The Mist Trailer: A Murky Horror
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With the success of 1408, this year’s only profitable horror movie (with the exception of this weekend’s Halloween), Stephen King is back on top. With Eli “gore-porn” Roth set to direct Cell for 2009, fans of Maine’s biggest monument can get some more King action later this year with The Mist.
The trailer above pretty much explains it all. A group of townsfolk hole up in a supermarket as a mysterious and dangerous mist engulfs them. The cast are a rather unrecognisable bunch, with only Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden worth noting. However, from the trailer, the film looks surprisingly tantalising for a horror film. Perhaps it’s the trailer’s emphasis not on gore on typical “surprise scares”, but on director Frank Darabont’s wise decision to focus on the interaction between characters, evoking the brilliance of Hitchcock’s The Birds. Then again, perhaps it’s the trailer’s curious use of music, a piece from Aronofsky’s underrated The Fountain, which adds a (probably erroneous) metaphysical, almost tragic, layer to the promo.
Of course, everything falls apart in the trailer when we see the creatures that inhabit the mist. It’s not so much that the CGI is awful (and it is), but it’s the case of seeing everything so well. I remember reading King’s novella about a decade ago, and enjoying the eerie vagueness of the story, outlining creatures just enough to make them appear real, but not too much to inhibit the imagination. Showing them in a film just ruins the tension. Still, the film should retain the range of creatures prowling through the mist, which vary from oversized bats to unimaginable behemoths, and will hopefully offer some sublimely creepy moments. The Mist hits US theatres on November 21.
And poor Andre Braugher – the guy needs to get a role where something bad doesn’t happen to him, let alone another ill-fated Stephen King role (the remake of Salem’s Lot was the first).
What hit me in particular was how much the film looks reminiscent of another Stephen King work – Storm of the Century – in which a community is beseiged by a supernatural event, and also in which the struggle revolves largely around a main character’s child.
Still, Frank Darabont has done well with King’s material (Shawshank Redemption, Green Mile) in the past, and the fact that we see the monsters suggests to me the heart of the conflict isn’t the supernatural, but the community itself, which really interests me.