In 1985, when I was a 14, all I wanted for Christmas was Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew, then fresh in hardback. I got it, and the cold winter nights were perfect for reading “The Mist,” the eerie first of 22 stories in the collection.
But really, what were the Weinstein brothers thinking in releasing Frank Darabont’s The Mist movie over a Thanksgiving weekend? While it is mostly faithful to King’s original, 100ish-page story, its drastically different ending doesn’t exactly scream “holiday family motion-picture experience.”
Thomas Jane (2004’s The Punisher) stars as David Drayton, an artist and all-around family man living the quiet life in coastal Maine until the night a freak storm tears the outdoors to hell. The next day, facing no electricity, he and his little boy head to town to pick up food and supplies at the Food House grocery store, leaving his wife back at the house.
Given the storm, the store is packed with people of all backgrounds, which will make for a real pressure cooker (mostly thanks to the apocalyptic religious zealot played by Mystic River’s Marcia Gay Harden) once the eerie fog envelopes the place and traps them inside. Despite attempts at escape, gooey tentacles and oversized insects from the mist thwart those desperate plans. But what’s really in there? And will anyone who sees live to tell?
It’s the third go-round for Darabont in King features, having written and directed 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption and 1999’s The Green Mile prior. Hey, at least this one gets out of prison … or does it? People trapped in a grocery store — may as well be San Quentin.
Differences to the story are mostly subtle, except for the biggest change of all: the ending. I won’t spoil it for you, but it brings to mind a point Jeffery Deaver made in the introduction to his 2003 Twisted anthology of short stories: “Authors have a contract with their readers and I think too much of mine to have them invest their time, money and emotion in a full-length novel, only to leave them disappointed by a grim, cynical ending. With a thirty-page short story, however, all bets are off.”
True, this is a motion picture, not a work of literature, but its extended running time makes it the equivalent of a novel, and Darabont crosses the line into cruel cynicism. Up until that point, I was with The Mist all the way — a suspenseful, purposely paced horror thriller that delivers some old-school, B-movie scares. —Rod Lott
Love this movie, including the ending. For me, it’s perfect. King himself has said he wished he’d thought of it.