"Play Misty for Me"

The greatest horror movies are human dramas. The monster exists to punctuate mankind’s limitations, not star in the show. By those rules, The Mist is a great horror film. It should make for a delightful case of indigestion after your turkey feast.

A hurricane-like storm knocks a small town on its hind end. The people, eager to start putting the pieces back together, head into town for supplies. A number of them are in the grocery store when the mist arrives. It comes rolling in off the lake as a thick fog. Standing at the front of the market’s large front windows, a group of 60 townspeople can hear people screaming outside as the wall of moisture crashes into the store. And then they hear bones crunching. So begins one of the better Stephen King book-to-film adaptations.

Like Jaws before it, The Mist finds its horror in the unseen evil, the vast nothing of humidity outside the store’s front windows. Shoppers wander outside at first, convinced there is nothing to hide from indoors. When they return in pieces, panic sweeps through the store, from the dairy (Aisle 5) to the produce section (Aisle 2).

The monster movie, very quickly from this point on, turns into a human drama — a la Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds — with people fearing the unknown in their own unique ways: the macho mechanics downplay the seriousness until they get someone killed and then they cower in the corners sipping warm beer (Aisle 4); the quiet clerk, with his round little belly and thinning hair, steps into a leadership role with a .357 Magnum; an elderly woman overdoses on painkillers (Aisle 7); and the butcher turns to barbarism with his various cutlery (Deli Department).

Much of the plot is spent with David Drayton (The Punisher’s Thomas Jane), who comes to the store with his young son when the mist rolls in. Drayton is the typical horror-film hero, the guy you can depend on to make wise decisions and play offense and defense with skill. His weapon of choice: flaming mop of death (mop, Aisle 10; lighter fluid, Aisle 9) His cool, calm character is countered by Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), a religious zealot who has such a fervent hold on God’s gospel that she would worship a Glade plug-in (Aisle 3) if it were written in the Old Testament. Mrs. Carmody is apparently a member of a satellite branch of the Westboro Baptist Church: her love for God is reduced to hating all that he has created.

Half expecting the dreaded mist to be a psychological dilemma — a mind-controlling mist that produces decibel-crushing hallucinations maybe — I was delighted to see that there are real monsters lurking in the billowing whiteness outside the store’s doors. They begin as tentacles, then giant scorpion-like mosquitoes, then full-blown pterodactyls. They eventually evolve at a steadfast rate: tiny gnats into tarantulas into cat-sized creepers into horse-sized spiders into elephant-sized crabs into brontosaurus-sized beasts right out of Middle Earth. They came from somewhere, the movie hints, but it’s pointless to describe it here — impalement is impalement whether they come from Saturn or the Boy Scouts of America. They’re from Sweden if you need to know.

The Mist is often times very humorous, very much like Slither, last year’s gory laugh factory of a horror film. Mist isn’t as silly as that movie, but it is never 100 percent serious until the final closing moments, which will shock you like only Stephen King knows how. Its real appeal is the way it fuses tremendous monster frights with the situational dilemma of being in a confined space with a person so loony that Acme should name an anvil after her. That’s Mrs. Carmody, who will have your blood boiling so hot that you’ll melt yourself through the chair and have to watch the remainder from the floor.

I greatly admired the pacing and structure of The Mist. And I’m usually hard on horror films. This is the best one since last year’s The Descent, which was awash in shadow and blackness. The Mist is bathed in white and that fiendish, overcast mist. The whiteness, the religious subtext, the devilish ending … all totaled up, this is an unconventional film from a man who has become all too conventional recently. Thanks for trying something new out, Stephen.