Picturenose

Not to be missed

As someone who has read Stephen King since I was around 11 years old, who has grown up loving (and loving being scared by) the man’s work, from Carrie, through The Shining via his Dark Tower cycle (and around 40 more novels and short-story collections, all told) to his most recent, Lisey’s Story, my reaction to the prospect of another King big-screen adaptation has, over the years, largely moved from child-like excitement to confused disappointment to weary boredom and, often, outright anger.

Initially dismissed as just another pulp hack during the horror boom of the 1970s and 80s, King is in fact an enormously talented writer, who, while he has largely remained in the arena of slitherings by moonlight, has nevertheless emerged as a true Dickens of his own generation – a peerless chronicler of modern humanity’s terrors and mores.

And, for his efforts, how does Hollywood frequently treat his work? Horribly. Right from the start, for every Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980) or The Dead Zone (1983), there have been two or three examples of a Cujo (1983), Children of the Corn (1984), Hearts in Atlantis (2001) or Dreamcatcher (2003).

Thank God, then, for Frank Darabont. Having already filmed King’s more mainstream works The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) to great acclaim, he now turns on all his jets and, with The Mist, has produced what is perhaps the finest SK horror adaptation, period.

Based on a novella originally published in the mid-1980s collection Dark Forces, the story opens in the wake of the biggest storm to hit Maine in decades; the following day, surveying the damage to his home, Dave Drayton (Thomas Jane) notices a strange mist on the lake, but thinks nothing of it. When he takes his son Billy (Nathan Gamble) and his neighbor Brent Norton (Andre Braugher) to the supermarket, leaving his wife Stephanie (Kelly Collins Lintz) at the house, the three see the army, firefighters and police heading toward the mist, which is spreading. A rumoured secret military plan, Project Arrowhead, is mentioned.

At the store, everything seems normal until an old man (Jeffery Demunn) runs in with a bloody nose: “There’s something in the mist!” He’s not wrong. A catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions has arrived at the door of the 80 or so people trapped in the shop – but will they have more to fear from the terrors lurking outside, the pseudo-religious madness of Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Wallace) who’s calling on the group to face ‘the end of times’, or the darkness in their own hearts as the microcosmic society begins to break down?

“It’s unapologetically a horror – I’m not messing around with namby-pamby definitions,” as Darabont himself has said. And The Mist works brilliantly as a full-on screamer, thanks to a premise that’s both simple and sophisticated (monsters inside and out), sterling work from Jane as the nominal hero figure Drayton and young Gamble as his son, plus an electrifying performance from Wallace as the mad preacher. Like all great examples of the art form, the movie reveals just enough, at key points, to suggest that whatever the mist is actually hiding is going to be far, far worse than you could possibly imagine. The S/FX have come in for some criticism – pooh, pooh. It would be interesting to wonder just what such critics would expect Lovecraftian creatures from another dimension to actually look like – realistic, perhaps? Hmmm.

Frankly, for this reviewer, the dread factor was not diminished even slightly by the director opening the door (just a crack) on his Cthulhu-esque monstrosities – and the picture races at breakneck speed through sublime set-piece after set-piece, with nary a misstep.

DAVID: I count four. She’s preaching to them right now. By noon she’ll have four more. By tomorrow night, when those things come back, she’ll have a congregation. Then we can start worrying about who she’s gonna sacrifice to make it all better…My little boy?

Stephen King, who never quite bought the ‘the most frightening things are always unseen’ dictat, has already expressed his enormous approval and, furthermore, paid Darabont the ultimate compliment: “I wish I’d thought of that ending.” The novella’s dénoument was left open – the film’s, far from it. As King himself has said of his own horror motivation: ‘Take something that’s bad, and make it worse.’

You’ll know what I mean, when you’ve seen it - take a bow, Mr Darabont.

127 mins.