Stephen King horror films tend to do well on Netflix and the best of them is currently taking over the platform.
By Nathan Kamal
| Published
Movies based on the work of Stephen King have made over two billion dollars at the box office. It’s a staggering number, even in the age of billion-dollar blockbusters. A single writer is responsible for movies that have collectively made the gross domestic product of many small nations.
Among those many movies, one of his most misunderstood is 2007’s The Mist, a film that deserves more praise than it gets.
Frequent Stephen King collaborator Frank Darabont directed it, and in a comprehensive filmography that includes enormous box office earners, The Mist is pretty much middle of the pack. It made a decent $57 million (off of an $18 million budget) but certainly did not set the world on fire.
Critics were lukewarm on it then and now, with it currently holding a 60% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Compared to Frank Darabont’s earlier Stephen King adaptations, The Shawshank Redemption (which flopped on release, only to be reassessed as a modern classic) and The Green Mile (which is less fondly remembered, but made a quarter of a billion dollars), The Mist was something of a non-starter.
Those numbers don’t do The Mist justice. It is one of Stephen King’s most terrifying film adaptations.
Unlike It with its leering, loquacious killer clown or Pet Sematary’s haunting revenant roadkill cat, nothing in this movie is easily marketed. Sure, there are monsters aplenty out in the titular mist of the movie, and they are masterworks of horror designs, but they are not the film’s real villains. Like many great movies, the true monsters of The Mist are human beings.
The Story Of The Mist
The Mist begins as Stephen King adaptations often do, in a small Maine town full of distinctive characters. After a thunderstorm causes severe damage to the town of Bridgton, visual artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane, doing some of his best work) makes a run to the local grocery store with his neighbor Brent Norton (Andre Braugher) to stock up on supplies, only to find low-grade panic mode already setting in with the townsfolk.
The movie makes it clear there is tension between Drayton and Norton from past conflicts, but it also portrays them as fundamentally willing to try to work through their conflicts civilly. Unfortunately, that is not how things go.
The titular mist rolls over the town and traps a collection of shoppers, employees, and military personnel from a nearby base inside. The movie’s standouts in the ensemble are played by character actor greats like Marcia Gay Harden, Toby Jones, and William Sadler.
The trapped shoppers are spooked by a man who runs out of the mist, claiming “something” is out there. No one is convinced until tentacles start grabbing people and tearing them apart, flying bug monsters invade the store, and religious fanatic Harden starts prophesying the end of the world.
Despite the H.P. Lovecraft monsters lurking in the mist (whose presence is never completely explained in a restrained touch by Stephen King and Frank Darabont), the conflict is about people turning on each other and breaking from common sense and morality.
The Best Things About The Mist Are The Reasons It Wasn’t A Big Hit
It is unsurprising that The Mist was not really a hit in theaters. It’s a dark and gloomy-looking movie, as expected from a movie about monsters and mist. It feels claustrophobic and stressful in a way that was not in vogue during the heyday of overt torture porn movies like Saw; the horror and tension are not in the gore (though there is plenty of that), but in seeing society break down so suddenly.
Amongst all of that, the biggest thing holding The Mist back has always been its ending. It famously has the single bleakest ending in cinematic history, an ending that departs from the original novella and was signed off on by the author himself.
Everything I’ve listed as a reason The Mist didn’t perform is also a reason to see it. There’s nothing quite like it. The Mist is the ideal kind of Stephen King horror movie to watch at home, hopefully in the company of trusted loved ones, not in a theater full of people who could turn on you if monsters appear.
