Terrific write-up, Keith--I just finished rereading Under the Dome, and was thinking how that book has _also_ aged unsettlingly well. This is still one of the best King adaptations for me; seeing Darabont's usual sentimentality inverted is bracingly nasty, and I love how fully it commits to its over-the-topness. (Harden's performance is great, and I like Thomas Jane a lot too; he's got this nervy, awkward energy that makes the character more than just a cipher, and the awkwardness of it feels more and more appropriate as the situation gets worse.) Horror movies often have ordinary people fighting against forces they can't begin to understand, but this one of the few ones where every choice those people make just makes things that much worse. It's like Murphy's Law as a horror movie, with all the things we've come to take for granted swept away.
SPOILERs:
I'll admit to still being iffy on the ending, if only because it feels like it crosses the line between "horrific cruelty" and into "judging cruelty." The shot of Melissa McBride, alive and well after leaving the store earlier to save her kids (and yelling at everyone who refused to go with her), is just a little too pointed, as though Jane failed some kind of hellish morality test (Jigsaw: "You've spent your life trying to protect your child from harm. Now you've protected him so hard you shot him in the head.") It's a more fitting ending to this version of the story than King's more open-ended, hopeful one, at least.
It definitely sits on the shortlist of King adaptations that fully nail his tone (and even that ending kind of works more like a lot of his darker endings, particularly in the shorter stories, back in the coke days).
I'd include Pet Semetary and Night Flier as the two others that really crush it in terms of going Full King.
I watched Pet Sematary for the first time this past weekend.
it was, surprisingly, not a good film. it rests entirely on us believing that grief has driven this father to take crazy risks, and Dale Midkiff is just nowhere up to the task
I definitely agree that Dale Midkiff is the worst part of the movie but, the performance mostly works for me in that he comes across like a dingus which I think suits the character (and, honestly suits a lot of King characters)
Everybody dunks on Dale Midkiff, and deservedly so, but I just want to note in fairness that Lou Creed is a pretty unplayable role. The genius of King's book is that unlike 90% of his books, where the hero is just some everyman, Pet Sematary gets you into Lou Creed's head---reading it, you feel like you *are* him. Any medium that takes you out of his head and depicts him as a flesh-and-blood guy is going to weaken the impact of the character. That could be Daniel Day-Lewis up there, and you still can't capture Lou Creed on film.
Catching up with this now as it was linked in today's post.
Yeah, I'm back and forth on the ending. It feels like an M. Night Shyamalan "what do you mean, 'theme'? A movie is just a bunch of cool stuff that happens!" ending. I used to see on Reddit all the time, back when I used to go on Reddit, people suggesting that one cool ending for e.g. Cujo would be if Vic Trenton magically turned into The Punisher and simply showed up and beat everybody up, and that's pretty stupid.
On the other hand, when you take one of King's milquetoast-cipher-artist protagonists and you actually cast The Punisher, you're kind of opening a door to this being a different kind of movie.
Argument for the B&W Version: it makes the effects work a heck of a lot better.
This movie isn't exactly slept-on but dang if it isn't great. I've long wondered how much better The Walking Dead would have been if they'd landed Thomas Jane in the lead instead of the eternally bewildered-looking Andrew Lincoln.
I thought that, too, when I saw this for the first time at the end of last year, but then I remembered that Darabont spent a fair bit of time running THE WALKING DEAD.
Not that much time, considering - he left/was fired in 2011, sometime during the production of the second season (so only four years or so after THE MIST was released). He then did MOB CITY, a little-seen Ellroy-esque LA noir series that was cancelled after one season. So he hasn't made anything since 2013-14. One assumes/hopes that's at least partly his choice - those TWD cheques probably mean there's never a pressing need to work again - but still. Particularly galling as his rights to THE LONG WALK lapsed a few years ago.
I believe he kind of ended up in Director Jail for The Majestic, which not only lost money but kind of did so at a time where it was hard to do so with a Jim Carrey movie. This movie was probably supposed to be his comeback / reset but while it made money, it didn't make *much* money, which'd probably have meant Darabont would have had to claw his way into another job.
Walking Dead probably looked and felt like one hell of an upgrade for him professionally and, I'd guess, financially (at least over time).
I love Harden's performance, too. I've always believed that good actors often straddle that ham line, but the great ones know when to cross it. Cate Blanchett is another one...
Def one of my fave King adaptations. Have debated after many a gaming con, in the bar after, about the ending. I loved it, but many found it too dark and bleak, excessively so. Would’ve def changed if they never showed the arrival of the cavalry.
