The Mist

I’ve watched a lot of horror films. My Master’s thesis involved horror films and terrorism. I’ve seen good ones, bad ones, funny ones, self-loathing ones, but none of them was an angry horror film. Yeah yeah slasher films are gory, lots of people die very theatrical deaths, the torture films are pseudo-topical, hiding behind the screams; too afraid to ever say the words “Iraq” or “united states government” or “Guantanamo Bay.” Dawn of the Dead was a vicious critique of consumerism, but it was, at its heart, a satire.

None of them, not a single one, comes close to capturing the anger of The Mist. Mr. Darabont is pissed, and he’s not gonna take it anymore.

I talked to the screen at this movie. I made exclamations at the screen. “I’ve seen a hundred movies with you, and you’ve never done that” a friend observed.

This film is about politics, class, religion, reason, authoritarianism, the abyss, fathers and sons, war, and yes, gore. I’m sure some out there will say it is heavy handed; I’d disagree, it’s accurate, deadly accurate. As the Milgram experiment, the SPE, and Nazism illustrate, this IS the way people behave when the shit hits the fan. These are the things they say; these are the things they do.

And the fact that the protagonist’s profession is artist is telling, very telling about Mr. Darabont’s feelings not about art, rather the devaluation of the artist in society; mistrusted for the book learnin’ and their thinking.’ What do they know right? They just draw pictures and make pretty sounds!

A reviewer on chud.com compared this film to John Carpenter’s The Thing, and I think he is dead on. They share a common language of paranoia punctuated with Rorschach monstrosity: in each scene the monstrous is never the same. It is flux. The meaning is always just a little bit different.