Film / The Mist

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The Mist is a 2007 horror film directed by Frank Darabont and adapted from Stephen King's novella of the same name.

It features an ensemble cast including Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Laurie Holden, Toby Jones, Andre Braugher, Alexa Davalos, and Sam Witwer. Darabont began filming The Mist in Shreveport, Louisiana in February 2007. The director changed the ending of the film to be darker than the novella's ending, a change to which Stephen King was amicable. Unique creature designs were also sought to differ from creatures in past films.

The movie provides examples of:

• Actionized Adaptation: Some of the monster attacks are more action-packed in the film than in the novella. In the novella, only one bird-thing gets through a broken window before David and the others kill it, whereas the film has a bird thing and several of the deadly bugs swarm in and take a few more lives. The original expedition to the pharmacy is rather short-lived, while the film's version is longer and has a few changes, such as giving Mrs. Reppler an improvised flamethrower as opposed to just a can of Raid.
• Adaptational Alternate Ending: Frank Darabont infamously changed the ending from the novella into a Diabolus ex Machina for the film. The original left it on a more ambiguous note, with the survivors setting out in a car to an uncertain future, finding no end to the mist and the creatures' rampage after at least four days of careful driving, but heading towards Hartford since they thought they heard the city named in a garbled radio transmission. In the film ending, the survivors keep driving until the car run out of gas; David Mercy Kills the other occupants of the car, including his young son, to spare them the horror of being eaten by the monsters outside; he then exits the car to be eaten himself only for the military to appear, killing the monsters and clearing the mist. Stephen King has said that he actually preferred the movie ending to the one he wrote in the original book, and Frank Darabont said that hearing this from King was the happiest moment of his career.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: The film's ending. Good God, the film's ending! The book ends with the survivors hunkering down in a Howard Johnson's, and David narrates that although things are dire, he's still holding onto hope that they can reach a safe haven. The movie ends with the survivors looking between being killed by the monsters of the mist or taking their own lives—they go with the latter, but now out of bullets, David faces an incoming sound from the mist...and it turns out to be the military, meaning that if they'd just waited a few more minutes, the others (including David's son) would have been saved.
• Adaptational Attractiveness:
  • Beauty certainly lies in the eye of the beholder, but Marcia Gay Harden is not quite the old hag Mrs. Carmody is portrayed as in the book.
  • The same can apply to Ollie Weeks. Ollie in the novel is described as heavily overweight, but he's played by Toby Jones.
• Adaptational Badass: Amanda in the novella largely stays away from the action, and is reduced to a screaming mess during the escape to the car. In the film she takes part in fighting back against the bugs and birds that come through the glass and mostly keeps her cool.
• Adaptation Expansion: There is an extra scene in which someone is killed and given to the monsters as an offering, which Stephen King said he should have thought of himself when writing the story. He has said the same regarding the film's darker ending.
• Adaptation Explanation Extrication: The creatures seem to be coming from all angles the minute that someone goes outside or just opens a door or window wide, but they leave the sealed grocery store and David's car completely alone so long as the survivors stay inside with the doors and windows shut. The book explains that, due to the low visibility of their environment, the creatures in the mist rely on scent to identify and track prey, and none of them are smart enough to continue identifying a fleeing meatbag as food once it goes inside, closes the door between them and the creatures can't smell it anymore — the pharmacy got attacked by the Gray Widowers because its doors were propped wide open when the mist rolled in. This explanation is completely absent from the movie, but the creatures still behave the exact same way.
• Adaptation Name Change: Mrs. Reppler's first name is Hilda in the novella but Irene in the movie.
• Alien Blood: The monsters have either yellow, black, or brown blood.
• All for Nothing: The trip to the pharmacy. The reason the group went was to get medicine for a man who had set himself on fire accidentally, only the trip doesn't go as planned. Not only do some of the group die in the pharmacy, but they also fail to find the medicine. Even if they had succeeded, they learn upon returning to the store that the burnt man died from his injuries while they were away.
• All Webbed Up: Done rather effectively with the spider-like monsters in the pharmacy. Made worse because the webs are coated in caustic secretions.
• Alternate Monochrome Version: The film saw a black-and-white version released as a DVD extra. Director Frank Darabont claims that he always wanted to film the movie in black-and-white as a Genre Throwback to the pre-color work of Ray Harryhausen and classic horror films like Night of the Living Dead.
• Anachronism Stew: Deliberate example. The film is set around 2006/2007, yet the Army soldiers are all dressed in 1970s-era uniforms and equipment.
• Another Dimension: In-house rumors about the top-secret Arrowhead Project state that the military was attempting to open a portal to another universe, which explains the mist and its monsters.
• Apocalypse How: Part of the horror is that no one knows if there's even anywhere left to escape to. Depending on how far the mist traveled across the world, it could be an awful regional catastrophe, at least, and possibly anything ranging from a native multiple species extinction to the annihilation of the fabric of the universe. At the end of the film, a heavily-armed military clean-up crew is moving in and clearing the mist, implying a regional rather than worldwide catastrophe.
• Ascended Extra: In the novella, Sally the cashier girl that works at the supermarket disappears quickly from the plot. She gets a larger role in the film and a romance subplot with Private Jessup before she's stung to death by one of the bugs.
