killer, played by Rutger Hauer, chasing a young man, C. Thomas Howell, across the highways of Arizona. In the director’s commentary, Robert Harmon says that what Hauer is doing is educating the protagonist; in that in this single 48-hour stretch of total horror, he is putting the kid through more than most people will even experience in their lives. And he will be wiser and more learned for it. In a sense, Hauer is doing this naive kid a favour by putting him through this nightmare…)

Because oddly, time can seem to slow down to a crawl at the other end of the spectrum too – when the mind and/or body is in pain. Einstein said “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute – and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” (Another example: People with depressive illnesses are often prescribed SSRI medication, which require a three month minimum before the patient can say objectively whether they are feeling better. To most people 90 days would fly by. But for the depressive, on a medication they are not sure will even work, this can seem like an eternity.) Most forms of torture, and particularly solitary confinement, are based on generating this effect. For all the modern Abu Ghraib innovations in the art of torture, the simple act of throwing someone into a pitch-black room for days, weeks, month, years on end is an incredibly potent way to inflict psychic torment on another human being.

Deprived of any external input, the brain perceives time as passing at in interminably slow rate. Though in one sense experientially similar, it is the fundamental opposite to the states of child-like fascination described at the beginning of this article. The brain does in the absence of information what the stomach does in the absence of food; it begins to consume itself. It invents all sorts of wild reveries to stave off the nothingness; nature abhors a vacuum and the mind will do anything to avoid that state.

In an excellent, harrowing BBC Horizon documentary called Total Isolation, we watched the effect of 48 hours of this type of isolation on six volunteers. In just this relatively short space of time, people panicked, paced their rooms endlessly like caged animals, sensed a “presence” in their rooms, and even had full-on hallucinations. Most importantly, however, they all lost their sense of time, and after a short while seemed to have no idea as to how much time had passed in the experiment. This made the experience all the more frightening; since they truly had no idea as to when they would get out. How long had passed? Twenty-four hours? Twelve hours? Six? Three? That total loss of connection with even the passage of time must be a truly horrendous thing to endure.

Going back to the Steve Taylor article, it seems that in the middle of these two extremes of childlike wonder and brutal despair, lies a middle road in which time runs at breakneck speed for the individual. That middle road is routine. Familiarity breeds contempt, and it also speeds things up considerably. For the person who gets up and repeats one day after the next with the same informational patterns, day-in and day-out, time is jet-propelled. And since most people’s lives are based on the 9-5, live-for-the-wage-packet patterns of modern office existence, then we can understand why the great majority of us are frustrated about our lives “flying past us”.

The thing is, routine seems so much easier than the constant investigation, thought and movement that is required for one to experience life in its “slow/fascinated” form. But of course, that’s not true at all. Each is nothing more than a habit, an association with pleasure formed in the neural patterns of the brain. The routine habit is perpetuated around us by a society that constantly pushes the idea of swift gratification – and the fact that public schooling tends to kill off one’s youthful love of learning. We associate learning with “work”, in the same vein as that office job we yearn to leave. But learning isn’t work. In fact, as Robert Anton Wilson once wrote, when done properly, it should feel like play.

If we can make that the habit, then we can become as children once again. We can get up in the mornings and look at the world anew, wide-eyed. We can feel endless fascination with the workings of every facet of the universe, just as we did when we were kids. We can take back the love of learning of which schooling and advertising has robbed us, bombard our senses daily with the joy of new experiences and connections – and by doing so, live longer, more fulfilled lives – regardless of how long we live.