FEATURE: A Stephen King Halloween!...The Mist

8. The Mist

(Frank Darabont, 2007)

By tonight, she'll have six people sitting with her.  If those pink bugs and the bird come back tonight, she'll have a whole congregation sitting with her tomorrow morning.  Then we can start worrying about who she'll tell them to sacrifice...

The Long and Short of It

After a violent storm, father David Drayton (Thomas Jane) drives into town with his son and a neighbor in tow.  What they don't know is that they're being followed by a strange fog that settles over the town, traps them in a grocery store, and forces them into a nightmare that might prove hopeless...

Adaptation Decay

Your Mileage May Vary.  In the novella (collected in Skeleton Crew), it's implied that the military is the cause of the Mist, but in the film, Darabont creates a soldier named Jessup (Sam Witwer), who makes the connection explicit.  In the novella, David's neighbor is presumably white, but in the feature, Andre Braugher plays Norton and adds a racial edge (referring to a group of skeptics as "my people").  In the novella, David sleeps with Amanda Dumfries (Laurie Holden), but in the film, he has no time for sex.  Most notably, the novella and the film have different endings.  While the other changes aren't too significant, the ending's grown notorious as either (a) a brilliant subversion or (b) a manufactured "gotcha."  I think the novella's ending works for the novella, and the film's ending works for the film.  What can I say?  I'm an equivocating bastard.

Forget All That - How's the Movie?

 Frank Darabont is one of the few directors in Hollywood to grant King's works the patience they deserve (Rob Reiner is another), and he nails the quiet hysteria of the novella.  Along the way, he suggests all the ways that Bush's America willfully partitions itself, specifically through color, class, and creed.  That last point is emphasized by Marcia Gay Harden as Mrs. Carmody; she takes what looks like a campy role and invests it with hideous conviction.  If her scapegoating and followers seem unlikely, remember that people still listen to Pat Robertson after he blamed 9/11 on the gays.  Getting away from the social criticism, Darabont also creates scenes of undeniable suspense, like an expedition to a pharmacy that goes terribly wrong, and scenes of unexpected awe, as when a late-film arrival dwarfs all the previous threats.  If you have the opportunity, watch the film in black-and-white.  It's Darabont's preferred version of the film, and it rocks.

Okay, but Is It a Good Halloween Flick?

Sure, especially if preceded with black-and-white big bug classic Them!...or with Night of the Living Dead.  I've pointed out before that the two have a hell of a lot in common.

Kingwatch 2012

Stephen King was supposed to cameo as the biker who takes the rope from David...and gets torn in half.  That didn't pan out, so Darabont fell back on set dressing to honor the author.  It's nearly impossible to see, but the spinning book-racks all feature books by Stephen King.  Hopefully Skeleton Crew isn't in there.  Can you imagine David Drayton leafing through a book and learning about David Drayton?  What's next?  Stephen King writing himself into a story?  Anyway, here's "King's Pharmacy."

And here's a painting of King's gunslinger, Roland, with the same universe-door nodded to in 1408.

But You Know What Sucks?

8. Firestarter

(Mark Lester, 1984)

My lasting memory of Firestarter is Charlie McGee (Drew Barrymore) becoming so powerful of a pryokinetic that she manifests giant ball-missiles of fiery death.  Even as a kid, I called bullshit on that.  That may say more about me as a child than Firestarter as a movie, but if nothing else, we now know that I draw the line at ball-missiles of fiery death.  The film takes King's wonky, middling sci-fi novel and squashes the story into drecky pulp, which is a damn shame, considering that George C. Scott got involved in this mess (I assume he wandered onto the set while looking for the studio cafeteria one day).  Is it worse than Maximum Overdrive or The Lawnmower Man?  Maybe not, but considering some of the talent involved, Firestarter is a hell of a lot more aggravating.  It adds absolutely nothing to the conversation to note that director Mark Lester also directed Showdown in Little Tokyo, in which the late Brandon Lee was super-impressed with Dolph Lundgren's penis, but there you have it.

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A Stephen King Halloween

01. ?
02. ?
03. ?
04. ?
05. Stand By Me / Dreamcatcher
06. The Dead Zone / The Mangler
07. Misery / Sometimes They Come Back
08. The Mist / Firestarter
09. "Battleground" / Creepshow 2
10. Creepshow / "The Road Virus Heads North"
11. Dolores Claiborne / The Tommyknockers (TV)
12. The Stand (TV) / Maximum Overdrive
13. 1408 / The Lawnmower Man
14. Christine / Silver Bullet
15. Cat's Eye / Thinner
HM. Hearts in Atlantis / The Shining (TV)