Hallelujah! Just when I thought I was going to get through 2007 without seeing a single excellent horror film, a superb movie like The Mist jumps out of nowhere and grabs me by the throat. This is not a non-stop frightfest or an action-packed thriller. Instead, it’s an eerie exercise in suspense that builds and builds for its first hour and actually gets better as it goes along, leading toward a handful of gruesome and memorable scenes, all the way to its jaw-dropping, ironic, and surprisingly downbeat finale. This is the first great horror movie based on a Stephen King story in seventeen years, and that sure is saying something!

The set-up is classic Stephen King. David (The Punisher’s Thomas Jane) and his son go into town to buy some groceries on a day that started off with odd weather. First, a seemingly heavy wind has blown down his trees, one slamming into the front of his house, and second, a thick mist has started to cover part of the lake. Impossible, right? David’s not sure. In line at the grocery store, the mist resurfaces. Not a big deal right? David’s not sure. Until people start leaving the store, however, as blood starts squirting every which way and people’s screams echo across the parking lot. Something is in the mist, and everybody in the store is going to have to work together to survive or turn against each other in the most gruesome and heinous of ways.

Director Frank Darabont has tackled two other Stephen King stories in his previous efforts–the masterpiece The Shawshank Redemption and the terrific The Green Mile–and here he finally takes on his first King horror story. It really could have been a recipe for disaster. A movie set in a grocery store for 90% of the running time, with lots of different, creepy, giant bugs outside trying to kill everyone, could have, almost should have, failed on many levels. I walked into this one hoping for something entertaining, nothing more. I was familiar with the short story, and I liked the idea of what could be if all the elements came together. They did. This is a flawed movie, to be sure, with one particular scene that doesn’t really work on a technical level, but the majority of this is fantastic.

The movie mostly works because Darabont is just as interested in the human stories as he is with the bugs outside. If all this movie was people running and screaming from hungry little critters, we’d have a Critters 5 or 6 on our hands. We’re stuck in a grocery store. Let’s get to know everyone. And there is a tremendously gifted ensemble cast that breathes life into their characters. Thomas Jane plays the average joe hero, who is one of the first to recognize that something truly wrong is happening. Others include Andre Braugher, as that annoying kind of character who doesn’t believe there’s any possible way for a supernatural phenomena to be occurring around the grocery store; Toby Jones, as a grocery store clerk who has a few more tricks up his sleeve; Laurie Holden, as a new girl in town who wants to care for David’s son; and Frances Sternhagen, who has some of the memorable moments as an older and feisty woman who is more handy with weapons than you might think.

And then there’s the most annoying, hateful, mean-spirited, egotistical, maniacal, religious quack of a woman named Mrs. Carmody, played by Marcia Gay Harden. I haven’t hated a character this much in the movies in a long, long time. The beauty of this character is the time it takes for her true wicked self to appear. In the beginning, she’s just a talkative nutcase who likes to spout off her bible quotations. But as the movie progresses, she poses more and more of a threat to the other humans in the grocery store, and she becomes entirely the villain in human form to the last remaining sane survivors who haven’t been gobbled up by giant creatures yet. She appears to be a character who will exist mostly in the background of the situation, but she becomes front and center by the end. She’s so frustrating that when something happens to her in the conclusion, I, along with almost the whole audiences, broke out into loud, beaming applause, shouts, and hoo-hahs! Marcia Gay Harden has great fun with this role, and she deserves her third Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Could that happen? Not in a million years. But she deserves it, just for getting so deep under my skin, like few movie characters, especially in horror films, ever do.

The special effects, aside from one scene, are top-notch. If you’re going to make a successful horror film that includes various giant bug attacks, the special effects better be at least semi-effective. My heart sank in an early scene when a squid like creature attacks five of the men in the back of the grocery store, and I was inundated with a long five-minute scene with nary a single effects shot that looked right. I honestly thought to myself, “Well, there goes the possibility of this being any good.” But then, a miracle happened. The rest of the effects ranged from good to superb. All the work done outside looks amazing, partly, I think, because the mist effect allows for some aspects to the creatures to not have to be perfect. But I was shocked and happily surprised to a scene where giant winged creatures fly into the story, and, for minutes on end, all the characters are running around as the heroes try to kill the things, swinging long sticks around and spewing large amounts of fire into their faces. All of this scene looks great! What happened with that earlier scene? Did the special effects guys have a month off, and Darabont had to do everything by himself?

There is going to be a lot of debate over the ending of the movie, but I have to admit, I loved the hell out of it. I always love when a mainstream movie goes against the norm in the end and delivers something unique and challenging, as long as it’s earned. There is one aspect to the end that I don’t agree with, and that’s the short amount it takes from a character to make a decision. I just thought he should’ve waited awhile longer to make completely sure that there was no other decision to make than the one he does. But I was just flabbergasted to see the movie take this direction after all we’ve been through. It was a gutsy choice to make by Darabont to not have the typical flowery ending and I salute the man! Fucking brilliant!

What I loved most about The Mist is its slow pace, that builds and builds until the harrowing last forty-five minutes or so, when the select few characters we love have to not only battle the furry monsters outside the store but also battle the human monsters inside as well. These ideas have gone back as far back as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I love claustrophobic horror movies set all inside one location (hell, I made one earlier this year), and Darabont succeeds on so many levels that he proves he needs to be making more than just one movie every five or six years. He’s been attached to Fahrenheit 451 for a long time, and I am dying to see him take that classic tale to the big screen. He’s a gifted filmmaker, with a keen eye for visuals, a way with actors, and a knowledge for how to led a true horror movie unfold. What is this movie called? Stephen King’s The Mist? Try Frank Darabont’s The Mist. This guy is good.