• Asshole Victim
  • Mrs. Carmody takes advantage of the dire situation to preach her insane religious beliefs to other scared, desperate survivors. She takes every opportunity, including those where people's lives are on the line (or already taken), to be Holier than Thou and look down upon the others for not believing in the truth. By the time David and a few others decide to leave, Mrs. Carmody has formed a cult that insists on a Human Sacrifice for the Mist, and has her followers do so with Private Jessup before trying to do the same with Amanda and Billy, and in the movie does sacrifice Private Jessup. Ollie eventually shoots her in what is basically an act of self-defense.
  • Norton is a more conventional example. While certainly condescending and stuffy (and in the book, leery towards David's wife Stephanie), he's not quite an asshole until David tries to convince him of what's in the mist. Then Norton refuses to listen to any and all reason, even denying the chance to see physical proof that there are unseen horrors outside, and dismisses anything David says because he's sure David is just trying to get back at him over the property dispute. He also convinces several other scared survivors of the same mindset. He ends up digging his own grave when he and the others decide to walk out into the mist despite David and others' pleas with him not to go.
• Alien Blood: The monsters have either yellow, black, or brown blood.
• Attack of the Monster Appendage: Part of the Monster Delay. When the men try to fix the generator they're attacked by a bunch of tentacles and one of them is dragged into the mist. We never know what the rest of the creature looks like.
• Ax-Crazy: Mrs Carmody. She gets more and more bonkers until she tries to have the entire group killed!
• "Back to Camera" Pose: The film poster shows David holding his son and looking out at the alien fog outside the windows with his back turned to the viewer. He's also silhouetted by the light from the fog.
• Bad Vibrations: David's group is only able to stare up in horror as the entire van bounces from the Behemoth's steps. Its feet tug against and snap power lines, toppling telephone poles with them.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: The entire point of the movie is to show how most people would believe any notion, no matter how crazy it sounds on paper, and commit any atrocity when put in a sufficiently incomprehensible and dangerous situation. A counterpoint appears in the form of the biker who tells Mrs. Carmody that he believes in God, too, but doesn't think of God as the "bloodthirsty asshole" Mrs. Carmody makes Him out to be. He's presented as a very brave, admirable guy - even if his Heroic Sacrifice turns out to be for All for Nothing.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: When it seems that they are out of hope, David shoots all the other survivors in the car (including his son Billy) and still comes up one bullet short. The Cruel Twist Ending is that the sounds they heard approaching was actually the military coming to save them.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: averted by Sally (played by the very attractive Alexa Davalos), who is stung by a scorpion-fly and dies after her neck swells up horribly
• Beware the Living: The story is essentially a Zombie Apocalypse story, just with the zombies switched out for alien animals hiding in an impenetrable, perpetual fog; and that includes the convention of the humans holed up together in their safe haven turning on each-other and becoming just as much a threat as the inhuman nasties outside as sanities fray, desperation mounts and the bests and worsts of different people are brought to the fore. Ultimately, the creatures pose no threat so long as the survivors stay inside with every entrance point shut, and don't shine their lights at the windows during the night — the same can't be said for the fanatical, bloodthirsty cult that the town loony starts building inside amid the disaster.
• Big Bad: Despite all the alien nasties outside the store, the biggest threat turns out to be Mrs. Carmody, who soon forms a cult of terrified survivors with herself as the leader.
• Bittersweet Ending: The mist is actually defeated, as we see the military torching it and taking down the creatures within, making the ending situation for the world at large considerably more positive than the book's. That said, what happens to the main characters makes any and all positivity in the ending very easy to overlook entirely.
• Black Blood: One trailer retouches the blood on Dan's face when he enters the store at the beginning.
• Bloody Handprint: On the glass exit doors left by Private Jessup. It stays there for the rest of the film.
• Boom, Headshot!: In the film's climax, as David's group tries to escape from the store and the now-deranged cultists, Ollie takes out Mrs. Carmody, their leader, in this manner after also shooting her in the stomach.
• Bottomless Magazines: Averted to tragic effect. Amanda only had twelve bullets for her gun, and only twelve shots are fired during the course of the movie. And then it turns out that twelve bullets were way too many.
• Bloodier and Gorier: The film is considerably more gruesome than its book counterpart.
  • Norm in the book is still Eaten Alive by the tentacles, but the film also adds said tentacles tearing flesh from his chest and leg.
  • In the novella, when David pulls back the clothesline that was attached to one of Norton's "flat earthers", all he gets is a frayed end soaked in blood. The film has him pulling back the severed lower half of the man's corpse.
  • After the novella's version of the bird-creature coming in through the store window, an unseen older woman has her leg broken after she's trampled by the crowd. The movie replaces this by a man being set on fire when he accidentally poured charcoal fluid while trying to fend off the creatures. We see his heavily burned body later in the film.
  • When David's group goes to the pharmacy in the novella, they find a decapitated corpse. In the film, they find a man who has become a nursery for the Grey Widower's hatchlings—his back bursts open in a spray of gore and spiders when he hits the ground.
• Body Horror: A very prominent example in the pharmacy; the reason that one of the men in that place is still alive is because he is serving as a nursery to several hundred infant Grey Widowers.
  • Also the fate of Sally, who swells up like a balloon after a sting from one of the insect-like monsters.