Regardless, ending still tons better than the book one.
Just a quick note to let people know that the version streaming on Peacock is an edited TV version, as evidenced by repeated use of the word “bullspit.” Lots of blood is ok though.
"Still, though The Mist seems weirdly in sync with our current climate, it didn’t seem particularly out of sync with the atmosphere of 2007... Nor did the King novella feel out of place in 1980"
This is always one of those things that just really bums me right out, like looking at a brilliant satire like Sorry to Bother You and realizing it could have been made 20 years ago and it would have been just as relevant. The Mist was first written 43 years ago, I first read it ~30 years ago, the movie came out 16 years ago, and it's still tragically, frustratingly relevant.
Art that shines a light on social issues is supposed to help us resolve said issues, help us move past them, but it so rarely seems to actually do so. Instead, 16 years later, we get Marcia Gay Harden's character elected to multiple seats in our government, sitting on benches in our courts, and dictating what my kid can read in school.
Loved the essay. Just wanted to add that the moral, to me, always seemed the exact same as Shawshank’s. That hope mustn’t be abandoned. One “teaches” that moral through triumph and one tragedy, but the moral itself is the same.
Yeah, I've always defended this as a great examination of despair, specifically. Jane's hope is slowly stripped away, finally obliterated first by the personal (seeing his wife is dead) and then the cosmic (seeing that Kaiju-sized monster and realizing this isn't their world anymore).
Of course I haven't seen it in forever. Only learned from these comments that Melissa McBride is the woman he sees survived.
I was so disappointed by the ending, because up to that point it's an excellent horror movie. I don’t care that Darabont deviated from the original story (I'm not a stickler for “faithfulness”), but what he comes up with fails on multiple levels. The final moment of Twilight Zone-style heavy-handed irony is bad enough. But just before that, Darabont gives us a scenario that strains credibility so badly (the level of the characters’ despair does not remotely justify their actions) that it becomes obvious it was contrived purely for shock value. Adding insult to injury, he seems to think he can pass off his cheap shock ending as something deep simply by slathering Dead Can Dance's portentous "The Host of Seraphim" all over the tail end of the soundtrack (it’s a great song, but simply out of place here). Instead, it only serves to expose the pretensions of someone who would try to infuse a giant-bug movie with unearned depth.
The irony here is that the ruling class creates the monsters they tell us to be afraid of, and those who know the truth are treated like heretics rather than voices of reason. Right now Israeli Zionists are slaughtering Palestinians (which they’ve been doing since 1948), and Joe Biden tells us it’s okay for them to do that for their own protection. He lied recently when he said he saw evidence of Hamas beheading babies. He lied about his academic record and his own family’s history during his 1988 presidential run. He lied in 2020 when he told a black journalist he was endorsed by the NAACP every time he ran for office. (They’ve never endorsed ANY candidate for any office!) And just today I heard that he believes some innocent people in Gaza have been killed but that it was the price to be paid for war. In other words, he’s justifying genocide and ethnic cleansing just as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did when she said the deaths of a half-million children were worth the sanctions the U.S. government imposed on Iraq. Those calling the shots in Washington, whether they’re politicians or corporate executives, are genocidal maniacs, and yet they’re treated as though they’re far less barbaric than communists, terrorists, Donald Trump, and whoever else we’re supposed to fear. I don’t give a damn about your feelings. I want to listen to historians talk about history. I want to listen to scientists talk about science. Kary Mullis said PCR tests shouldn’t be used to isolate a particular virus cause you would just end up with a lot of false positives. Who’s Kary Mullis? Just the guy who invented the PCR technology. If you disregard what he had to say about something he should know better than anyone else, then you’re the one who’s anti-science. If you’re letting Rachel Maddow tell you who or what to be afraid of, then you live in a delusional world. I wish I could make a movie that would drive that point home for the arrogant bastards who think they’re smarter than the hicks who refused to get vaccinated.
The parallel is a little off - COVID requires two shots. (Was this worth me posting three days late? I'll let history decide.)
Terrific write-up, Keith--I just finished rereading Under the Dome, and was thinking how that book has _also_ aged unsettlingly well. This is still one of the best King adaptations for me; seeing Darabont's usual sentimentality inverted is bracingly nasty, and I love how fully it commits to its over-the-topness. (Harden's performance is great, and I like Thomas Jane a lot too; he's got this nervy, awkward energy that makes the character more than just a cipher, and the awkwardness of it feels more and more appropriate as the situation gets worse.) Horror movies often have ordinary people fighting against forces they can't begin to understand, but this one of the few ones where every choice those people make just makes things that much worse. It's like Murphy's Law as a horror movie, with all the things we've come to take for granted swept away.
