You can't convince some people there's a fire even when their hair is burning. Denial is a powerful thing.

Rating: 8/10 (6 October 2019)

Residents of a small Maine town become trapped in the local supermarket when an otherworldly mist brings deadly creatures in full attack mode. That's not the only problem, for two groups form inside the market, one in favour of escaping, the other for expiation!
As is the norm, King adaptations vary in quality and divisive fan appraisals, so with "The Mist" on screen not exactly setting the box office alight, and it even getting delayed releases in Europe, one would think this is one of the lesser King adapted lights? Not so! In fact, it is now proving to have a longevity of worth in horror fan circles. So much so, that the great horror writer at the literary source gives it the full thumbs up whilst giving the "changed" ending his full pat on the back approval.
Frank Darabont (director and adaptive writer) is of course the man who previously took King's more human interest stories and crafted much beloved movies out of them, so why was he in the chair to direct a film about alien creatures unleashing bloody dread on small town Americana? Well the answer is why "The Mist" is such a cunningly chilly delight. For this not only features monstrous creatures straight out of a Lovecraft/Barker nightmare, but also the monsters of the human kind, where the venality of the human condition is laid bare under duress - and it is frightening.
The alien creatures themselves creep the flesh, ok the effects work sometimes sags under the scrutiny of "HD" viewings, but this is nightmarish stuff, none more so than with a quite brilliant and terrifying sequence of events in a pharmacy. Yet it's the human monsters within the supermarket that usurps our creature invaders, where religious fervour and man's propensity for survival comes crashing together for dynamic results - the cast utterly in tune with the material and delivering quality portrayals.
Once the human battles within dissipates, and we come to the resolutions and reasonings of what has caused the creature invasion (hello subtext), we arrive at the much talked about finale. It actually deserves to be divisive, for we don't want yet another horror film finale that has people shrugging their respective shoulders and saying "fair enough, but is that it?". If you buy into the all round bleak tonalities that the pic has been serving throughout, then this ending hits all the right buttons. For sure, this is no easy cop out to send you home with a smile on your face, it's brutal, and crucially it's befitting the word of the genre it sits in - horror! 8.5/10