• Canon Foreigner: Private Jessup was not in the original novella, whereas in the film he's one of the soldiers who arrived at the supermarket very shortly before the mist came. He also gives a more definitive explanation that the Arrowhead Project caused the mist, whereas in the book it's just something that Ollie and David speculate.
• Casting Gag: Played with. William Sadler, Jeffrey DeMunn, and Brian Libby all featured in Frank Darabont's "The Green Mile" and "The Shawshank Redemption."
  • Andre Braugher co-starred in the television remake of "Salem's Lot."
  • Freddie Jones, the father of Toby Jones, co-starred in "Firestarter."
• The Cavalry Arrives Late: Possibly the cruelest example in film history. In the final scene of the film, the military finally arrive, successfully taking out the mist and the monsters...after David just mercy-killed his friends and young son, thinking it was monsters coming for them and not help.
• Combat Tentacles: Whatever it was that drags poor Norm to his doom possesses these in spades.
• Cool Old Guy:
  • Dan Miller, despite his horrifying first encounter with the mist killing John Lee right in front of him, is the one who first proposes an expedition to the nearby pharmacy. He accompanies David and the others in spite of the unknown monsters lurking in the mist. In the book, he's killed during this venture, but in the film he lives long enough to make it to David's car with the others. He's consistently presented as brave, level-headed, and compassionate.
  • Ambrose Cornell — the guy with the big mustache — is another old man who joins in on David's group. Smart and plain spoken, he has a shotgun in his truck that he would have gone to get himself if the others hadn't advised him against it.
• Cool Old Lady: Mrs. Reppler is a tiny old woman, but one of the most formidable survivors. She uses a makeshift blowtorch to kill a Gray Widower and throws a can of food at Mrs. Carmody, telling her, "Shut up, you miserable buzzard!"
• Cosmic Horror Story: The mist is filled with bizarre, otherworldly creatures, from three-foot-long dragonflies to behemoths too large to see through the mist. It's speculated by the survivors that they come from another dimension which the Arrowhead Project ended up accessing. Despite the extreme danger they pose, they are apparently only animals, and seemingly only attack humans when they smell them for food.
• Creator Cameo: Averted for once in the movie, although a store window is labeled "King's Pharmacy" in a nod to the author's usual bit parts.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Several. The lingering threat of all of these is what motivates the movie's infamous Cruel Twist Ending.
  • The MP webbed up in the pharmacy store is revealed to be in critical condition from spiders nesting under his skin, until he falls to the floor, and his entire torso explodes with thousands of spiders crawling out of his corpse.
  • Sally, after being stung by one of the giant insects, instantly has her throat swell up until she suffocates.
  • A couple of David's group members take acidic web strands from the giant spiders. While one is shot in the leg, the other is shot square in the face.
  • After accidentally setting himself on fire whilst attempting to drive the ptero-buzzards out of the market, Joe Eagleton lingers for at least a day in unbearable agony before finally succumbing to his burns. Made even worse because the other characters denied his request for a Mercy Kill in order to mount a risky expedition to the adjacent pharmacy for painkillers and antibiotics, which wound up getting Joe's brother killed. On top of that, although they returned with the right medicine, it turned out to be too late to save him anyway.
  • While in the back storage room, Norm meets his fate when tentacles from some unseen monster reach in and take him. It's even worse in the film, where the tentacles first rip off skin from his chest and leg.
  • Ollie gets cut in half by a giant mantis-like monster while trying to escape from the supermarket with David's group.
• Cruel Mercy: David's fate at the end of the movie essentially counts as this. After giving the rest of his allies a Mercy Kill, he steps out of the van and allows whatever monster that is still out there to come and take him. However, the military shows up with survivors instead, leaving him with Survivors Guilt over having killed his allies for nothing.
• Cruel Twist Ending: The film only. David's car runs out of gas, leaving him and the others stranded in a mist with the monsters that they can hear coming. They all silently decide that it's Better to Die than Be Killed, but with five of them in the car and only four bullets, David is left to figure something out for himself. With his mind broken from killing his friends and his young son, David leaves the car to face whatever monstrosity is coming for him. However, it turns out that what they heard was the military approaching, meaning that if they had just waited a few minutes more, they all would have been saved. The movie ends with David screaming in utter anguish as the military officers simply stare at him, unaware of what he's done.
• Darker and Edgier: The film still manages to do so despite the original story already being pretty damn bleak. Instead of an uncertain but hopeful ending as David and the others continue their survival of the mist, the movie ends with David mistakenly mercy-killing the others and his son despite help shortly being on the way. The movie also adds a scene in which Private Jessup is sacrificed to a monster in the mist, cementing that Mrs. Carmody's followers have completely lost it.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • At the end of the book, Billy, Amanda, and Mrs. Reppler are all still alive, though looking towards uncertain survival within the mist. Here, David mercy-kills them (along with Dan Miller) when it seems that they've run out of all hope.
  • Although he finally makes it back home with his car, David is ultimately unable to see if his wife Stephanie is still alive inside the house, with no way of getting there without entering the mist. He makes the tough decision of leaving her behind, dead or alive. In the film, we see her corpse outside the house, apparently killed by the Grey Widowers.
  • Myron, having had his role largely swapped with Jim, dies in his place, getting eaten by a Grey Widower on the way to the car. Ambrose, who in the novella escapes back to the supermarket while making an aborted car park escape, ends up having his path to safety cut off by the same creatures, and gets pounced upon and audibly torn apart off-screen, while Bud Brown takes his place of running back to the store.
