Stephen King Movie The Mist Available Free on Streaming

Stephen King movie adaptations have a habit of becoming larger than the books that inspired them. The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile gave director Frank Darabont two of the most beloved King adaptations ever made. Films like The Shining, Misery, and Carrie became foundational pieces of horror cinema. King adaptations take massive liberties with their source material. The most famous example is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which King spent almost 50 years complaining about. However, no cinematic departure proved more devastating than the final few moments of The Mist.

Frank Darabont adapted King’s 1980 novella in 2007. The film appears at first like a conventional monster movie with a bit of Silent Hill baked in, but it devolves into a psychological windfall. The story kicks off after a violent storm damages the home of David Drayton, played by Thomas Jane. David decides to take his young son Billy, played by Nathan Gamble, and his neighbor, played by Andre Braugher, into town for supplies the next morning. They step inside a local supermarket jam-packed with dozens of residents looking to stock up after the storm. An eerie mist rolls in and blankets the outside world in a dark white smog.

The Mist establishes that its central subject hides awful monsters within its white embrace. One of the best sequences happens near the start of the movie when David and a group of men investigate the back of the supermarket. They find several enormous tentacles pushing through the opening. Norm, a young stock clerk played by Chris Owen, is one of the first victims. The creature wraps its tentacles around Norm, and the appendages protrude sharp blades that slice through skin. David, Ollie Weeks played by Toby Jones, and the other men desperately try to pull Norm back to safety. The tentacles quickly overpower them, and the young store clerk is dragged into the fog screaming in a bloody mess.

It is a nail-biting introduction to a menagerie of Lovecraftian creatures whose designs are unsettling for how little Darabont reveals of them. He rarely gives a clean look at the larger monsters lurking in the mist. Frantic camera pans, screaming, blood, and enormous tentacles do the heavy lifting. The scene establishes the supermarket as a cage rather than a refuge. David and the other survivors have no idea what else might lurk in the fog. The comfort offered by the wall of glass at the front of the shop begins to wane.

The monsters eventually become far less frightening than the people hiding from them. As time ticks away inside the supermarket, fear breaks down the community among the remaining survivors. Mrs. Carmody, played by Marcia Gay Harden, becomes disillusioned by her faith and hunts for a divine explanation for the atrocities. David and the others struggle to understand the true nature of their situation, while Carmody’s interpretations influence frightened survivors into believing the event is divine punishment.

The marketing tagline reads: “Fear changes everything.” The line is never spoken by any of the characters, nor is it brought up in King’s novella, as it was made up for the movie’s marketing. It remains the central thesis of The Mist. Watching people argue over whether the creatures exist is disturbing, but seeing Carmody weaponize that fear into a fanatical movement is devastating. Darabont taps into how humanity’s desperate need to extract meaning from senseless catastrophe can be more horrifying than any Lovecraftian entity looming in the white nothingness.

King’s narrative and Darabont’s filmmaking do not completely hide the poor CGI, which is a byproduct of its era and a minimal budget. Made for somewhere between $13 million and $18 million, The Mist looks rough around the edges. In the supermarket loading dock scene, Lovecraftian tentacles slither out of the fog to drag away Norm. The digital appendages look flat and rubbery, lacking the texture and proper shadow integration needed to anchor them in physical space. The lighting on the tentacles does not match the harsh glare of the garage. Much of the CGI looks dated by modern standards and was jarring in 2007.

An oddly enduring appeal exists within that jankiness. Darabont talked about having to shoot the film on a dramatically reduced budget and an unforgiving schedule, which meant constantly shifting resources. Although the rest of the digital bestiary fares similarly to the tentacles, the poor effects give the film a distinct B-movie energy. The dated visuals are easy to overlook when the real terror is driven by the human cast, anchored by performances from Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, and Toby Jones.

One of horror cinema’s bleakest endings

The most striking difference between Darabont’s movie and King’s novella is the end. The filmmaker stays close to the source material for most of the runtime by preserving the supermarket setting, grotesque monsters, religious fanaticism of Mrs. Carmody, and David’s attempt to protect his son. Darabont gave the story definitive closure instead of King’s open-ended finale, imbuing the story with a heavy emotional impact. Darabont thought about the ending for years and fought to keep it during financing. King praised the change, and Darabont recalled the author saying he wished he had come up with it himself.

David and the remaining survivors eventually escape the supermarket and drive until their car runs out of gas, leaving them stranded in the middle of the mist. With nowhere else left to run and no clue where the mist ends, David makes a drastic choice. Down to just four bullets, he shoots the remaining survivors one by one, saving his son Billy for last. The boy’s death is brutal because David spends the entire movie trying to protect him from outside horrors, only to kill him himself. David climbs out of the car to face the creatures and screams into the fog in absolute pain. A military convoy sporting soldiers, tanks, and trucks filled with survivors emerges from the unknown instead of a monster. David watches in stunned horror as the mist dissipates and the convoy rolls past, realizing aid was moments away.

Those closing moments are the reason The Mist sticks with viewers. The CGI creatures look ripped from video game cutscenes, and the supermarket setting becomes repetitive, but those elements do not detract from the feeling the film leaves behind. Darabont takes a tale about monsters emerging from an inexplicable mist and turns it into a meditation on the terrible things people convince themselves to do when hope is gone.

The Mist is streaming on Roku.

Source: Polygon