Compare & Review: The Mist

Horror is probably my favorite movie genre, but it’s typically not something I read. What I have read has mostly been written by Stephen King. That doesn't change with The Mist.

I recently picked up Skeleton Crew, a collection of short stories by King published in 1985. I started reading it specifically because of one single story, The Jaunt, because it deals with teleportation in a way not often handled. I did start from the very beginning of the book though, and that just happened to begin with The Mist.

The story is about a group of people trapped in a store surrounded by a dense fog that holds deadly and horrifying creatures. The film adaptation came out in 2007 and I saw it shortly after release. It’s a good movie. Great creature design, and as tensions grow inside the store, you start to think maybe you should fear the people inside more than the monsters outside. The ending is likely what cements the movie in people’s minds more than anything else, but as I’m going to keep this spoiler free, I’ll just say it most definitely is a memorable ended. What I hadn’t realized until reading the short story, was that the film was an extremely faithful adaption, with really there only being three differences worth noting:

The first is something that many of King’s book-to-film adaption loses, and that is his habit of including sexualization, be it the protagonist having some additional perverse thoughts or implied/explicit sex, a famous example coming in at the end of the It novel involving the group of kids. There is nothing as drastic as that in The Mist, not by a long shot. Most of his short stories are pretty tame in this respect, but that said, when two characters ended up together in a back office, it felt jarringly out of place.

The second thing that’s different is the book keeps exactly what’s going on a mystery. There are plenty of theories given- one seemingly obvious- but it’s never explicitly stated. Most of King’s short stories are like this. No solid information is given on the antagonistic force. Part of that is likely because the unknown is scarier, the other part is that it’s a short story, so why waste word count on an explanation that does not service the plot?

Both of those changes are extremely minor and have little impact on either story. The last change is also a small one, but it completely changes the ending. I’m going to have to reiterate here that The Mist film is great and worth a watch. The ending was a great way to end the film. That being said, I was very glad the ending to the short story was just different enough.

I think the short story and the movie are both worth watching/reading, and if you plan on consuming both versions, I would suggest reading the short story first. The two are so similar in most aspects that if you watch the movie first, you would just be visualizing the movie in your head as you read. But if story comes first, you can really appreciate the movie’s visuals and the monster designs after the fact. Plus, after reading the story’s ending, the films ending will be one hell of an exclamation mark.