  • Sally is only a minor character in the book who is presumably still alive in the supermarket when David and the others leave. In the film, she's stung by a bug in the throat, and suffocates from the swelling.
• Death by Pragmatism: The film goes way past the original story with this. The pragmatic characters who try to help themselves are wrong all the time and mostly end up dead. A woman goes out into the mist at the beginning to save her kids and somehow ends up surviving with them, appearing safe and sound on a truck in the final scene.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The DVD includes an extra copy of the movie in black and white.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation:
  • Dan Miller. In the book, he is killed during the trip to the pharmacy alongside Mike Hatlen and Buddy Eagleton. In the movie, he survives, only to die later during the Downer Ending when David shoots everyone in the Land Cruiser.
  • Hattie also joins David's group in leaving the store in the book, but is killed by the spiders in the parking lot. In the film, she commits suicide by overdose a little over halfway through.
• Died in Ignorance: Used for one of the harshest Downer Endings in recent memory. After escaping the supermarket where they've been hiding and running out of gas, the main characters decide to kill themselves rather than be eaten by monsters. David shoots the remaining survivors—including his eight-year-old son—and leaves his car to be taken...and is immediately met by a U.S. military convoy that's clearing the titular mist with flamethrowers. Turns out that the Army is winning against the otherworldly creatures and already working to restore peace—and David learns this literally seconds after he's killed everyone else in his car.
• Downer Ending: The movie, while the novella is more ambiguous: After losing many of their allies to both the monsters and each other (with some dying in front of them no less), David, Amanda, Billy, Dan and Irene reach David's car and escape the supermarket. After driving home to find his wife dead, David drives on but their car eventually runs out of gas. With no sign of escaping the mist, David shoots his son and everybody in the car, but comes up one bullet short to kill himself. He then steps out into the mist to be killed. But instead of monsters, the military emerge from the mist and destroy it as he screams in anguish, because it means that help was literally seconds away and that he killed five people, including his own son for no reason, meaning that his actions that got his own group members killed were All for Nothing. You know an ending is dark when the death of the monster and humanity surviving doesn't make it much happier. Stephen King was shocked by the ending, and wished he had come up with it himself.
  King: "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."
• Dramatically Missing the Point: This exchange from the movie:
  Ollie: We need to start barricading the storefront.
  David: Why? We closed the loading dock.
  Ollie: Yeah, but the entire front of the store is plain glass!
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Amanda, who has been looking after Billy, discovers Hattie has committed suicide by overdose after she failed to protect Billie during the monster insect attack.
  • With the exception of Private Jessup, the soldiers who escape into the store commit suicide by hanging themselves after having been told that the Gray Widowlett-infested MP's last words were "it's all our fault".
  • At the end, David's group of survivors plan to kill themselves to avoid a Cruel and Unusual Death at the hands (claws? Tentacles?) of the creatures in the mist. This ends very badly.
• Eldritch Abomination: Averted. The monsters in the mist are very much non-terrestrial in origin, but they're explicitly biological organisms with their own ecosystem amongst themselves that can bleed and die, implying that they come from a world just as physical as Earth. The baseline viciousness in most of them (as opposed to true malevolence that Mrs. Carmody might assign them) does however outmatch our ecosystem by a truly scary margin. It must be a seriously hostile alien environment that they come from.
• Ending with a Scream: The film ends with David Mercy Killing everyone in his car including his own son to save them from being eaten by the monsters in the mist, has no bullets left for himself, and is about to die... only to watch the military show up to clear the mist away. Realising that he did all of this for nothing, all David can do is scream in grief and horror.
• Evil Luddite: The movie version of Carmody seems to think that any scientific advance past 1940 is an affront to God. Stem cells and abortions are surprisingly her last appeals to Science Is Bad, although she appears to be going roughly in chronological order.
  Carmody: We are being punished! For what? For going against the will of God! For going against His forbidden rules of old! Walking on the moon! Or... or splitting His atoms! Or... or... or stem cells, and abortions!
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: The MP found All Webbed Up in the pharmacy. And, even more horrifying, David's wife, whose death we do not see... but her webbed-up corpse, split open.
• Face of a Thug: The intimidating biker, whom we barely get to know, says this to Ms. Carmody after listening to her rants.
  "Hey, crazy lady. I believe in God too. I just don't think He's the bloodthirsty asshole you make Him out to be."
• Fog of Doom: It's in the title.
• Foreshadowing: A suspicious number of soldiers from the Army are seen going into the town early in the movie, and the three in the supermarket learn that their leave has just been cancelled, indicating there's something big happening that's being kept from the general public.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Before the events of the film Mrs. Carmody was just another civilian who was an antiques store owner and the town's local Cloudcuckoolander for being Holier than Thou, but once these monsters rampage through the streets, she becomes the human Big Bad with her cult made up of other survivors.
• The Fundamentalist: Mrs. Carmody takes her religious fundamentalism to psychotic extremes. She's outright trying for Dark Messiah — she'll save as many souls of the deserving as she can, but forget actual lives... or how she goes about deciding on the "deserving": throw them to the monsters and sacrifice children. David likens her to Jim Jones at one point.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The soldiers of the US Army wear these, presumably to protect themselves from unknown pathogens or chemicals.
