For the alert viewer, Frank Darabont's stunning new movie The Mist - which may one day be seen as America's definitive post-9/11 movie - discloses everything about itself in the opening shot. Darabont's protagonist - soon to be sorely tested indeed - is movie-poster artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and as he works on a new painting, the camera focuses on a poster for John Carpenter's 1982 remake of Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby's The Thing (1951), showing a man in an icy landscape wearing a parka with a large hood, from which emanates a blinding white light that completely obscures his face. The relationship between those two movies encapsulates everything that Darabont is doing in The Mist. In the Hawks version, the threat of the alien invader draws two deeply opposed mindsets - naive scientists and skeptical military men - together as one to defeat a common enemy. Three decades later, Carpenter stirred in all the division, cynicism and paranoia that had surfaced in American society during Vietnam and Watergate. His beleaguered team was seen to fragment and deteriorate under pressure, resorting to an every-man-for-himself ethic very appropriate to the movie's socio-cultural moment.
And now here's Darabont, taking a long-nurtured script from a Stephen King story - first published as Ronald Reagan came into office - about a large group of people trapped in a supermarket by a profoundly malevolent, monster-concealing fog, and utterly failing to rise to the apocalyptic occasion; instead ignoring the voices of reason and falling into disunity and irrationality, and even resorting to human sacrifice. Darabont adds a minimum of tweaks to render the story horribly relevant to our present plight, but couches his discourse in the hair-raisingly suspenseful terms of a classic, politically metaphorical 1950s sci-fi B-picture. Like The Incredible Shrinking Man or Them!, The Mist wears its politics lightly but indelibly over a finely tooled, souped-up genre chassis. And as with that poster for The Thing, the most terrifying aspects emerge from deep within that white light - from the unfathomable human mind. The result may be Darabont's masterpiece - a despairing, angry thriller, with the bleakest ending of any Hollywood movie in years.
"It always struck me as a kind of timeless story," says Darabont. "It's what I call the Lord of the Flies paradigm: you put people into a pressure-cooker of fear and terror, you shake 'em up and you see what they do. Do they start to work together, or do they start to descend into unreason and savagery and superstition? It's like one of the characters says: 'The human race is fundamentally insane. If you put two of us into a room together we're soon gonna start figuring out good reasons to kill one another.'
"And you know what? I've been saying that for years, and it felt great to finally be able to say it in a movie. That's what the movie's about and that's what compelled me to make it: it winds up being an enormously powerful metaphor sociologically and politically. So I had to make it now. It's been on the back burner for a long time and the past seven years in this country made me take this story and make it a wounded, angry cry. If you want that! If all you want is a cool scary monster movie and a real tense time - you'll get that, too."
With his perfectly polished bald pate and neatly trimmed goatee, Darabont exudes a certain Mitteleuropean impishness that reminds one of his Hungarian roots. He was born in 1959 in a refugee camp in France, where his parents were briefly resettled after the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Budapest uprising, and he seems to have inherited a Slavic/Magyar predilection for fantasy and horror (Transylvania, after all, looms large in the Austro-Hungarian folk-memory). He certainly has no reserve about the core enthusiasms that first gripped him as an infant. And while his previous movies (including perennial "greatest ever" vote favourites The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile) can be classed as "adult fables", his earliest screenplays, for The Blob remake of 1989 and The Fly II, reach back deep into 50s low-budget, sci-fi and monster folklore. Thus The Mist is a return to his favourite kind of movie.
"My first love was this genre. My very first memories are of watching television as a four-year-old: Frankenstein and the Wolfman and Dracula and all the old Universal monster movies were my first love, and anything that had an element of the fantastic always appealed to me - it's a genetic disposition, y'know, you either love this stuff or you don't. And, oh my God, I'm suuuuuuuuch a geek about this stuff that I've always wanted to veer back into that territory."
And that he does: political metaphors aside, Darabont has certainly delivered on the suspense front. Out of the mist, apparently generated by a botched military experiment, emerge some of the nastiest monsters imaginable - giant flying bugs of the ickiest, squirmiest kind, huge clawed tentacles that can reach in and tear away huge chunks of human flesh, giant shadowy creatures hundreds of feet high - and their extreme violence and malevolence drives the characters to the edge of insanity. As the film develops, the parallels with America in the insane, vengeful and paranoid aftermath of 9/11 become unmistakable.
