Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we celebrate our 500th post with Frank Darabont’s 2007 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist. Spoilers ahead! Content warning for harm to children, blood and guts, giant insects, fundamentalist Christians, and child death.
Artist David Drayton lives near Bridgton, Maine, with wife Stephanie and eight-year-old son Billy. Their lakeside house has been in the family for generations and seen bad weather, but nothing like the thunderstorm that hits one hot summer. Trees crash through David’s studio window and the boathouse. The boathouse-wrecker is a dead pine David’s been asking his neighbor, NYC lawyer Brent Norton, to remove. The Draytons have previously taken Brent to court over property disputes. They won, and bad blood persists. Finding Brent in mourning for a treasured car also pine-wrecked, David takes him to Bridgton for supplies along with Billy.
As they drive, a strange mist spills across the lake. A convoy of Army trucks heads toward the nearby base, home to the tightly-guarded Project Arrowhead.
Like the rest of the area, Bridgton has lost electrical and phone service. The supermarket is crowded. As David, Billy and Brent wait in a long checkout line, a local man (Dan Miller) rushes in, shouting about things that pulled another man into the mist. Sirens start wailing. Mist envelopes the store. An earthquake shakes it. Only one woman, who’s left her children at home, dares to leave.
The rest, including three base soldiers, hunker down. David goes into the storage area and finds a generator spewing toxic smoke. He turns it off, then hears something slithering outside the loading dock. Though incredulous about the slithering, two workmen (Jim and Myron) and assistant manager Ollie check out the generator. A bagger (Norm), urged on by the workmen, agrees to clear the exhaust vent. As he exits, huge tentacles snake in and grab him. Jim and Myron are shocked useless. David and Ollie try to free Norm, but he’s dragged into the mist.
Enraged by Jim and Myron’s cowardice, David punches Jim. The dock doors are holding, but the storefront’s all plate-glass. David approaches Brent for help rallying the shoppers. Brent thinks the attack witnesses are pranking him because he’s an out-of-towner. Even after seeing a severed tentacle, he remains skeptical. Shoppers help build a window-barricade. Brent, however, gathers followers. Another faction forms around Mrs. Carmody, who claims the mist is God’s judgment on sinners.
David and Billy connect with schoolteachers Irene Reppler and Amanda Dunfrey; with Ollie and Dan, they oppose Carmody’s ranting and Brent’s denialism. Amanda entrusts her self-defense revolver to competitive target-shooter Ollie. With nightfall, yard-long fly-scorpions swarm the windows, along with pterodactyl-things that break through the glass. It’s pandemonium as shoppers battle the monsters. Oil-soaked mop-torches set a pterodactyl on fire, killing it, but one man’s severely burned. Checkout clerk Sally dies from a venomous “fly” sting. Having “miraculously” survived, Carmody broadens her congregation. She begins calling for atonement through blood sacrifice.
Next morning, Brent’s group leaves to look for help. They’re swiftly killed. David leads a group to the pharmacy next door for medical supplies. Everyone there, including a military policeman, are hung like flies in webs. The M.P. babbles that he’s sorry before bursting open and releasing monster-spiderlings. Adult “spiders” attack, shooting corrosive webbing. Two men die; the survivors flee to the market.
David’s crew decide to question the soldiers. Two have hanged themselves in the storage room. The third, Jessup, admits that Project Arrowhead was investigating extradimensional space and may have opened a door. Carmody incites her followers to stab Jessup and throw him outside, where a mantis-creature devours him.
With Carmody ascendant, David’s crew plans an escape to his four-wheel drive. Carmody’s followers cut them off and demand that Billy be the next sacrifice. As the “sinners” fight the mob, Ollie shoots Carmody dead. Leaderless, the remaining shoppers let David’s party leave. Five survive to reach David’s vehicle: David, Amanda, Billy, Irene, and Dan. Ollie’s seized by a monster, but drops Amanda’s revolver onto the hood. David risks leaning out to get it.
At the Drayton house, they discover Stephanie dead in a spiderweb. They drive on through a mist-shrouded landscape alive with monster calls. Wreckage and corpses block highways, but they inch slowly south. A cyclopean walker crosses their path. At last, running out of gas, they’re stranded on the roadside. David checks the revolver and counts four remaining bullets. The adults watch, then quietly agree to suicide. Earlier, Billy made David promise he wouldn’t let the monsters get him.
David shoots his companions, even Billy. He lurches outside and shouts for the monsters to come get him. Instead the mist dissipates to reveal a long parade of Army vehicles packed with civilians. Realizing he’s killed his son and friends minutes before rescue, David screams in despair.
