thread: 2010-11-03 : Horror Flick Pies
On 2010-11-04, Jon Hastings wrote:
The Mist is flawed, but it's also admirably true to its vision.
Here's a little moment from the movie that kind of sums up everything I liked about it:
Our hero goes into the back room of the supermarket and sees, or rather, smells, that the generator is backing up and spewing fumes. He rushes over to turn it off - a good move - but, of course, that means the lights go out and he ends up bumping his head on an overhanging bar and tripping and stumbling over boxes on his way out. It's played as low key physical comedy and shows how despite our best intentions, the world gets in our way. He does the right thing, but that doesn't mean those boxes aren't there waiting to trip him up.
But "waiting" is the wrong word, because that implies they have some kind of motive and, of course, they don't, which gets right to the heart of what makes this a horror movie and not just a scary movie: the complete and total indifference of the physical and natural (or in this case, extra-natural) to human intentions.
That also seems to be the point of the extended battle in the supermarket between the trapped humans and the little flying dragons. The dragons break into the supermarket only because they're following their food source - those little bugs. For the most part, the seem to ignore the humans, except when they're in the way. And, as it turns out, the ways the humans come up with to fight the monsters - trying to hit them with flaming torches, shooting at them in a crowded store - are as dangerous as the monsters themselves.
I want to say that the fire "turns" on one of the humans and burns him, but, again, there's no intention here, just indifference. They try to harness the fire for their own purposes, but their mastery over the physical world falls tragically short.
For me, that's where the horror comes in and that's how the movie earns its stripes: not through fear of the monsters, per se, but through the fear of our inadequacy when faced with them and the fear that when faced with this kind of indifference you'll go crazy and/or lose all hope for the future.
These aren't necessarily original themes, but the movie dramatizes them with what I thought was a nearly staggering amount of emotional force, which is, in turn, grounded in very specifically-realized details. Though on a smaller scale, this made the movie feel a lot like one of Steven Spielberg's (esp. War of the Worlds). But it diverges from Spielberg in its pessimism and refusal to hedge its bets.
It fits nicely alongside 28 Weeks Later - another movie where the horror is again centered around human intention vs. natural indifference.
(The problem with the ending is a stage management one: it would work fine if, say, we had gotten the sense that more time had passed. As it is, though, it feels unnecessarily rushed.)
