Ghoulies and Ghosties and Long-Legged Beasties

The Mist
Regal Kiln Creek 20
Newport News, VA
35mm
11/23/07

Major spoilers ahoy.

Frank Darabont's adaptation of Stephen King's "The Mist" feels like an open letter to moviegoers that reads thusly:

Dear Audience,
Fuck You.
Sincerely, Frank

I saw this with a group of about ten other people in a small, sold out theater on Black Friday. Most of them did not like it. Most of them did not like it at all. Jamee is still mad at me about the pharmacy sequence.

I liked it. I liked it a lot.

I haven't felt as exhausted after a movie since Children of Men, which my friend Marie echoed as we were leaving. I think she and Kevin liked it. I'm not sure about them. I do know that I felt bad about her getting dragged to a horror movie knowing that she does not like them, but she said she was fine once the tentacles showed up. So I don't feel as guilty.

This flick is tense. I'm not sure how it's going to play on video, but with 200 people in a theater there's definitely tension. There were people taking, but it didn't bother me once I realized that if the movie was working on me and I was feeling as tense as I was, others were probably feeling the same way. And it's not like you're given any outlet for release.

There's very little humor in The Mist. It gets going pretty quickly (sacrificing a bit of build-up and some of Brent Norton's character from the book) and things start getting bad within the first reel. And then they get worse. And worse. By the time you get to the end you're drained. And then Darabont hits you with the bleakest ending to a horror film since Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. More on that later. I'll warn you. (Actually, there are going to be spoilers-a-plenty from here on in, but I'll red flag it when I get to the ending.)

There are three main monster sequences in The Mist: What Happened to the Bag Boy, the bird-thing attack, and the expedition to the pharmacy. Normally, when you read something, especially in one of King's stories, by the time it gets translated to film it loses something. Not here. Even though the tentacles in the first sequence look a bit CGI-cheesy (They're the worst effect in the film) Darabont amps up the horror from the source material. In the story, King describes the tentacles as eating into Norm's flesh as they wrap around him. Here we have a single feeding arm that rips chunks out of him. Chunks. It's gory and shocking and raises the bar for what's going to happen later. And it's the first monster we see.

But it's not really about the monsters. Like the sociological horror films of the 60s and 70s, this is more about the people that the beasts. Or, more precisely, it's about the beasts that are the people. Here, it takes about two days for everything to go to hell with in the "safety" of the supermarket. The early King religious nut character begins preaching about the end of the world and sacrifice and it takes about two days from most everyone in the store who isn't dead to come around to her point of view. Two days. As scary as the monster sequences are, the scenes where Mrs Carmody's mob begins to act out on their blood-lust are more frightening because something like that is more apt to actually happen that to have a multi-tentacled hellbeast come out of the fog and eat you. At least in the county where I live.

But here's the thing. In the last mob scene, where the crowd is screaming with blood lust to sacrifice the little boy, Mrs. Carmody gets blown away. And the audience roars. It's another of Darabont's F-you's to the audience. He gives you a character who is inciting a crowd to kill in order to get a horrified reaction from the audience and when she gets killed, the audience watching the movie has the same reaction that they were just horrified to be watching on screen. And I'm not saying this at a distance. It's the reaction I had, too.

Which brings us to the ending. And the beginning.

Jim Emerson, the editor-in-chief at Roger Ebert's Web Site has something called The Opening Shot Project. The basic premise is that the first shot of a movie tells you everything you need to know about how to read the movie you're about to watch. The first shot of The Mist shows our protagonist, David Drayton, at work in his studio. He paints movie posters and is currently finishing one of Roland the Gunslinger from The Dark Tower. This is an in-joke for King fans and ties this into the meta-fiction of Roland's story. It's not the first time that a character in a King story painted a picture of the Gunslinger. But that's not what's important in reading the film. There are movie posters displayed throughout the studio and the two most prominently featured ones are Drew Struzan's paintings for John Carpenter's The Thing (which I have) and Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (which I don't). Both of these have bleak endings, although you can argue that Pan's Labyrinth has a happy ending if you believe that Ofelia's fantasy world is real. Regardless, it still ends with the death of a child, a death that is established in the film's opening shot. So, the way to go into The Mist, based upon the images that we're given up front is to expect that it is not going to end well.

And it doesn't.

Darabont has so far made three feature-length Stephen King adaptations. Two of the original stories, "The Mist" and "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" end with the word "hope." Both film versions have endings that go further than their source material. The Shawshank Redemption ends with Red and Andy's reunion, where the novella ends with him on a bus, headed towards that reunion. "The Mist" ends ambiguously, though it sets things up to go badly. The story is told in first person, as though Drayton is recording everything that happened in a journal. His group of survivors, including his young son, are stopped at a motel. They have a dwindling gas supply in their truck and a gun with four bullets. Drayton writes that they are headed in the direction of a single word that he thinks he heard while scanning the radio. If they run out of gas they're prepared to use the gun on themselves. There aren't enough bullets for everyone, but he'll do what he has to if it comes down to it. He leaves the journal for someone to find and then they drive off into the mist. The End.

How pissed off would you be if you saw a movie that ended like that?

The film goes further. It goes to the point where they run out of gas and they hear the monsters approaching. And then it goes further. It goes to the point where the gun is used. And then it goes further. It goes to the point where Drayton steps out of the car to meet his fate, to offer himself up to the beasts. And then, because this is the narrative engine that this movie has been going on, it gets worse.

It gets worse.

It takes balls to end a movie the way this one ends. It takes balls to release it and not tweak it to give the audience some sort of upbeat ending (see the American cut of The Descent). It really is a great big "fuck you" to the audience and I'm glad to see it. I don't think the ambiguous ending would have worked, though it's fine in the novella. A happy ending in any form would have ruined everything that came before it. For my money, and I do realize I had a free pass, this is what a horror movie should be like. And I hope to see more like it coming out.

See, there's that hope that got tossed aside.

And Mr. Darabont, if you want to make it up to your audience, please make that Dark Tower poster available for purchase. Showing that off like that... and then destroying it...

That's just mean.