Halloween Horrorfest 2018: THE MIST (2007)

Boy, you wanna talk about the Romero Standby....

The Romero Standby, for those who don’t know, is what I call those horror films where the entropic element is secondary to the bad choices and conflicts that arise when you put a bunch of people into a confined space for any length of time.  While there are scary monsters in Frank Darabont’s The Mist, the true horror arises from the way People Fuck It Up For Itself; I find it telling that Darabont wanted to originally shoot the film in black and white much like the movie that created The Romero Standby, Night of The Living Dead.

And much like Night of The Living Dead, Darabont intentionally creates a sort of mundane tone to give The Mist the feel of watching a documentary, even if the film is conventionally structured.  The dialogue is mostly naturalistic, the scenes composed of long takes, and the score is punctuated by long stretches of nothing but ambient noise; even the closing credits are overtaken with the sounds of tanks and heliocopters.  Darabont works extremely hard to create a sense of veracity, freely including conversations about the most ordinary stuff in the first act to ground us so that when things start breaking down we feel it all the harder.

The emphasis is on ensemble here, and it’s littered with actors who are kinda, sorta familiar that add to the veracity and work well together.  The monster sequences are really sparse, truth be told--there are only three major set pieces and a brief flurry of mayhem in the third act.  The human factor triggers all of these; even the first major attack happens because some guy holds his lantern too close to the plate glass storefront.  And much like Duane Jones’ Ben in Night, Thomas Jane’s David makes a number of plans to solve various problems that end up Getting Folks Killed.

I love this cast.  Along with Jane, who I have always appreciated and will always be to me the Definitive Punisher, there’s Laurie Holden (who I fell in love with when she played Marita Covarrubias on The X-Files), Toby Jones (who I did not realize was British until years later), Andre Braugher (who should be a national treasure),  Jeffrey deMunn and Frances Sternhagen.  Marcia Gay Hardin does well playing the ‘villain’ of the piece--a villain who gets more and more emboldened because the shit she’s talking happens to come true.  Her madness slowly infects the other people in the store until it’s a hivemind mob.

I should make mention of the ending, which is severely dark and punches up Darabont’s theme of faith and how we approach it.  It’s a real gut-punch, and may be scarier than all the skull-spiders and quadra-winged birds attacking our cast.

The Mist wasn’t well received, and didn’t make money.  The lackluster TV series probably tarnished it a bit as well.  I think its reputation has grown since its brief theatrical run, but I’m sure there are a number of you who haven’t seen it yet.  If you are one of that number, correct it now.  I highly recommend this film.

How YOU Can Curate The 2nd Half Of The Horrorfest!

You have three more days to help curate this year's Halloween Horrorfest

If you donate $31 to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network before October 15th and send me the receipt proving you did, you can name one movie I have to watch during the Horrorthon.  Keep in mind there are some things I won’t do (so no Eli Fucking Roth movies, for example), and it has to be a movie I can find.  If you’re an independent filmmaker and are willing to make the donation, by all means send me the film.  I will do as many as I can before October 31st, and those I can I will view in the days after Halloween during ‘Beyond Halloween Horrorfest.'