After a lifetime of putrid adaptation failures, Stephen King was given his due in 2007. Following Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining twenty-seven years prior, Mikael Håfström issued his anxiety-inducing 1408 before Frank Darabont, who made a name for himself by setting the author’s non-horror narratives to the Big Screen–The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, opted to change gears and set one of King’s gothic tales to cinematic life. What results is one of the most harrowing, darkest visions of humanity in celluloid history.
After a small, vacation town in Maine experiences an overnight storm, a strange mist encloses the community. It envelopes a number of locals as well as summerers in a humble supermarket. While whatever is lurking in the titular anomaly threatens the lives, the motley crew quickly realize that an equal menace is at hand: themselves.
What makes The Mist so potent is that the director and writer bring together influences which, as a whole, make for a devastating vision. The titular monster of course recalls John Carpenter’s film by almost the same name twenty-seven years prior, The Fog. However, using Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon, we quickly see that the latter’s sway under the guise of American Gothic Godfather, H.P. Lovecraft, is what King is using to his optimum advantage. Not only are there tentacle monsters but, more importantly, they are the consequence of an intra-dimensional exchange sponsored by the military industrial complex. Interestingly, and vintage Lovecraft, we slowly become aware of the fact that the creatures have no vested interest in a species who has spent almost its entire existence convincing itself that “it is all about me.” Masterfully, knowing that his audience will identify with this sentiment, Darabont uses such as a forum to ravage his viewer’s ego: He posits the theory that, regardless of how much we might like to think otherwise, that humanity might not persevere. So it goes.
Returning to the military being the possible responsible party for The Mist and everything contained within, the work serves as an ecological parable for it harks back to Don Delillo’s premonition in White Noise that science might, not lead us to our future, but to our demise. As the military’s “The Arrowhead Project” can only be speculated as a possible culprit for the meteorological abnormality, this facet of the plot permits Darabont to segue into an equally scathing indictment of humanity itself.
After a gaggle of individuals find themselves trapped in a local supermarket, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat is joined at the hip with William Goldman’s Lord of the Flies. As tension mounts and tempers and egos flair, factions emerge as King revisits Carrie’s most disconcerting element: the religious zealot, played by Marcia Gay Harden to a hilt equal to Piper Laurie’s role 29 years prior. Interestingly, as Scripture’s vague nature succinctly allows for prophecy to, a-hem, see the light of day, non-religious individuals find themselves seduced by the allure of an answer, any answer. Sadly, New Testament compassion and forgiveness gives way to fantastical Old Testament Hellfire and Brimstone as wrath and revenge reappears in the form of human sacrifice.
In the end, what The Mist offers is a very plausible reading of Thomas Hobbes’s theory that life is “nasty, brutish, and short,” as his polar opposite, Jean Rousseau’s perspective that the human organism is not innately animalistic but is taught to be so by society, becomes wishful thinking. Interestingly, Darabont achieves this, not by his premise, but rather by allowing his characters to take their natural courses. An exchange between four characters midway through the feature epitomizes the essence of filmmaker’s vision:
Amanda Dunfrey (Laurie Holden): You don’t have much faith in humanity, do you?
Dan Miller (Jeffrey DeMunn): None, whatsoever.
Dunfrey: I can’t accept that. People are basically good; decent. My god, David, we’re a civilized society.
David Drayton (Thomas Jane): 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.
Ollie (Toby Jones, in a remarkable performance): As a species we’re fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up ways to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?
So what is Darabont stating in The Mist in respect to the human condition? Is he proposing that through politics, religion, the military, and perhaps our own intrinsic natures that, as a race, we are–at best–merely waiting out our time? Given how the storyline progresses, we find our vision of hope, the character of Drayton, overly optimistic and, as a result, somewhat anticipate that his good-natured approach to the scenario to run dry for he foolishly places himself in peril time and time again for the sake of his fellow man. Par Hollywood, audiences therefore await his (and our) reward at film’s close yet, like Herman Melville, William Burroughs, and John Hawkes, the director obligates us to face the fact that we might, as Father Lovecraft told us almost a century prior, merely be a portion, not the center, of everything and, as such, are susceptible to being blotted out just like overgrown housefly.
Thirteen years in the making, Frank Darabont’s The Mist takes five whole minutes to warm to its audience before lunging forth and sinking its fangs into its viewer and refusing to let go. Much like Mikael Håfström’s sweaty-palmed adaptation of King’s short story, 1408, earlier in the year, we find ourselves paradoxically leaning away from the knife which is running across our nerve endings yet into that self-same blade for want of redemption (what King calls a “Pollyanna ending”). Granted, only a veteran filmmaker who has proven he can bring in audiences would be allowed to override viewer expectation so as to force us to confront what we might not want. Darabont does so, not with a Schopenhauerian darkness, but a Stephen Crane-esque indifference (what else can be said when the Granddaddy of all otherworldly behemoths turns an apathetic blind eye to the sole remaining Alpha of the human race?). And what of it? Wouldn’t you rather be told the existential truth so as to live freely as opposed to suffering under the pressure of hubris all for nothing?
– Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