SPOILERs:
I'll admit to still being iffy on the ending, if only because it feels like it crosses the line between "horrific cruelty" and into "judging cruelty." The shot of Melissa McBride, alive and well after leaving the store earlier to save her kids (and yelling at everyone who refused to go with her), is just a little too pointed, as though Jane failed some kind of hellish morality test (Jigsaw: "You've spent your life trying to protect your child from harm. Now you've protected him so hard you shot him in the head.") It's a more fitting ending to this version of the story than King's more open-ended, hopeful one, at least.
It definitely sits on the shortlist of King adaptations that fully nail his tone (and even that ending kind of works more like a lot of his darker endings, particularly in the shorter stories, back in the coke days).
I'd include Pet Semetary and Night Flier as the two others that really crush it in terms of going Full King.
I watched Pet Sematary for the first time this past weekend.
it was, surprisingly, not a good film. it rests entirely on us believing that grief has driven this father to take crazy risks, and Dale Midkiff is just nowhere up to the task
I definitely agree that Dale Midkiff is the worst part of the movie but, the performance mostly works for me in that he comes across like a dingus which I think suits the character (and, honestly suits a lot of King characters)
aside from a dingus, he seemed like a guy who wouldn't notice if the cat or his baby disappeared one day. totally checked out.
Everybody dunks on Dale Midkiff, and deservedly so, but I just want to note in fairness that Lou Creed is a pretty unplayable role. The genius of King's book is that unlike 90% of his books, where the hero is just some everyman, Pet Sematary gets you into Lou Creed's head---reading it, you feel like you *are* him. Any medium that takes you out of his head and depicts him as a flesh-and-blood guy is going to weaken the impact of the character. That could be Daniel Day-Lewis up there, and you still can't capture Lou Creed on film.
Catching up with this now as it was linked in today's post.
Yeah, I'm back and forth on the ending. It feels like an M. Night Shyamalan "what do you mean, 'theme'? A movie is just a bunch of cool stuff that happens!" ending. I used to see on Reddit all the time, back when I used to go on Reddit, people suggesting that one cool ending for e.g. Cujo would be if Vic Trenton magically turned into The Punisher and simply showed up and beat everybody up, and that's pretty stupid.
On the other hand, when you take one of King's milquetoast-cipher-artist protagonists and you actually cast The Punisher, you're kind of opening a door to this being a different kind of movie.
Argument for the B&W Version: it makes the effects work a heck of a lot better.
This movie isn't exactly slept-on but dang if it isn't great. I've long wondered how much better The Walking Dead would have been if they'd landed Thomas Jane in the lead instead of the eternally bewildered-looking Andrew Lincoln.
I own two copies of The Mist in my small Blu-ray collection. The first one arrived and the Ebay seller had mislabeled it as including the B&W version.
I'm waiting for a date or someone to notice and make excuses to leave.
kinda surprising that's the last film he made
I thought that, too, when I saw this for the first time at the end of last year, but then I remembered that Darabont spent a fair bit of time running THE WALKING DEAD.
Not that much time, considering - he left/was fired in 2011, sometime during the production of the second season (so only four years or so after THE MIST was released). He then did MOB CITY, a little-seen Ellroy-esque LA noir series that was cancelled after one season. So he hasn't made anything since 2013-14. One assumes/hopes that's at least partly his choice - those TWD cheques probably mean there's never a pressing need to work again - but still. Particularly galling as his rights to THE LONG WALK lapsed a few years ago.
I believe he kind of ended up in Director Jail for The Majestic, which not only lost money but kind of did so at a time where it was hard to do so with a Jim Carrey movie. This movie was probably supposed to be his comeback / reset but while it made money, it didn't make *much* money, which'd probably have meant Darabont would have had to claw his way into another job.
Walking Dead probably looked and felt like one hell of an upgrade for him professionally and, I'd guess, financially (at least over time).
I love Harden's performance, too. I've always believed that good actors often straddle that ham line, but the great ones know when to cross it. Cate Blanchett is another one...
King really kills it with novellas (all four in Different Seasons are perhaps my favorite works of his), doesn't he? I love The Mist. I even have a cassette tape radio-play-esque rendition of it that uses 3D sound! https://www.discogs.com/release/17384692-Stephen-King-The-Mist-In-3D-Sound
This is why I love The Reveal: How else to find the gold amid the streaming dross?
