MasterChugs Theater: ‘The Mist’

It’s October, so in MasterChugs Theatervania, that means it’s time to break out the horror movies! Last week, we did a preliminary jump into the theme for this month: Horror Movies You Should Be Watching. That’s right, four under-appreciated, or maybe just under-watched films will be looked at. So how do we kick off the month? With the The Mist, possibly the best film adaptation of a Stephen King work.

In a small town in Maine, secret doings are being done up at the military base under the guise of “The Arrowhead Project.” A fierce thunderstorm heralds a freakish mist enveloping much of the area. A graphic artist and his son are stuck in the local grocery store along with a variety of locals and mistrusted out-of-towners, including the artist’s imperious neighbor and the resident fundamentalist end-times prophet, played by Marcia Gay Harden. Toby Jones plays store manager Ollie.

The evil arrives in a judiciously varied array of critters. Huge winged insects (excellent scene, played for quiet chills rather than screams), enormous spiders and worse keep the shoppers under siege and on their toes. The story’s focused on how people react under unexplainable duress. King’s answer: not well.

The Mist has a political streak but not enough to politicize every moment. “The government’s got better things to spend our money on,” says Frances Sternhagen, as a schoolteacher complaining about the federal education budget. That’s right. On things such as horrible far-out experiments that go murderously wrong. Though he allows each major character a chance to talk, and develop, Darabont wisely doesn’t waste time with the sort of thing that The X-Files spent entire seasons explaining. In the haunting images of men and women cautiously venturing outside, their bodies melting into the mist, he offers a stronger, more palpable sense of what it means for human beings to be truly frightened than he does with any of the dialogue. He makes fear visible.

For The Mist, the monsters are only a small part of the larger supporting cast. Although never fully exposed or explained, Darabont’s terrifying creatures can best be described as flies, spiders, and other inserts on steroids-10 times their normal size, with razor sharp teeth and penetrating claws. As the hero, Thomas Jane is a believable everyman with whom we can all identify. He’s not overly strong or domineering; he just wants to do the right thing for his family and others. The most frightening character of all may be Harden, whose self-righteous, apocalyptic cries for atonement are more piercing and menacing than the savage flesh eating beasts of the mist.

Most of the film takes place in or near the supermarket, so it’s sort of a miracle the film works as well as it does, but part of why it works is because of that-it’s a locked room scenario. It makes a tense virtue out of its confining setting. As for that ending (very different from King’s), well, it’s certainly brave. It’s probably braver than it is dramatically effective. But the film is very absorbing, and by the time the ending arrives, you may be willing to cut it a break, like me, even if Darabont’s nervy resolution cuts the audience no break whatever.