*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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Shaun O Connor 