What I, as a Father, Think of "Stephen King's the Mist"

If you'll pardon me ... I need to get this off my chest:

On Thursday (March 27), I finally saw Frank Darabont's film Stephen King's The Mist, based on King's novella (my review of The Mist is here) of the same name. I have very mixed feelings about this film. As a father I am horrified. As a Stephen King fan I feel betrayed. And as a movie-goer I feel cheated.

I had high hopes for this film, as it is one of my favorite King stories and Frank Darabont has done a wonderful job adapting King's work for the silver screen in the past. The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile were both written and directed by Darabont, and we all know how well those particular films turned out. So, to reiterate, my hopes for The Mist were set very high.

For the most part, my expectations were met, and even exceeded. Darabont did a wonderful job of setting the stage in the opening, and then he and his team did the unthinkable and created one of the scariest experiences ever to be set to celluloid as the patrons of the supermarket begin to realize that there is more in the mist than just water vapor, and that the inhuman monsters outside of the store are nothing when compared with the human monsters inside the market. (Marcia Gay Haden is particularly convincing as the psychotic and religious Mrs. Carmody.)

The special effects are quite convincing and the creatures that Darabont and his team have created (tentacles from Planet X, ginormous insects, prehistoric birds, some of the deadliest spiders ever, giant lobster critters, and something so big as to barely be seen in the mist) are nothing short of amazing. They are truly otherworldly and genuinely frightening. When the prehistoric bird thing crashes into the store and begins flying around the shelves, it is a very convincing and scary scene; and don't even get me started on the spiders that have taken up residency in the pharmacy next door.

So, with all this praise, I guess you're wondering why I stated at the beginning that "As a father I am horrified. As a Stephen King fan I feel betrayed. And as a movie-goer I feel cheated." Well, there is the last ten to fifteen minutes of the film.

Pete Hammon of Maxim magazine said of The Mist that is has "One of the most shocking movie endings EVER!" According to Firstshowing.net, Stephen King said the following about the ending:

Frank wrote a new ending that I loved. It is the most shocking ending ever and there should be a law passed stating that anybody who reveals the last 5 minutes of this film should be hung from their neck until dead.

My take on the ending sums up the three aspects of myself that I have now mentioned twice.

As a Father

Shortly after the movie was released in November 2007, Alisa (who would never go see a movie like this with me in a million years) dug around online and read the spoiler. She was horrified (her post, "The Mist Has Drained My Spirit," can be found here) and she warned me that the ending of the movie was going to (or at least SHOULD) haunt me as a father, and that it was the darkest and most evil ending to a film that she has ever read. Now, after years of devouring horror movies and books, I have become (for better or for worse) inured (or desensitized) to horror. The carnage in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead doesn't bother me, because I know it is all corn syrup and oatmeal and silicon, and books, well ... books can be scary, but you can always just shut the cover and its all been put away. So, I thought that whatever ending Darabont had cooked up would probably be too much for Alisa (who did not like The Ring or The Grudge) but that it couldn't be worse than anything I had already seen or read.

I was wrong.

What Darabont has done is ruined a perfectly good film with the s#@t ending he created. I have lost a lot of the considerable respect I have for both Darabont and King for their endorsement of this ending. It is a horrible and hopeless ending and if it doesn't affect you, then G-d have mercy on your soul, because you are beyond all human emotion in my book.

As a Stephen King Fan

As previously indicated, part of me has lost a lot of respect for King and his endorsement of this ending. As a father (even though his children are grown and out of the house) it should have touched him some how. I feel betrayed by King himself because of this. I also feel betrayed as a King fan because Darabont did such a wonderful job of recreating King's novella in the first hour and fifty minutes of the film.

Yes, there are some tweaks (the roles of the soldiers from the Arrowhead Project and the events in the pharmacy, most noticeably) but these are less "full blown-changes" and more a "tweak" in order to better tell the story and give some more of the answers that King only hints at (with the soldiers) and - in the case of the pharmacy - it's just pure special effects gross out that is changed.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that Darabont stays so incredibly faithful to the source material (there are some scenes that you could follow along with the book, if you wanted) that to change King's wonderfully ambiguous and essentially hopeful ending into the monstrosity of hopelessness that Darabont does is a betrayal of King's material, the fan's love of the story (which consistently rates in the Top Five of fan favorites alongside The Stand, IT, and The Dark Tower) that I cannot understand what Darabont was thinking.

There is also the fact that Darabont's ending casts the character of the religious Mrs. Carmody in a whole new light. It does not make her the religious crank that she is in King's novella and instead gives her quite a bit of legitimacy, which - while Hayden does an excellent job as Mrs. Carmody - betrays the insanity that King originally created in the novella.

As a Movie-Goer

Finally, as a movie-goer, I feel supremely cheated in the ending of The Mist. I am just glad that I got it from our local library and only paid $1.00 for it, and not at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video and paid $4.00, or - heaven forbid - actually saw it in the theater and shelled out $7.00-$9.00 for it!

As a movie-goer, Darabont's ending makes me question the first 110 minutes of the film, and why any of it played out the way it did. It, for all intents and purposes, negates the impact of the time spent in the store and makes the Viewer ask why it was necessary, and why - if that was going to be the ending - did Darabont bother making the film in the first place, because he could have had the people trapped in the supermarket, and then cut right to the last ten minutes.

Well, now that I've got that out of my system, my advice to anyone who has not seen the film yet, and wants to, is two-fold: FIRST: I would ask, do you have children, and do you love them? If the answer to both of those questions is "Yes," then you better seriously reconsider seeing this film. It will leave you, as a parent, feeling hollow and hopeless and you children will probably protest the strength with which you hug them when the credits begin to roll. SECOND: If you insist on seeing the film, and are (1) a parent, (2) a Stephen King fan, or (3) a discerning and intelligent movie-goer (or any combination of the three) then my advice is watch it, enjoy the first 110 minutes, revel in Darabont's storytelling, and then turn the film off when there are ten minutes left (David Drayton's car runs out of gas at this point) and return it to your local video store, Redbox, or library ... and live happy in the ambiguity that ending the film here gives.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to find the people from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to scrub out the fact that I ever saw the last ten minutes of Frank Darabont's film Stephen King's The Mist.