Tentacled creatures, pterodactyl-like predators, and giant spiders take over Bridgton and swarm the supermarket exterior. A civil alert siren blares, and the worried shoppers decide to barricade the supermarket.Ĭalamity, of both the monster and the inner-demon kind, ensues. Neighbors congregate at the supermarket to buy supplies, and from inside the store, they begin to see the mist thicken, speeding police cars crash into each other, and locals scream in terror.

Directed by Frank Darabont, who’d already adapted The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, it takes place in the usual setting of King’s spooky stories: Maine.Īfter a severe thunderstorm strikes the small town of Bridgton, a thick mist advances over the lakes. The Mist, however, offers a refreshing twist on the trope of being trapped, and one of the bleakest takes on the horror microgenre. It’s rarely easy, yet sometimes, against all odds, happy endings are achievable. These have already provided a plausible answer for what happens when strangers with differing viewpoints are forced to work together to solve a mystery, defeat a Big Bad, or win a competition. The narrative trope of confining people in close quarters isn’t unique - there’s Cube, Clue, Squid Game, and Snowpiercer, to name a few, along with practically every haunted house and prisonbreak movie ever made. But the movie is so much more than a psychological portrait of what happens when you stick a bunch of townies in a grocery store for days while monsters lurk outside. Such is the premise of The Mist, an adaptation of the Stephen King novella.

Why do you think we invented politics and religion?” “Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. “As a species, we're fundamentally insane,” Ollie Weeks (Toby Jones) says.

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