Streamin’ King: ‘The Mist’ Might Very Well Have The Bleakest Ending In Modern Movie History

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching The Mist, the 2007 adaptation of the novella that led 1985’s Skeleton Crew. Spoiler-light until noted otherwise.

THE GIST: When some mist covers a small Maine town, a man and his son get trapped inside a packed supermarket with plate glass windows deeply unsuited to the coterie of tentacled, winged, insectoid, human-exterminating creatures lurking just out of sight. The store becomes a microcosm of society under duress.

PEDIGREE: Written and directed by Frank Darabont, who did classic King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (’99), scoring Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nominations for both and a Best Picture nod for Green.

Stars three-time King-er/three-time Golden Globe nominee Thomas Jane (Hung, The Punisher), Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden (Code Black, Mystic River), and Andre Braugher (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Homicide), plus William Sadler, Toby Jones, Jeffrey DeMunn, Laurie Holden, and Melissa McBride. Those last three, along with cinematographer Rohn Schmidt and a handful of smaller actors, were all tapped by Darabont for AMC’s The Walking Dead, which parted ways with him extremely quickly and acrimoniously. Darabont wanted Jane as Rick Grimes.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Required viewing, although mileage on your frustrate-o-meter may vary. Faithful to the novella and the chatty King aesthetic of a bunch of Mainers facing the supernatural together, and to the gross-out jump-scare moments bred in the vintage creature features that inspired the story.

It famously adds its own bleak, bleeeeak twist to King’s ambiguous ending. (More on that soon, down in Spoilertown.) But it does have crippling dialogue issues and jarring-in-the-wrong-way camerawork. Darabont smashed back-to-back grand-slams on those King curveballs in the ’90s–Shawshank and Green Mile are top five or even three, in spite and because of their atypicality in the canon–then took a needlessly wonky swing at a straight-down-the-middle horror softball. How did he channel two of King’s most sentimental, human tales so brilliantly, then shortchange both his Mist characters and, in turn, a project he’d been cooking up for years? It didn’t have to be this way, Frank.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Horror-heads seem to be really, really into The Mist. It’s high-grade tentacle terror, capably made and nicely cast–we could’ve been stuck with D-listers or actual nobodies and instead got a sheaf of solid character actors. A lot of the monster moments are thrilling, especially the larger they get; the total ease with which these things tear humans apart makes them viscerally frightening. The mist itself is awesome and its arrival is chilling.

But that plentiful, pitiful dialogue is like bad jacket copy on the saddest neglected genre novel: “You don’t have much faith in humanity, do you?” “None whatsoever.” “I can’t accept that. People are basically good, decent. My god, David, we’re a civilized society.”

The writing both throttles the performances and makes laughable the high-speed erosion of that society. The lack of true human grounding makes a humorless product feel distinctly not-whole.

SPOILERS BELOW

And if that lack of humanity does get under your skin and you feel the disappointment of what this film really could’ve been, that deliciously malevolent ending suffers. How real is Drayton’s pain supposed to feel when the son he mercy-kills was an underdeveloped plot device the whole time? Then, if you’re not in The Mist‘s thrall, it just gets annoying: The military shows up within like A MINUTE? And the mist immediately clears? And THAT’s the wail Tom Jane went with?

It is nice that only like 1 percent of the movie is spent trying to get to the bottom of the mist’s origin, though.

15 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. Jane starred in 2003’s Dreamcatcher and 2017’s Netflix adaptation of the novella 1922.
2. Here, he’s an artist seen working on a gorgeous poster for a then-fictional Dark Tower movie.

In the background lurks a poster for The Thing, from the very same John Carpenter who adapted Christine and gave us a flick called The Fog. (Speaking of foggy stories: The Mist is a known influence on the video games Half-Life, Silent Hill, and Vorago.)

3. Spike released, then canceled, a 10-episode Mist series in summer 2017. Isiah Whitlock Jr, who also did 1408, had a role.
4. Marcia Gay Harden gives perhaps the best-ever rendition of King’s archetypal religious zealot, and echoes many of her forebears. We get strong hints of Carrie’s mother in the first praying scene, and of Children of the Corn‘s child preacher Isaac when she’s got the whole store seething for “expiation.” Her line “my life for you” is something characters from The Stand and The Dark Tower tell uber-baddie Randall Flagg. (One’s called Trashcan Man; the other’s the Tick-Tock Man. Hm.)