What’s Cyclopean: “Welcome to Sesame Street. Today’s word is expiation.”
The Degenerate Dutch: It’s unclear if Norton suffers more from being Black or being not-from-around-here-are-ya. Though the grocery denizens do tend to lash out at everyone they think might be patronizing them, whether because of education or New York snobbery.
Weirdbuilding: The first monsters have tentacles. That’s how you know they’re not-from-around-here.
Madness Takes Its Toll: “As a species we’re fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we start dreaming up sides.”
Anne’s Commentary
Unlike other menaced kids in King’s oeuvre, Billy has no psi sensitivities or superpowers to help him survive. He must rely on well-meaning adults. Sadly, not all adults are well-meaning. Some parents tell children that, if lost, they should approach women for help rather than men. What if the woman approached is Mrs. Carmody? On good days, she might suffer the little children to come unto her without scorching their ears with dire prophecies. On bad days, well. It’s okay to throw sinners who’ve pissed you off onto the sacrificial barbecue, but innocent lambs will best please the Divine Palate.
As a competitive sharp-shooter, Ollie comes closest to an adult superhero. But out of ammo, he too will be reduced to flaming mops, broom handles, a fire axe or two, and bug spray (preferably set alight.)
As for supervillains, King’s Carmody comes closest by wearing a pantsuit so glaringly yellow it could blind any superhero who’d left their super sunglasses off the utility belt that day. Darabont’s Carmody dresses churchladyish but doesn’t otherwise stand out. Nor, as scripted by Darabont and played by Marcia Gay Harden, is she absolutely unsympathetic. Every manifestation of the mist-fauna terrifies her off her pulpit into fellowship with the other shoppers. She even has a Gethsemane scene in the women’s restroom, tearfully sharing with God her doubts about the whole End Times thing.
Ordinarily, Bridgtoners get along well enough, politely (or politically) suppressing dislikes, resentments, prejudices. The storms creates extraordinary circumstances that exert negative pressure on tempers, patience, and finances, but initially camaraderie prevails. Even Brent and David manage to cooperate. Inside the market, employees get harried and shoppers get antsy as supplies dwindle and checkout lines lengthen, but the pressure level in this “cooker” remains tolerable. Thunderstorms, however severe, are natural. Even unprecedented mist banks must have a natural explanation, to be revealed during the News at Six.
But—what about mist banks that eat people? We sitting comfortably in front of our screens can argue that if thing-hosting mist banks exist, they must be natural, Nature being the sum total of existence. What seems supernatural is just a phenomenon we haven’t written into our philosophy yet, no need to panic.
Huh. If those smug screen-sitters were in the market when Dan came screaming in and the mist whited out a trembling world, they’d panic along with everyone else. The seeds of panic being sown, they could only try to bury them beyond germination, probably insisting that Dan was freaking out, and writing Carmody off as the town’s crazy-conspiracy lady. But would they walk home with the lady worried about her kids? Nobody else did, even before giant tentacles whisked Norm away. Before the nocturnal “flies” and “pterodactyl-birds” appeared.
The “flies” and “pterodactyl-birds” seen and barely fought off, Brent’s companions in denying the existence of things that should not be switch to denying the futility of going in search of rescuers. Rejecting reality under the self-delusion of being the reasonable ones doesn’t get Brent’s faction out of the parking lot. Coping strategies still in play are copious alcohol consumption, catatonic withdrawal, and suicide. David’s faction clings to the hope of a rational path to safety. They’re increasingly outnumbered by Carmody’s “congregation.” Observers of the current sociopolitical scene will readily believe that the loudest mouth in the room, the doomsayer claiming to be the voice of God, can capitalize on fear and uncertainty to win support. Even though Carmody preaches the end of the world, at least that will divide the sinners from the righteous, the prideful from the ones they’ve long disparaged.
It does look like the end of the world out there in the parking lot. Jessup’s confession confirms that science opened Hell’s gates: the godless science of a godless government. As sole survivor of Project Arrowhead, Jessup becomes the first sacrifice.
Now David’s group must risk a dash to his car. The guilty having paid, innocence (aka Billy) must be offered up. However, thanks to Ollie’s marksmanship, Carmody becomes the not-so-snowy-fleeced lamb. Her cult collapses. Slack-armed, former congregants watch as David’s group departs.