After the sumptuous classicism of his other movies, Darabont has ditched his usual big budgets, fluid camerawork and operatic architecture to made a movie that feels like Arthur Miller's The Crucible shot in the style of Paul Greengrass's United 93, or Invasion of the Bodysnatchers remade by Peter Watkins from the perspective of the pod people: long, long takes, crowd-as-cast, claustrophobia, escalating hysteria, very bleak and pessimistic ending. Darabont used in-your-face camera operators who improvised around and among the cast as they shot and reshot their long, chaotic and exhausting scenes in real time. Darabont says it was sometimes more like filming a hectic and energetic stage play.
While he was preparing the movie, Darabont got the chance to direct several episodes of the punchy, stripped-down police drama The Shield, and took it, he says, "as fieldwork for The Mist". And just as Alfred Hitchcock went straight from his zillion-dollar, transcontinental Technicolor epic North by Northwest to picking up a TV crew from Alfred Hitchcock Presents ... and filming Psycho in black-and-white for next to nothing, Darabont has embraced a similar, return to simplicity and velocity.
"Even though it was initially developed at Paramount, this could never have been a $40m-50m studio movie, so I took it to Dimension and Bob Weinstein and we did it on a six-week shoot. I said, 'Let's embrace the aesthetic, not only of story, but also of circumstance; let's embrace the aesthetic of super-tight budget, super-tight schedule, under great duress of resources.'
"And what a delight it was to take the formalism of a kid who grew up watching Stanley Kubrick movies, where everything's painstakingly thought-out in advance and very meticulously rendered, then throw that whole skillset out the door and have no more control. I'm still the captain of the ship but we're in storm-tossed seas here, folks, making the Mist. It's much more vérité, more documentary style. I was looking for a way to shake everything up and this movie lent itself to that in terms of material, certainly in terms of budget and schedule, because I could never have shot it the other way in six weeks.
"I realised how potentially instructive The Shield could be for me with The Mist. And it was such a success for me that I wound up doing the Hitchcock thing: I took their cinematographer, two camera operators, their editor and the script supervisor that had done my episodes and did it literally during the show's six-week hiatus. It was very liberating. Not only can I paint outside the lines ... there ARE no lines! Let it be ragged, let it be jazz versus classical music, all adrenaline and spur-of-the-moment, and let's just start shooting without blocking or rehearsals. If the actors miss the marks, never mind, the camera will compensate. What's hilarious in some of those scenes is actors getting bodyblocked by a cameraman pushing in for a great angle, then having to fight their way back in front of the lens. We were doing some of their close-ups from 30ft away with a zoom!"
Perhaps the biggest issue for Darabont on The Mist was its ending, which, to put it mildly, completely sidesteps the uplift and optimism of Shawshank or The Green Mile. He says it's the kind of thing a smaller shop like Dimension is better able to get away with.
"It was a leap in the dark, a big risk. One big producer offered me a great deal and a $30m budget - on condition that I change the ending. So I went with Bob Weinstein, and a budget half that size.
"Because whether you love The Mist or not - I mean, as long as you're not indifferent! - I just don't want cinema to go to that place where it's all by the numbers."
· The Mist is released on July 4
Poster boy: the art of Drew Struzan
Had anyone else directed The Mist, the profession of the lead character would probably have had little significance in a film more concerned with siege mentality and hidden terrors. But for Frank Darabont it was an unmissable opportunity to showcase the work of his favourite artist, Drew Struzan.
Even if you've never heard the name before, you have definitely seen Struzan's work. Given the choice at art college between becoming a starving artist or a merely peckish illustrator, Struzan chose the latter, calling it "the shortest path to a slice of bread". Since then his work has adorned postage stamps, collectable plates and album covers, including Alice Cooper's Welcome To My Nightmare.
But it's in his work for the movies that he has really made his mark. It's Struzan's work that adorns the walls of David Drayton's studio in The Mist - his instantly recognisable posters for The Thing, Pan's Labyrinth and Darabont's Shawshank Redemption. Had the film been about Struzan, that panning shot could have continued for hours, taking in artwork for First Blood, Blade Runner, Big Trouble in Little China, The Goonies as well as assorted Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Star Wars, Harry Potter and Muppet movies.
Many directors still recognise the power of the illustrator's art. Ridley Scott contracted Struzan to complete his earlier, largely unused artwork for Blade Runner to accompany the recent definitive DVD releases. And Struzan's poster for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was all that was needed to silence the internet commentators from a pre-emptive tirade of naysaying. Struzan just did what he has always done: he made it look like a movie you simply had to see.
Phelim O'Neill