   There’s also a cute moment where Harden says “we are being”–purposeful cut to Thomas Jane, former Punisher–”punished.”

5. A strange entry in the Multi-Time King Performers database: William Sadler isn’t just Heywood in Shawshank and annoying-ass Jim here, he also performed the lead role in The Mist: In 3-D Sound, an ’80s audio adaptation with “sound so visual you’re literally engulfed by its bonechilling terror.” Other Kingverse returnees are Frances Sternhagen (1990’s Misery, ’91 miniseries Golden Years) and Jeffrey DeMunn, prominent in both Shawshank and Green Mile.
6. King’s reaction, per Darabont:
   “…he read it and said, ‘Oh, I love this ending. I wish I’d thought of it.’ He said that, once a generation, a movie should come along that just really pisses the audience off, and flips their expectations of a happy ending right on the head. He pointed to the original Night of the Living Dead as one of those endings that just scarred you.”

7. King teased that ending, with book-Drayton noting he’s one bullet short if it worse comes to worst. Instead of going there, he ends on the word “hope.”
8. Darabont put a black-and-white version, his preferred format from inception, on the DVD.
9. Drayton calls his son Big Bill, like It‘s Bill Denbrough.
10. While King’s Mist got in and out in about 110 pages, Under the Dome took a similar “let’s trap people and watch them reenact society’s insanity” setup and ran 1,100 pages with it. Analysts early in the novel think the be-domed town is victim to “not terrorists, invaders from space, or Great Cthulhu, but the good old military-industrial complex.” One of the main theories is that it’s “an experiment that had gone wrong and out of control”; a blogger comments it’s “exactly like in that movie The Mist.”
11. A spinning wire bookrack gets knocked over in some fiery supermarket chaos. A: the rack is full of King titles, and B: King has at least one of these in his home, with “lots of fifties paperbacks because I love the covers” plus “a certain amount of pornography from the sixties, paperback pornography.” Earlier, a Castle Rock Times newspaper is shown.
12. The government’s responsibility for the mist and monsters and everything is, like many King things, very Stranger Things-y. Speculating in the store, these folks could be totally be talking about the Upside Down and Hawkins, Indiana. Darabont reportedly wrote and nixed an opening scene showing an incident at the Arrowhead Project and a portal opening.
13. If you can’t get enough of those monster-world portals, 2002’s From a Buick 8 is 350 meandering pages of a car being one of those while sitting in a shed behind a police station. Revival goes there a tiny bit, and The Dark Tower III has a stomach-churning sequence that takes place in what might be on the other side of a Mist-like portal.
14. If “Ollie” feels like a real meat-and-potatoes King name, it might be because you’ve got Ollies in Under the Dome, Cycle of the Werewolf, and Kingdom Hospital.
15. The kid who gets tentacle-murdered on the loading dock (American Pie‘s Shermanator) wears a T-shirt for one of King’s Maine radio stations, WKIT. Barely visible under his apron, but it’s there.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: A ripe 72% on the ol’ Tomatometer, reputation continuing to grow over time; it’s often seen as a 9/11 allegory, if you’re into that. (Darabont certainly was, telling an interviewer “the past seven years in this country made me take this story and make it a wounded, angry cry.”)

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR “THE MIST”: First published in 1980 collection Dark Forces, where it was billed on the cover as a “terrifying new novel” by King and got some sweet original art. It then led his sophomore short fiction collection, Skeleton Crew, in 1985, the same year King gave up the ghost on his pseudonym and dropped the Bachman Books collection. The next year came It.

NEXT TIME ON STREAMIN’ KING: Cell, the King co-written 2016 adaptation of his ’06 novel, starring 1408 fellows Samuel L. Jackson and John Cusack.

Zach Dionne is an editor at Complex and is excited about King’s May novel The Outsider but worried it might be too Mr. Mercedes-ish.

Where to stream The Mist