To be honest, I approach movie adaptations of Stephen King’s work with a certain amount of trepidation. For every Misery, Stand by Me, or even 1408 there is a Sleepwalkers, Maximum Overdrive, or The Mangler. However, Frank Darabont, who has specialized in Stephen King prison movies (Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile), has proven that he understands Stephen King. And The Mist, based on the eponymous novella, is vintage Stephen King.

The Mist is an apocalyptic tale of an experiment gone awry and a mysterious door being opened. After an electrical storm, a small town in Maine sets about to repair itself when this mist engulfs them, bringing with it all sorts of unimagined horrors and trapping several residents in a supermarket. As fear, desperation, and dwindling hope set in, the denizens face threats from within (as they begin to turn on each other) and without (with increasingly nasty attacks from the creatures in the mist).

The movie comes back to two ideas: fear of the unknown and the depravity of man.

“You guys don’t understand. Or you’re trying real hard not to.” –David Drayton (Thomas Jane)

Pitting rationalists, led by Brent Norton (Andre Braugher) against religious fanatics, led by Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), artist/voice of reason David Drayton has to find his own way. The mist represents mystery and how humanity confronts things they don’t understand. There is a degeneration as we wrestle with the unknown and come to the limits of our ability to control things. Be it a man-made or natural disaster, we’re used to solving our problems and managing our situations. We’ve been blessed and cursed with a need to know and often our need for proof goes to war with our need for faith. As I wrote before:

You can have all the facts you want, you can debate facts, and, frankly, you ought to. Faith doesn’t mean the turning off of one’s brain: things should make sense and continual questioning is a valid exercise unto itself ... Sometimes faith means that we have to come to the conclusion that we don’t have many things figured out. That we have to learn to get comfortable with that and the idea of mystery (read: the great “I don’t know”). Some people need proof.

Although one character in the movie puts it more succinctly: “You can’t convince some people there’s a fire even when their hair is on fire.”

“Let me shine your light. Some can be saved, can’t they?” –Mother Carmody

We are told to work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). Ultimately, horror is about the fear of death and horror is excited by the reality of evil. We fear for our lives and the lives of those we love. We live in fear of good being consumed by evil (and frankly, evil should be feared as we live with the consequences of evil all around us).

We often sense, if not experience, an existential terror, a gnawing emptiness that claws at our souls. A darkness, the deep, that threatens to suck the joy from all aspects of our lives, that can lead to a spiraling sourness to life that makes us want to crawl into bed and never get out.

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