Has writer/director Frank Darabont been weighed down by the heavy legacy of his first fea­ture film? The Shaw­shank Redemp­tion remains one of the most pop­u­lar movies ever made, if not quite (yet?) accepted into the canon (read The Dork Report review). The Mist, after The Green Mile, is Darabont’s third Stephen King adap­ta­tion, so far only hav­ing made only one fea­ture not derived from a King work. After two prison yarns (one set very much in the real world, the other with a dash of the super­nat­ural), Darabont now turns to one of King’s more char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally grue­some hor­ror tales.

King writes at great length about clas­sic hor­ror movies in his non­fic­tion book Danse Macabre, and The Mist squarely fits into one kind of clas­sic b-movie struc­ture. We open in a seem­ingly bucolic lake­side town with sim­mer­ing ten­sions between local res­i­dents and wealth­ier week­enders sum­mer­ing in lovely lake­side homes. A mys­te­ri­ous, mostly unseen, and def­i­nitely hos­tile alien force traps a ran­dom assort­ment of local per­son­al­i­ties in a super­mar­ket. The hor­ror works best before we actu­ally see any evi­dence of the super­nat­ural; for exam­ple, a char­ac­ter bolts into the store, full of ner­vous but not yet ter­ri­fied cit­i­zens, cry­ing the simul­ta­ne­ously eerie and hilar­i­ous line “There’s some­thing in the mist!” For home view­ers, a big reveal was spoiled right in the DVD menus: one of the adver­saries is a very bib­li­cal swarm of giant beastly locusts.

They’re heeeeeeere…

Like vir­tu­ally every zom­bie movie ever made, a cross-section of soci­ety is trapped in a con­fined loca­tion, under siege by unstop­pable forces. The micro­cosm includes rep­re­sen­ta­tives of all the usual sus­pects, includ­ing a top New York City lawyer (because we all know NYC sharks are more venal than the reg­u­lar kind) Brent Nor­ton (Andre Braugher), a cou­ple of good ol’ boys, the town cutie pie, a few hand­some young lads from the nearby mil­i­tary base, and the res­i­dent looney fun­da­men­tal­ist Mrs. Car­mody (Mar­cia Gay Harden). The Mist is not above another clas­sic hor­ror movie cliché: the vir­ginal good girl kisses a boy and dies hor­ri­bly in the very next scene. The heroes that arise are, of course, unlikely: a gro­cery bag­ger (an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter with a lot left up to us to fill in: he’s not a young man, and he’s got brains and skills, so how did he end up in such a dead-end job?) and a rel­a­tively wealthy artist David (an out­sider to the town, viewed as elitist).

We first see “our hero” (more on that later) David (Thomas Jane) in the very first shot. He’s an illus­tra­tor of movie posters: I spot­ted three shout-outs to genre movies both actual and poten­tial: Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, and Stephen King’s own Dark Tower. He’s a macho, badass painter, using the back of his own hand as a palette, and bitch­ing about stu­dios cob­bling together cheap posters in Photoshop.

Speak­ing of craven movie stu­dios, some­times stu­dios white­wash action and hor­ror movies to cater to more lucra­tive PG-13 audi­ences (like Blade III: Trin­ity, extra­or­di­nar­ily lame & tame com­pared to Guillermo Del Toro’s out­ra­geously gory Blade II — vam­pire autopsy, any­one?). The Mist is one of the few R-rated hor­ror movies I’ve seen that might have been bet­ter with less gore and pro­fan­ity. Most espe­cially the pro­fan­ity — I’m cer­tainly guilty of salty lan­guage in my own vocab­u­lary, but the over­all F-bomb count in The Mist is so absurdly high that it almost seems as if the film­mak­ers were delib­er­ately striv­ing for a record.

Play misty for me?

Over­all, I’d have to say I really did not care for the movie, find­ing it over­writ­ten. At numer­ous points, char­ac­ters expli­cate the plot, elapsed time, and char­ac­ter arcs — to para­phrase an exam­ple: “It’s only been two days, and Mrs. Car­mody has already turned every­body against us… in only two days!” It’s also too reliant on CG gore for a story than depends on the hor­ror of the unseen (also where M. Night Shyamalan’s oth­er­wise great Signs falls down). But the best bits of the movie are squeezed between the CG set pieces, and the entire affair is redeemed by an utterly aston­ish­ing end­ing. Although I nor­mally don’t con­cern myself with spoil­ers on The Dork Report, it would be cruel of me to reveal the end­ing here. Suf­fice to say, it’s impos­si­ble to imag­ine how a script this bleak was financed and dis­trib­uted (by Dimen­sion Films). I also wish I had seen the movie in the­aters so I could see first­hand how an aver­age audi­ence would react to such an end­ing. The big downer at the end of Clover­field (read The Dork Report review) did not go over well, to say the least, and The Mist makes that one look pos­i­tively wimpy.

Like Signs and Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, The Mist depicts a mas­sive alien inva­sion from the per­spec­tive of reg­u­lar folk, as opposed to the global view taken by movies such as The Day The Earth Stood Still and Inde­pen­dence Day. But The Mist has a truer end­ing than any of these exam­ples. The core theme is of the roles peo­ple assume under extreme duress. Their illu­sions about them­selves are ampli­fied and they believe their own myth. Just as the fun­da­men­tal­ist Mrs. Car­mody com­pen­sates for a life­time of exile from healthy human inter­ac­tion by ele­vat­ing her­self into a dem­a­gogue (I’m reminded of the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the young Adolf Hitler in the movie Max, as he first finds the mass adu­la­tion he desires as he ral­lies a crowd into a racist frenzy), David falls all too well into the role of hero; he never com­plains when peo­ple turn to him for strength and lead­er­ship. The so-called “hicks” that fight him in the begin­ning of the film were right; he does think he’s smarter than every­body else. In movies, he’s exactly the kind of guy other char­ac­ters auto­mat­i­cally defer to in dire sit­u­a­tions: So-and-so’s dying of third degree burns? Tell David! What do we do next? Ask David!

The utter demo­li­tion of the stock hero char­ac­ter type is so sur­pris­ingly strong that it’s prac­ti­cally sub­ver­sive. I had thought Post­mod­ern genre films had petered out after their late-90s golden age of Scream, Star­ship Troop­ers, and Wild Things. But The Mist is a new entry in the Post­mod­ern genre cycle, in the sense that it com­ments crit­i­cally upon the hor­ror movie genre, and yet still actu­ally is a hor­ror movie. The Mist may be a mon­ster movie, but it’s not about a Thing, an Alien, or a Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon; it reveals the stan­dard hero char­ac­ter to be a kind of mon­ster himself.

Offi­cial movie site: www.themist-movie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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