Screenhead

I’ll admit right off the top of the bat this time around that I’m very fond of the work of Stephen King.  Generally King knows how to craft a good, horrific story and his movies, under normal circumstances, reflect this.  In fact, when they first announced that his novella The Mist would be hitting theaters I was really excited to see it hit.

And after seeing it, my excitement was no less dimmed for the experience.

Basically, The Mist deals with a thunderstorm in New England.  This by itself wouldn’t mean so much, except for the fact that the storm has done a real number on the power lines, and also brought a hefty quantity of thick white mist into the area.  And even this wouldn’t be so much of a problem except for what’s in the mist; namely, gigantic bugs.  That’s what’s in the mist–gigantic bugs.  Gigantic person eating bugs that easily out mass a human being by a factor of at least fifty to one.  So you can imagine the kind of panic disorder this creates to a bunch of townsfolk left stranded in the local supermarket surrounded by this midst containing the giant person eating bugs.  No one knows exactly where they came from.  No one knows exactly when they’ll leave.  No one knows exactly how to stop them… but what everyone does know is…not much.  And when human beings don’t know much about a disaster that’s facing them they’ll tend to lean defend their own explanations which may or may not resemble the truth.  This is exactly the case with The Mist.

The key thing to note about The Mist, is that strange tendency people have to fill in the blanks when they don’t know much about a situation that might kill them.  When a situation contains as many blanks as a giant wall of opaque mist, then the explanations become suitably outlandish.  And yet in this case those explanations may well wind up getting as many people killed as a giant person eating bugs do.

The Mist is scary on several levels, viscerally for the unexplained person eating bugs, but on a deeper level for the nature of the interpersonal dynamics at play.  It’s downright amazing to see how many old grudges can come to the fore when you’re faced with imminent death.  When you’re about to be killed by a giant bug are you really thinking about how one guy won’t mow his lawn?  You wouldn’t think so, but then you’re not about to be killed by a giant bug.

Interestingly, the movie represents several deviations from the original King work, and while these deviations make the movie significantly darker than the book itself was, it doesn’t necessarily take away from the quality of the work.  I’ve always been one of those to say that a remake or an adaptation needs to be as close to the source material as possible, but The Mist actually shows that some liberties can be taken and still produce a worthwhile whole.

This frankly amazed me.

But the proof is as close as your video store—The Mist is a fantastic and scary time that’ll make you look twice at your neighbors.  Plausibility is the ultimate fear maker, and in places, there’s nothing more plausible than The Mist.

Some places more so than others.

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