• Gave Up Too Soon: The film's ending, as described elsewhere on this page, has become infamous as one of the cruelest cases of this trope ever.
• Gentle Giant: The "Impossibly Tall Creature", a skyscraper-sized monster that appears at the end. Well, at least it doesn't instantly attack the humans' car. It's so large (larger in the book, but still utterly gigantic in the film) that it probably doesn't even notice them. Which, given everything else, is probably for the best.
• Go Mad from the Apocalypse: On the first day, the survivors were logical yet fearful as they were trapped in a store. By the third day's start, everyone but David's group has started to fully buy into Mrs. Carmody's claim that she's a vessel of God with divine protection and that they are only safe by offering blood sacrifices to the monsters. It's even worse than in the book, as the second day isn't even over before a mob of half the store's residents commit murder in the form of Human Sacrifice at Mrs. Carmody's command.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Jim, one of the members of the pharmacy expedition, is reduced to a gibbering mess after his encounter with the spiders, including being grabbed from behind by the M.P. and witnessing spiderlets hatching from the MP's body. It breaks his mind, and he joins Carmody's cult as one of her most ruthless followers afterwards.
• God Is Evil: Mrs Carmody believes that God can only be appeased through blood and sacrifice. She believed that the event mirrored passages from the Bible and she wanted people to repeat The Binding of Isaac in order to appease him. At first people didn't believe her but when one of the insects had lost interest in her after landing on her, they started agreeing with her beliefs and believed that Carmody had divine protection by being God's vessel. Defied by the biker, quoted above under Face of a Thug.
• Gory Discretion Shot: The scene at the end of the film where David shoots his son and the other three passengers. Then you hear a scream of pure anguish.
• Government Conspiracy: Although it is never stated outright, the secretive Arrowhead Project at the Shaymore military base (which is in the same direction that the mist came down from) is believed by some of the characters to be the cause of the disaster. One of the soldiers in the store lends further credence to the theory.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: In the film, this is the fate of the man who David asks to wear a rope around his waist just so the others can tell they made it so far. David ends up pulling back the lower half of his corpse still attached to the rope.
• Hate Sink:
  • Mrs. Carmody, a Holier than Thou nutcase who believes everything that is happening is God's punishment, and time and again scorns others for not believing in her case that a blood sacrifice must be made. The more followers that she gets, the more evident it is (especially in the film) that she's taking great smugness is being the leader of the desperate people she took advantage of. She's ultimately the Big Bad of the film, as while the monsters may be in the mist outside, Mrs. Carmody's cult inside the supermarket grows more and more bloodthirsty—to the point of killing an innocent soldier and attempting to kill both Billy and Amanda in the climax. One couldn't be blamed for rejoicing when Ollie kills her.
  • Jim Grondin, whose Establishing Character Moment has him pointlessly endangering Norm the bagboy, accusing David of cowardice when he advises against it, and then immediately freezing up when Norm needs help (while David and Ollie spring into action). Jim comes across as a selfish Dirty Coward throughout the movie, and eventually becomes one of Mrs. Carmody's most fervent supporters.
• Hobbes Was Right: Humanity needs a good squeeze of authority, if this movie is anything to go by. Once the people in the store are deprived of technology and social structure, they'll start listening to anyone with a solution to their problems. Carmody's cult starts sacrificing people because they believe it's the only thing keeping the monsters at bay and because they don't want to be sacrificed next. It's just as likely that Humanity Is Insane, though; as Ollie cynically puts it:
  Ollie: "As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another."
• Human Sacrifice: Mrs. Carmody persuades her cult to start doing this to appease God and the creatures outside in the mist. She actually succeeds in this once she convinces them to throw Private Jessup out to the monsters. She later leads her bloodthirsty followers to try and kill Billy and Amanda for another sacrifice. Ollie kills her before they succeed.
• Humans Are Bastards: It's pretty disgusting and pathetic how quickly fear and fanaticism take over after people took shelter in the supermarket. As Amanda disbelievingly points out, it doesn't even take two days!^note Though in their defense, the people in the supermarket are in an incredibly stressful, frightening, and dangerous situation that they (possibly worst of all) are almost incapable of understanding or otherwise knowing what's going on
• Humans Are Morons: Generally speaking, anyone not in David's group acts like a complete idiot.
  • Brent Norton refuses to consider any possibility that there are monsters in the mist despite mounting evidence to the contrary. After he rallies as many people to his side as he can and walks out, we never see him alive again.
  • The entire attack by the Scorpion-Flies and Pterobuzzards scream of this. Nobody realizes until it's far too late that the Scorpion-Flies are attracted to the light even though they very obviously crowd near light sources before the window breaks, and one person actually goes out of their way to turn on more lights during the attack.
  • Almost all the survivors in the store are swayed by Mrs. Carmody's insane, fundamentalist cult by day three. Her hold over them is such that they kill Jessup by throwing him outside and feeding him to the monsters (also failing to consider this might attract more monsters who will see the store as an easy source of food), and become so extreme they're willing to kill David and his kid.
• Hypocrite:
  • Jim mockingly questions David's masculinity and bravery when he he advises against risking the teenage bagboy's life on a fool's errand, but whenever Jim himself is in danger he consistently puts his own self-preservation first. Given when the movie came out, this is often read as a commentary on people who supported the invasion of Iraq.
  • Once again, Mrs. Carmody. She makes a big deal out of what a pious Christian she is, but once she starts to gain influence among the survivors, all her strategies basically boil down to cowardice, scapegoating, and self-preservation under a religious veneer. This is most overt in her whole thing about "expiation" - sacrificing others to protect yourself is, to put it mildly, the opposite of what the Bible says you should do, and her specific demand to sacrifice a child brings to mind Moloch. This is tacitly acknowledged in a Mythology Gag when, while praying, she uses the phrase "My life for you", a line associated with followers of Randall Flagg, a Devil figure in King's other works.
  • One of Mrs. Carmody's most devoted followers (possibly a close friend of hers) screams "you murdered her!" at Ollie right after he kills her, conveniently forgetting the fact that she had no problem with sacrificing Jessup and wanting to sacrifice an innocent little boy. An early draft of the script actually had Irene angrily call out the woman for this.
• It All Ends in Tears: At the end, David sobs and screams hysterically as he realizes that, while he has just killed his son and every other ally he had, the army was moments from liberating them and he is now "safe". It was All for Nothing.
• Jerkass: Several characters in the store, mainly Jim and Brent. But the ultimate one has to be Mrs. Carmody, a horrid religious fanatic who slowly goes from a mere annoyance to pure evil.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Despite being nothing short of unpleasant, Mrs. Carmody did advise against venturing outside the grocery store, warning anybody who did leave that they would die out in the mist. Every group that attempted to escape was attacked, with fatalities occurring each time.
• Kaiju: The a giant, crustacean-like pincered creature which kills Ollie Weeks — in the movie version, it's a good several storeys tall. At one point near the end, the survivors encounter a colossal, tentacled beast easily as tall as a skyscraper. Their only saving grace is that it doesn't even notice them as it walks past, but it really drives home the hopelessness of the situation.
• Kill It with Fire: Fire is very effective against the monsters. A torch takes down one of the pterodactyl monsters, Irene uses an aerosol flamethrower to kill a spider monster, and the military uses flamethrowers to clear away the mist at the end.
• Knight Templar: Mrs. Carmody again. She believes that she is God's "vessel" among the survivors. When the others reject her ideas for blood sacrifice and other insane beliefs, she declares that they are the disbelievers who brought down God's wrath to begin with.
• Large Ham: Marcia Gay Harden takes the cake for this. She takes a religious woman and makes her go from relatively sane to completely insane and it works. It's a great performance.
• Lawful Stupid: Every member of Mrs. Carmody's cult follows her commands, no matter how insane or reprehensible they may sound to the audience's ears.
• Lovecraft Lite: Unusually enough it ends up being this in the movie. At the very end, the seemingly unstoppable Mist is killed by the military. Though you can't call it a happy ending for David.
• Mama Bear: Call her what you will, but the woman in the beginning who leaves the store alone proves she is one. Could you leave your young children alone without trying to get back to them? Oh, and she survives and rescues her kids, appearing with them among the evacuees at the very end. And though the movie doesn't go into it, it's possible that she survived due to leaving early when there may have been fewer creatures about.
• Mauve Shirt: The Eagletons, the biker, Ambrose Cornell, Hattie Truuman, Bud Brown and Myron LaFleur, all of whom have some impact on the plot and a decent number of scenes, but less focus than the core characters.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Did the flying scorpion not sting Mrs. Carmody simply because it was an animal that acted unpredictably (as animals do)? Did it not sting her because she remained calm and didn't panic it? Did Mrs. Carmody's prayer really have something to do with it? And at the end, she says that by sacrificing Billy and Amanda the monsters will be dissuaded, and Billy and Amanda are among the last characters to die before the mist is cleaned up.
• Moral Myopia: Mrs. Carmody is shot by Ollie, after commanding her flock to sacrifice an innocent young boy to the monsters that invaded before slipping even harder and screaming "KILL THEM ALL!". The response from one of the flock: "You murdered her!"
• Morton's Fork: Even though Mrs Carmody was right about not leaving the store, it didn't leave David with many options. Mrs Carmody was clearly warming up to sacrifice Billy, meaning that David and the others could have stuck around, except it would have almost undoubtedly led to both David and Billy's deaths, and also presumably the deaths of anybody who tried to stop it, or they could have gone outside and risk near-certain death from the monsters. Sure, it wasn't the monsters that got them, but still...
• Militaries Are Useless: Averted at the end. The military eventually deploys in force and begins to clear out the Mist ecology, ironically supplying the punchline to the Cruel Twist Ending.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Subtly present with Myron throughout the movie. He begins as Jim's crony, joining him in encouraging Norm's pointless and ultimately fatal attempt to clear a vent, and freezing up when Norm needs help. Jim learns nothing from this failure and even gets worse over the course of the story, but Myron seems genuinely remorseful and supports David for the rest of the movie. There's a deleted scene where he tries to talk some sense into Jim.
  • When Mrs. Carmody's cult starts to attack Jessup, you can see Mrs. Carmody's shocked expression basically saying this, possibly her one moment of true sanity in the whole film... and then it melts away as she turns around and orders him thrown to the monsters as a sacrifice.
  • Ollie has a short breakdown after gunning down Mrs. Carmody. Sure, she was a fanatic madwoman, a murderer in the film, and an attempted child-murderer who convinced her cult to use people as monster chow, but Ollie still felt the guilt of killing another human being.
  • As the surviving heroes pull away in David's car toward the end, you can see what might be this on the faces of the people still inside the store. Without Mrs. Carmody's constant encouragement of their worst impulses, they seem to be realizing just what exactly she has turned them all into.
• Mythology Gag:
  • David is painting a very Man With No Name-esque Roland of Gilead, from Stephen King's opus The Dark Tower, when the storm hits.
  • The line "My life for you," spoken by Mrs. Carmody, has been said by a number of villainous characters in the Dark Tower books. Most notably Trashcan Man in The Stand, and Randall Flagg who's the true Big Bad of King's multiverse. This also implies that if there is a supernatural force guiding Mrs. Carmody's actions, then it isn't God.
• Never Mess with Granny: Irene Reppler, the elderly school teacher (played by Frances Sternhagen), fries a giant acid-spitting spider with a lighter and a can of bug-spray, all the while having a terrifying facial expression in that way that only old ladies can. She also clocks Mrs. Carmody in the face with a can of peas, reminds her that the Old Testament was OK with stoning people to death, and then said there was plenty more where that came from.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: The mist is dangerous enough and infested with monsters during the day, but the survivors observe that from what little they can see and hear, there's an even higher overall count of monsters active during the night.
• No Name Given: The woman with the kids at home, and the biker
• Non-Malicious Monster: The creatures that arrive with the mist are undeniably dangerous and hyper-aggressive, but they don't act out of evil or hatred for mankind but out of simple animal instinct. Which of course highlights the depths humans are willing to stoop to.
• Not So Invincible After All: The creatures in the mist are an incomprehensible threat to the frightened, trapped civilians, but they are no match against trained soldiers armed with automatic weapons, tanks, and flamethrowers.
• Ominously Cut Tether: A man who ventures out into the mist trails a line, which gets yanked upwards by something, and eventually the group in the store manage to reel the cord back. Ultimately subverted in the movie when the cord isn't cut: it's still tied around his waist. But his waist isn't connected to the rest of him.
• One-Woman Wail: The last ten minutes or so. Incidentally, the track used is "The Host of Seraphim" by Dead Can Dance, who also provided most of the One-Woman Wail in the film that popularized it, Gladiator.
• Only the Leads Get a Downer Ending: In the film, which compared to the book actually has a more optimistic situation at the end... for the world, much to the absolute despair of the protagonist in light of what he had just done under the belief that all was lost.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Toby Jones (Ollie Meeks) has a full-on English accent for one line near the end of the movie.
• Papa Wolf: David. He has his young son Billy with him in the supermarket, and part of his will to survive against the monsters is getting back to his son alive. He promises he won't let the monsters get Billy, and he keeps that promise.
• Pet the Dog: A minor one, but the cult evidently let Bud back inside the store after he gets separated from the others in the mist, despite the fact that his buddies killed their leader and despite their leader marking him for death beforehand. This suggests that, without the poisonous influence of Mrs. Carmody, the cultists quickly reverted back to being ordinary, scared, more-or-less decent people.
• Race Lift: Brent Norton is white in the book but played by the African-American Andre Braugher in the film.
• Recurring Extra: Lots of supermarket survivors (Silas the janitor, a father and daughter, three teenagers, an older cashier etc.) show up in lots of crowd scenes in the film but keep quiet, stick to the background, and (in some cases) avoid taking sides as David and Mrs. Carmody come to blows. Four others, Tom Smalley, Mike Hatlen, and the Eagleton brothers, aren’t really part of David’s core group but show up multiple times and try to help out against the monsters when they can in the first half of the film, generally to their detriment.
• Religion of Evil: After Mrs. Carmody is able to create a cult, she convinces them to sacrifice the soldier to the creatures to keep them at bay and is about to try to sacrifice Billy before Ollie finally shoots her.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Mrs. Carmody ends up being entirely correct in saying that everyone should stay holed up in the grocery store in order to survive. Her reasoning behind why, however, is completely skewed and ends up creating more problems than it solves given that it involves forming a tyrannical religious cult that is totally down with human sacrifices.
• Sanity Slippage: This happens to the majority of the store patrons, but special mention goes to Jim, who grows more and more shell-shocked from the monsters and the deaths caused by them, before he finally snaps and joins Mrs. Carmody's cult.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Just as the mist rolls into town, a man decides to try and flee to his car next to the pharmacy, ignoring Dan's warnings. He fumbles with the keys just as the fog engulfs him. A few seconds later, the people in the store hear him screaming in anguish, the sound cutting off with a gurgle.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: After running out of gas in their unsuccessful attempt at escaping the mist, the lead character mercy-kills his entire party including his own son (it would've been group suicide instead of euthanasia, but he was one bullet short). About one minute later the military finally shows up with tanks and flamethrowers, along with cars and cars full of survivors, meaning the insane cult they had just left to escape likely survived. To top it all off, among the survivors, he sees the woman brave enough to leave the supermarket at the beginning of the movie, and her children are fine as well.
• Shout-Out:
  • All the paintings in David's studio at the beginning are real promotional art created by Drew Struzan, who also did the poster for this movie. Among them are the CD cover of Pan's Labyrinth and the poster for John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). It shouldn't come as a surprise that Carpenter directed a similar movie, titled The Fog.
  • The siren that goes off as the fog comes rolling in sounds similar to one that went off every time creepy stuff was about to go down in another story about a town shrouded in mist and filled with monsters. It's likely (although not confirmed) that the original novella influenced the game. ^note  Such town whistles are still common in rural areas, used not only in emergencies, but to sound nightly curfew.
  • In the scene where David buys a comic for Billy, Darabont had originally suggested it be The Punisher comic, as an Actor Allusion for Thomas Jane. However, Jane had had a falling out with the producers of The Punisher (2004), and instead suggested it be a Hellboy comic, as a Shout-Out to his friend Ron Perlman.
• Skyward Scream: David makes one at the very end after he finds out the mercy kill he gave his son and surviving friends has been for nothing.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: As noted in One-Woman Wail, the survivors' drive away from the supermarket across the misty, web-entangled New England landscape — and under a gigantic Eldritch Abomination — is set to Dead Can Dance's "The Host of Seraphim", making it even more haunting. And then it starts again when David sees the Army coming in through the mist after he just shot his son and companions.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • The fate of the woman with the kids at home was left ambiguous after she left in the book. The film showed that she and her kids managed to survive.
  • Jim is killed in the novella, but is presumably still alive in the film.
  • Narrowly subverted by Dan Miller, who dies in both versions. In the book, he is killed during the pharmacy expedition. In the film, he is one of the few who actually makes it to the car out, almost surviving the entire movie.
• Take Our Word for It: When the biker goes out to get Ambrose's shotgun from his truck, they tie a rope to his waist just to be safe. A few seconds after walking into the fog, the rope starts to rapidly shoot out into the mist and uses up the entirety of its length before rising high into the air and dropping back down. The people inside the store pull the rope back to see that everything above the waist is gone, and his legs are all that remains.
• Talk to the Fist: When Norm is dragged out by the tentacles and killed, Jim still tries to pretend none of this was his fault and still talks smack to David, who spend last few moments fighting for the kid's life. David shuts him up with a right hook, then starts beating him senseless. It's only Ollie's intervention that stops the beating.
• Tamer and Chaster: In the novella, David is immediately sexually attracted to Amanda Dumfries. He tries to dismiss his lust as just a byproduct of the stress, especially because he still loves his wife Stephanie, but he still ends up having Sex for Solace with Amanda anyway. The film cuts this out and leaves it at sexual tension.
• Villainous Breakdown: While clearly insane, Mrs. Carmody remains rather collected for the most part, with the occasional aggressive outburst. However, it isn't until she catches David and the others trying to steal food and escape the store that she completely wigs out and screams for Billy, Amanda, and eventually the whole gang in the film, to be sacrificed to the monsters.
• Wham Shot: A powerfully unexpected shot kicks off the infamous twist ending. After David mercy kills the other survivors on his car, he exits the car and looks into the mist, shouting for the monsters to come and kill him. David hears something large is approaching in the mist, and his expression changes from one of desperation to one of shock. The shot turns around, and looks over David's shoulder into the mist. The large object emerges from the mist. Instead of a monster like what David and the audience expects, it's a tank from the US army.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Carmody's remaining cult isn't seen again after David and his group kill her and leave the store for good. The cult was very likely saved by the army, as no one had any intention of leaving the store, assuming that - without Mrs. Carmody's bad influence - they were sensible enough to keep their heads down and not attract any more attention from the monsters. The fact that they let Bud back into the store supports this possibility.
  • Frank Darabont reportedly wanted to show that the cult survived by showing them in one of the rescue trucks at the end of the movie. Unfortunately, most of the extras and actors were unavailable to do this, as their parts were finished.
  • The other children in the store are conspicuously missing in the final scenes. Which gives off some unsettling implications.
• Whole-Plot Reference: A lot of the movie feels like a mashup of two specific older horror movies. The fact that Darabont originally wanted to release this one in black and white (as both of these movies are) further links them.
  • The Crawling Eye. Hideous tentacled invaders from another world hide in an ominous Fog of Doom that comes rolling down a mountain, while paranoia sets in among the humans in their path, turning them against each other. Both movies also feature a woman who claims to be some kind of medium, though they are very different characters beyond that. Stephen King is on record as a fan of this movie.
  • Night of the Living Dead (1968). As a potentially apocalyptic threat in the form of swarming, man-eating monsters rages outside, a group of survivors hole up inside a secluded building, but existing rifts in society become exacerbated as they begin to turn on each other, culminating in a bleak Cruel Twist Ending of the Only the Leads Get a Downer Ending variety. Also, the heroes' rationality and reason fails to bear fruit, whereas the most antagonistic human inside the refuge turns out to have had the right idea (if not the right way of going about it) about where they should hole up to survive, which the protagonist only learns too late.
• Wilhelm Scream: The infamous scream can be faintly heard amidst one man's other screams as the spider monsters mutilate him in the mist during the escape attempt from the store near the movie's end.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Mrs. Carmody eventually convinces her cult to sacrifice Billy in hopes of making the creatures lose interest in the cult, and, presumably, because she sees David as a threat to her authority. Ollie shoots her before her followers can act on the order, however.
  • The monsters too, being opportunistic predators that run on pure animal instinct. In one scene, there's a breached school bus in the mist with dead children inside it.