The Mist

Director: Frank Darabont.
With: Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden.
Released: July 4

Frank Darabont is famous for writing and directing two films based on Stephen King stories, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, both of them stately, Oscar-nominated dramas about the triumph of the human spirit. His third King adaptation, The Mist, is a different kettle of bug-eyed monsters. It's not what you'd expect from Darabont, but definitely what you might expect from King.

The Mist is a low-budget horror about a thick mist and the slimy abominations concealed within it. It's set in a lakeside rural community where everyone knows everyone else, but doesn't necessarily like them. One morning, David (Thomas Jane) is in a supermarket with his son when the building is enveloped in an impenetrable fog. But this is no ordinary weather condition, as someone discovers on opening the back door, only to be grabbed and devoured by a tentacled beastie. David and the other shoppers decide to sit it out.

For all of his Oscar nominations, Darabont is a first-time horror director, and he makes a few rookie errors. The most grievous of these is that he rushes to show us the creatures lurking in the mystic pea-souper, even though they would be more terrifying if they were left to our imaginations. Rendered using cartoony, computer-generated special effects, at best they look like leftovers from The Lord of the Rings. At worst, the monsters look like Scooby-Doo rejects.

All the same, The Mist is a powerful, unsettling film, mainly because it doesn't behave like a typical horror movie. There's an eerie ambience, but there's little of the manipulative music or the sudden, popcorn-spilling frights that punctuate many of today's chillers. Its actors aren't a bunch of improbably sexy, immaculately styled teenagers, either. Instead, this is a downbeat, character-based piece that could be performed onstage with few changes.

Like Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and this year's Cloverfield, The Mist posits that it would only take a nudge for modern civilisation to crumble to pieces. As the days pass, and Marcia Gay Harden's steely evangelist convinces more and more of her fellow captives that God is punishing them for their sins, David comes to realise that it's not the hungry aliens he has to worry about, it's the siege mentality which erupts into paranoia, prejudice and violent mob rule. The hysteria culminates in an astonishingly pessimistic ending, and a stark break from Darabont's previous films. This time, his subject isn't the triumph of the human spirit, but its failure. And that's a lot scarier than a few CGI tentacles.

Nicholas Barber