Until now, Darabont follows King’s story closely, aside from cutting a desperation-sex scene between David and Amanda. Good call. I’ve always felt their adulterous pairing was out-of-character and distracted from the bonding of their larger coalition. Post-escape, King’s David drives homewards. Trees block the road, and he never learns Stephanie’s fate. Darabont’s David reaches the house, where mist-spiders have webbed Stephanie’s corpse to the eaves. It’s the first last blow to David’s resilience. Then the party’s drive south passes universal destruction, and they spot a creature more massive than any dinosaur. Finally, they run out of gas far from filling stations. Foot-travel’s no option: The mist remains thick, reverberant with mist-fauna vocalizations. As Carmody insisted, death is out there.
Death’s also in the car. Provisions run low. As David counts their four remaining bullets, the camera dwells in torturous silence on the adults considering their choices: starvation, suicide, or death by monster. Billy too seems to take in the situation. He makes no protest—the last promise he extracted from David was not to let the monsters get him.
Darabont doesn’t show David’s point-blank shots, though we hear them. We glimpse Irene and Dan’s corpses, only blurs of Amanda and Billy. You know the rest from the summary. Darabont’s saved his most horrifying sequence and most killing irony for last.
King allows his survivors to survive. More critically, he allows hope to survive, via a short-wave radio. David gets nothing but static until, near the end of dial-twiddling, he makes out the single word Hartford. It’s this word, along with hope itself, he’ll whisper in Billy’s ear.
I can take either ending. For Darabont’s, though, I have to feel like getting my heart ripped out and handed back to me dripping, emotional practice for the End Times.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
After you read this column, and before the next apocalypse, I strongly recommend you all read Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. It’s a good antidote to assuming that, should you ever find yourself stranded with random neighbors during a crisis, you’re two hard days away from fistfights and human sacrifice. And avoiding that assumption is a good way for everyone to get more safely through said crisis. Thank you for listening to my PSA about a Good Book.
Prior to Solnit’s 2009 book, the general lay assumption was that crisis always brings out the worst in humans. This makes for great stories, not to mention a lot of not-so-great-but-exciting stories full of cannibalistic biker gangs, but also leads to stupid decisions, and the sort of newspaper reporting that captions our friend David Drayton as “retrieving emergency supplies from a pharmacy” while the Black characters get described as “looting.” No one’s having much good luck in The Mist, but at least the poor visibility undermines any such photographic bias documentation.
But I digress. In my teens I adored King’s “The Mist” novella. I loved scary weather, apocalypses, half-seen monsters, and crises that close the world down to a microcosm of intense drama—but especially scary weather. Anything could come out of the fog, or at least you can imagine that anything could. Anything could change. Sound is muffled along with vision, and everything holds its breath—something the movie captures beautifully with the cutting of the soundtrack during most outdoor scenes.
Looking at the story summary now, I’d forgotten much of the actual detail beyond the vivid image of giant walker legs going by, monstrous head hidden in the fog. The movie hews close to the original, save for a harsher and less ambiguous ending. In the novella, only a stray radio broadcast offers hope of survival—but everyone in the car is still alive and still has the gas to chase that hope. In the movie, the military is coming through to save the day, and the mist even starts to clear—less than five minutes after David fulfills his promise to not let the monsters get his kid. Given that I spent five minutes beforehand typing “He’s gonna shoot him, isn’t he. Oh god, please don’t do that, please don’t, please, please don’t oh god please,” into my live notes, this ending was extremely effective and I kind of wish I hadn’t watched it. But everyone was traumatized enough that this extremely stupid decision made sense in character.
But: If you are stuck in a safe-ish place and can’t get out, please just wait for a while. Maybe sing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. Because something might change and frequently disaster response is actually working to respond to the disaster. And you can always shoot everyone when an actual monster shows up.
The cast is great—I particularly loved the cynical older teacher with flamethrower chops, and tougher-than-he-looks Ollie the Grocer. He makes a great contrast with David’s leading man muscles, and I just love that this guy has been quietly running an indie grocery store for years and is suddenly stepping up for the monster brigade.
And then there’s Mrs. Carmody. She’s a bit of a caricature, so I really appreciated the early scenes with her praying to make a difference—and yet refusing any real offer of personal connection in favor of preaching herself up a cult. It’s a good bit of detail before she goes full villain and the rest of us start praying for her to get eaten sooner rather than later. Thank you, Ollie.
Are humans the real monsters? Contra Ollie’s cynicism, I would have to say: some of us. Sometimes. The cult-leader types are real, and eager to take advantage of any opportunity. But humans are also the real heroes, and the real crying kids and the real crying manly men and the real ordinary sandbag-stackers. I think it helps to realize that terrifyingly wide range of possibility—and to consider ahead of time which of those things we want to be.
Next week, we celebrate with a little holiday tale—join us for E. Catherine Tobler’s “To Drive the Cold Winter Away.”
