French-Hungarian-American
filmmaker Frank Darabont, known for directing two of Stephen King’s dramatic
works The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, first broke into the
film scene through his screenwriting work in the horror genre. Most notably, he is the screenwriter for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,
Chuck Russell’s remake of The Blob
and The Fly II. Although his first feature was a 1990
television horror film called Buried
Alive, Darabont’s involvement in directing horror films seemed to begin and
end there after his second directorial effort, 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption, put his horror leanings to rest in favor
of drama. While busily working as a
script doctor up through 1999 when he returned to adapting Stephen King with
the fantastical The Green Mile, the
director continuously moved away from his horror roots until the box office
failure of his 2001 ode to Frank Capra The
Majestic prompted him to return to the genre that opened doors for him in
the first place. In what would become
the director’s third adaptation of a Stephen King story and his first
theatrical horror film, Frank Darabont’s The
Mist snuck up on unsuspecting viewers in 2007 with its dark and foreboding
vision of King’s 1980 novella in ways that some still haven’t fully recovered
from to this day.
Closer to George A. Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead than John
Carpenter’s The Fog which couldn’t be
more unrelated despite frequent comparisons drawn between the two, the film is
both a creature feature as well as a claustrophobic and devastating parable
about the nature of survivalist mob mentality under duress and fear of the
unknown. Concerning an ensemble cast featuring
Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Andre Braugher and Toby Jones who find
themselves trapped inside a local supermarket when an unearthly mist concealing
otherworldly creatures befalls the town of Bridgton, Maine, things go from bad
to worse in a short amount of time as old superstitions arise amid the
intensifying apocalypse plaguing the town.
The question soon becomes which of the monsters are more dangerous, the
humans or the creatures? One of the
strengths of the story and how it plays out on film is how Darabont introduces
each of the characters’ backstories almost in passing, giving viewers enough
information as to which personalities could react the strongest or transform
into a mere shadow of their former selves in the face of a deadly and
inexplicable phenomenon. Much like The Twilight Zone episodes The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,
the strange occurrences possibly involving a UFO are secondary to the reactions
the sighting engenders in the once tranquil and friendly neighborhood now turned
into a paranoid war zone. As frightening
as the otherworldly events are, the real terrors stem from the very people you
think you’ve known all your life and begs the question how you too might react
to such a catastrophic event.
In mismatched hands, King’s
cocktail of the inter-dimensional, the otherworldly and the small group of
survivors could well have gone the hokey route of Lawrence Kasdan’s Dreamcatcher, which is still among the
most ridiculous horror films of its time.
But with Darabont behind the camera and seen in the director’s preferred
black-and-white home video version, The
Mist is a ferociously bleak horror film that manages to eclipse the dark
waters treaded by The Thing, The Fly, Inside and The Descent
combined. The film is of course
aided by fine performances from its central cast with a standout portrait of a
holy roller named Mrs. Carmody in the grip of theological madness and power
played by Marcia Gay Harden in one of the great horror villains in recent
memory. Thomas Jane, fresh off of The Punisher, imbues the local artist
and family man David Drayton with compassion and admirable leadership
qualities, pitting his own rationale against a bevy of skepticism and eventual
Middle Ages superstition engendered by Carmody.
Equally strong in bit parts are Andre Braugher as an attorney who
refuses to believe any of Drayton’s claims about strange creatures, Toby Jones
as the supermarket’s assistant manager and William Sadler as a hick local
mechanic whose alliances fall easy prey to his own fears.
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| Holy hell! That's the biggest White Castle I've ever seen!!! Who's in for some sliders?!!! |
Not all of it runs smoothly
as the creature feature elements akin to King’s later works including the
aforementioned Dreamcatcher border on
silliness with some entities including a Pterodactyl kind of creature rendered
with distracting CGI that work against the prosthetic effects. The special effects scenes benefit greatly
however from a black and white director’s cut, hiding some of the limitations
of the CG work and looking closer to an older horror thriller from the 1960s
which it is most directly inspired by. I
also found the presence of the Wilhelm Scream near the end to be distracting
even though every science-fiction horror filmmaker in the history of time has a
burning desire to stick it on their soundtracks. That said, this is a solid modern horror film
adaptation of King’s novella, among the best cinematic adaptations since Misery in my opinion. As a Darabont film, it’s a clever reimagining
of Night of the Living Dead filtered
through the prism of King’s narrative and represents the director’s first
official theatrical horror film. For those who like their Stephen King horror
on the edgier and more horrific side, The
Mist will give you the science fiction horror film experience Twilight Zone: The Movie should have
been as it sneaks up on you and pummels you into the ground before leaving you
for dead.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki