U.S.Anger: The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007)

I know, I know: I’m cheating. “The Mist has monsters,” I imagine you saying, from behind your computer, where you wait every day for the chance to receive my wisdom. “You’ve written multiple times that the threat in a disaster movie cannot be supernatural, and yet The Mist has monsters.” 

To which I answer: Not all of the monsters are supernatural. The worst ones aren’t, in fact. For the rest of them, I point you to Section 34, sub-clause 40(b) of the Disaster Movie Contract, which clearly states that filmmakers are allowed to include fantastical elements if the movie is actually an allegory for 9/11. 

LOST was a 9/11 allegory. Cloverfield was a 9/11 allegory. Battlestar Galactica was a 9/11 allegory. The Dark Knight was a 9/11 allegory. Two out of three Star Wars prequels were 9/11 allegories. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was a 9/11 allegory, even though it was filmed before 9/11. 24 was not a 9/11 allegory, as such, but it was a nine-season-long argument for why the US should be allowed to torture people, and the reason we should be allowed to torture people, as per 24, was “9/11.” 

We just loved 9/11 allegories, in this decade, and we were willing to deploy monsters, polar bears, time travel, Batman, and any number of other implausible plot elements to get them. The Mist’s 9/11 allegory uses a Stephen King story from 1980 about a grocery store that gets attacked by Chthulu. It was neither the most nor the least ridiculous metaphor of its time. 

So let us now enter The Mist, a horror movie that is also a monster movie that is secretly a disaster movie, or which is, at the very least, perched at the center of the Venn diagram where the three genres overlap. Our cast includes: 

• Thomas Jane!
• Andre Braugher! 
• The Gawker Stalker! 
• Toby Jones! 
• LCD Soundsystem! 
• Crashdown from Battlestar Galactica! 
• The BlackBerry Curve! 
• People saying “I prefer the British Office!”
• People actually preferring the American Office! 
• Marita Covarrubias! 
• “This Is My Now” by Jordin Sparks! 
• Tiger Beatdown! 
• Marcia Gay Harden! 
• Season One of Mad Men! 
• Spur-of-the-moment parenting decisions!
• Rapidly changing data! 
• Regret! 

It begins, as all 9/11 allegories must, on a perfectly ordinary morning. There’s a bad storm; a few trees get knocked over; local dad Thomas Jane gives his cranky neighbor Andre Braugher (!!!) a ride to the grocery store to get supplies for repair. Thomas Jane also brings his adorable young son to the grocery store, unaware that the two of them are going to become cinema’s most convincing argument against father-son bonding. 

Hell kicks in slowly, then all at once: A radio station is off the air, a few military vehicles are sighted on the road, and then there are sirens, and white clouds billowing through the streets, and bloodied civilians running along the sidewalk, toward safety, and away from something they can’t name. 

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The grocery store is surrounded by mist, and the mist is full of monsters, and no-one can leave the store if they want to live. The viewer nods and settles into their seat, ready to watch shoppers get eaten. Yet things can always get worse, and they’re about to, because the true lesson of The Mist is that there is, actually, something scarier than being trapped in a grocery store surrounded by mist and Lovecraftian monsters: Being trapped in any grocery store with Elizabeth Bruenig. 

Who? You rightfully ask, and the answer is “no-one you need to worry about in 2024,” but I assure you the joke is funny if you’re old enough to remember her. At any rate: Marcia Gay Harden plays a local evangelical Christian who is convinced the End of Days is upon them, and who gains an increasingly rabid and bloodthirsty cult among the grocery shoppers as the extremely icky monster deaths seem to prove her right. 

I’m torn on Marcia Gay Harden’s character. Part of me sees her as an overly broad caricature, not to mention a blatant retread of Carrie White’s mother. Another part of me thinks that Andre Braugher just makes for a more compelling antagonist, though that mostly comes down to Braugher imbuing a generic “asshole” role with more depth than the script calls for. (At one point, he manages to fit an entire lifetime of dealing with small-town racism into one pause, as in “you don’t care for,” pause, “out-of-towners, do you?”)

Yet Braugher's character is killed off early, when — as the group’s resident anti-vaxxer — he decides to Do His Own Research on this Chthulu problem by just wandering out into the mist and getting eaten. That leaves us with Harden. Cartoonish though she might be, she also gets at something deeply freaky lurking in the American psyche, a freakiness that has since attained full flower. 

“Overly broad caricature” sums up a lot of The Mist’s political commentary. You’ve got a sassy old lady condemning “corporate hand-outs and building bombs.” A scene with a bag boy getting eaten by a vampire squid ends with a lecture on the morality of old men sending young men to die. In one of her rants, Marcia Gay Harden manages to condemn, not only “science” as a whole, but “stem cells and abortions” — not because it actually connects to anything she’s saying, but because the movie is making a point about conservatives, and Frank Darabont wants you to know that American conservatives in 2007 were against those things. 

Yet — as in the weird parallel between Braugher’s death and COVID denialism — the core of the allegory holds up, and has outlived many of the more specific references. In times of crisis, charismatic leaders will arise, naming scapegoats and offering “solutions” that are just a chance for the crowd to transmute its fear into violence. That could be Mrs. Carmody as played by Marcia Gay Harden. It could be Hitler. It could be…

Well, you know who it could be. It’s an uncomfortable story to watch, as a trans person in 2024, fully aware that your community is slated to be this panic’s official Crashdown From Battlestar Galactica.

It’s uncomfortable because it’s true, though, and that’s got to count. 

What I remember most about the days and weeks after 9/11 — even living out in the sticks, in Ohio — is the shock on everyone’s face for weeks afterward. People were shaken and jittery and blank, their faces hung loose on their skulls a little, their sense of the world as a safe and predictable place was ruptured. That fear and hurt was unbearable, and people needed to hide from it, to feel invulnerably American. Within hours of the attacks, you could sense the fear closing over into a fist, becoming mean and armored, ready to inflict pain. 

It can feel, at times, as if that fist never really re-opened. Still: The violence was only able to emerge because it was already there, nascent, waiting for the right series of world events to crack the vault. 

In 2007, Sarah Palin was still just the governor of Alaska. We had no way of knowing that Palin would become a VP pick, and then a phenomenon; that Palin fandom would become the Tea Party, and the Tea Party would nurture birtherism; that birtherism would capture a game-show host’s attention, and help him build his brand into something political; that he would run for President, and that America would elect him; that, by 2024, he would be running again, after a coup, with a cult behind him, promising to expunge America through ethnic cleansing campaigns aimed at immigrants with “bad genes.” 

We didn’t know any of that, but we knew all of that, because The Mist was in theaters. Things have not always been this bad, but things have always felt this bad, at least to some of us, at least some of the time. The monsters were always here; not outside, in the mist, but here in the checkout line, right behind us, scanning the tabloid headlines, stacking cans of dog food and condensed milk on the conveyor, making small talk. 

In an ordinary disaster movie, the disaster is averted or mitigated; things go back to normal; the holy Nuclear Family is reunited. I already told you: The Mist is not a disaster movie. Nothing can save you from how it ends. 

The Mist is streaming on Tubi.

Once you're done watching it – and if you still miss Andre Braugher, which, who doesn't – this oral history of The Mist is good reading and contains several Braugher quotes that it is impossible not to hear in Holt Voice. ("On the logic tip, her existence is impossible.")