Great read!
Def one of my fave King adaptations. Have debated after many a gaming con, in the bar after, about the ending. I loved it, but many found it too dark and bleak, excessively so. Would’ve def changed if they never showed the arrival of the cavalry.
Regardless, ending still tons better than the book one.
Just a quick note to let people know that the version streaming on Peacock is an edited TV version, as evidenced by repeated use of the word “bullspit.” Lots of blood is ok though.
Really? That's bullspit! (I noticed it's also streaming on USA's app, so Peacock may be using that version.)
Why those mother-father Chinese dentists!
"Still, though The Mist seems weirdly in sync with our current climate, it didn’t seem particularly out of sync with the atmosphere of 2007... Nor did the King novella feel out of place in 1980"
This is always one of those things that just really bums me right out, like looking at a brilliant satire like Sorry to Bother You and realizing it could have been made 20 years ago and it would have been just as relevant. The Mist was first written 43 years ago, I first read it ~30 years ago, the movie came out 16 years ago, and it's still tragically, frustratingly relevant.
Art that shines a light on social issues is supposed to help us resolve said issues, help us move past them, but it so rarely seems to actually do so. Instead, 16 years later, we get Marcia Gay Harden's character elected to multiple seats in our government, sitting on benches in our courts, and dictating what my kid can read in school.
Loved the essay. Just wanted to add that the moral, to me, always seemed the exact same as Shawshank’s. That hope mustn’t be abandoned. One “teaches” that moral through triumph and one tragedy, but the moral itself is the same.
Yeah, I've always defended this as a great examination of despair, specifically. Jane's hope is slowly stripped away, finally obliterated first by the personal (seeing his wife is dead) and then the cosmic (seeing that Kaiju-sized monster and realizing this isn't their world anymore).
Of course I haven't seen it in forever. Only learned from these comments that Melissa McBride is the woman he sees survived.
This movie leaves you feeling nearly as much despair as No Country For Old Men. I love it.
**SPOILER ALERT**
I was so disappointed by the ending, because up to that point it's an excellent horror movie. I don’t care that Darabont deviated from the original story (I'm not a stickler for “faithfulness”), but what he comes up with fails on multiple levels. The final moment of Twilight Zone-style heavy-handed irony is bad enough. But just before that, Darabont gives us a scenario that strains credibility so badly (the level of the characters’ despair does not remotely justify their actions) that it becomes obvious it was contrived purely for shock value. Adding insult to injury, he seems to think he can pass off his cheap shock ending as something deep simply by slathering Dead Can Dance's portentous "The Host of Seraphim" all over the tail end of the soundtrack (it’s a great song, but simply out of place here). Instead, it only serves to expose the pretensions of someone who would try to infuse a giant-bug movie with unearned depth.
The irony here is that the ruling class creates the monsters they tell us to be afraid of, and those who know the truth are treated like heretics rather than voices of reason. Right now Israeli Zionists are slaughtering Palestinians (which they’ve been doing since 1948), and Joe Biden tells us it’s okay for them to do that for their own protection. He lied recently when he said he saw evidence of Hamas beheading babies. He lied about his academic record and his own family’s history during his 1988 presidential run. He lied in 2020 when he told a black journalist he was endorsed by the NAACP every time he ran for office. (They’ve never endorsed ANY candidate for any office!) And just today I heard that he believes some innocent people in Gaza have been killed but that it was the price to be paid for war. In other words, he’s justifying genocide and ethnic cleansing just as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did when she said the deaths of a half-million children were worth the sanctions the U.S. government imposed on Iraq. Those calling the shots in Washington, whether they’re politicians or corporate executives, are genocidal maniacs, and yet they’re treated as though they’re far less barbaric than communists, terrorists, Donald Trump, and whoever else we’re supposed to fear. I don’t give a damn about your feelings. I want to listen to historians talk about history. I want to listen to scientists talk about science. Kary Mullis said PCR tests shouldn’t be used to isolate a particular virus cause you would just end up with a lot of false positives. Who’s Kary Mullis? Just the guy who invented the PCR technology. If you disregard what he had to say about something he should know better than anyone else, then you’re the one who’s anti-science. If you’re letting Rachel Maddow tell you who or what to be afraid of, then you live in a delusional world. I wish I could make a movie that would drive that point home for the arrogant bastards who think they’re smarter than the hicks who refused to get vaccinated.