you gotta be kidding me wrote:So how does the story compare to Carpenter's The Fog?
Good question! I liked them both though I do not think they are self-consciously related, just dealing with a similar kind of subject - King's story was much more focused on being 'trapped and menaced' and what happens once the store is surrounded and the worries of what is going on elsewhere, which it sounds as if the ending Darabont has given to the film plays upon in what sounds to be quite a brutal fashion (I am not sure what I will think about it until I get a chance to see the film and how it plays - I thought one of the most powerful parts of King's story was the ambiguous ending)
The things I like most about John Carpenter's The Fog are the atmosphere and the score - the whole opening sequence from the camp fire story through to the strange events in the town in the middle of the night is wonderful. I think the atmosphere created by certain sequences is so powerful that it completely overpowers what is quite an underwhelming mystery/vengeful ghosts story. Strangely it also overwhelms the Jamie Lee Curtis storyline which seems content to coast along on Jamie Lee's presence and familiarity to viewers from Halloween - even using similar jump scares that worked wonderfully for Curtis and Carpenter in Halloween but just seem hackneyed in The Fog. If it was anyone other than Curtis playing that role there would be nothing of merit in that strand of the story at all, but I think it is her 'scream queen' presence and reteaming of her and Carpenter that manages to carry it through - along with the late in the film meeting between Curtis and Leigh's characters that adds an extra horror film fan frisson. But that is the problem with the Curtis section of The Fog - the only excitement that really comes out of it is from knowing the actors and their significance, not anything generated within that section of the film itself.
I think the Curtis scenes seem particularly bland because the other strands of the film are so good - I love the banter between Janet Leigh's character and her secretary and when they start to get nervous they have built up the authority by the way they have been managing every last detail of the pageant and their sceptical reaction to their local priest's guilty rambling that their fear helps to make the audience nervous.
And the very best scenes belong to the incredibly beautiful Adrienne Barbeau - not just the excitingly tense final scenes scrambling around on the roof of the lighthouse but the magnificent early scene where her son finds a piece of the shipwreck on the beach and the next sequence where she drives through the windswept landscape in her car and then walks down to her radio station at the lighthouse playing potential ident jingles for her show.
That sequence is the one that most sticks in my mind for sheer atmosphere, not frightening but beautifully and slightly creepy that then pays off in spades in the following scene when the dry driftwood starts leaking saltwater that possesses the tape player and sends a ghostly message!
I love Carpenter's The Fog for a number of different reasons: the Curtis/Carpenter reuinion, the Curtis/Leigh meet up, John Houseman's campfire story, Hal Holbrook's priest lugging a giant solid gold cross, Adrienne Barbeau doing anything(!), the kindly old lady being brutally bumped off, the radio show host urgently trying to guide people away from the fog bank, the windswept landscapes with the occasional foghorn sounding, Carpenter's fantastic score and the intercutting between the different storylines (however I thought he really did his best and most complex editing work in Ghosts of Mars even though I felt other aspects of that film were nowhere near the level of his best, more conventionally edited, earlier work).
All of those things mean that I do not particularly mind the ghosts of leper pirates motivation for what occurs and the abruptness of the ending, purposefully anti-climactic in preparation for that final shock!
Sorry for writing so long about Carpenter's film but who knows when I would next get the opportunity to do so! Anyway I suspect that The Mist will have difficulty matching my favourite scenes from Carpenter's film, and does not really need to try as it is not as if it is a remake per se (unlike the 2005 Fog film which I have heard is terrible!). The one area that Carpenter's film did not really work for me was in creating realistic characterisations and interactions between people, while I found the strength of King's story was the focus on that, especially in the middle section of the story, to the extent that the bug threat was almost secondary to what was going on inside the store (I think this basic plotline was taken to its extreme in The Langoliers where none of the characters really know what is going on or that there is any threat until the end of the film and the bulk of that story focuses on their exploring and trying to understand their eerily empty world and the various character's reactions: grouping and bonding together, revealing secrets, descending into madness and having love affairs - in that sense most of King's monsters in these stories are as much MacGuffins as Hitchcock's birds)
Similarly I think of Gerald's Game as being an even more stripped down version of Misery to the extent that the story itself is unfilmable - handcuffed to a bed and slowly dying but
not being terrorised by a psychotic nurse?
This review of 'fog themed' stories leads me to recommend the ultimate use of the substance in James Herbert's book! If it is apocalyptic madness you want Herbert's novel has it all, though it is as as obviously unfilmable as Gerald's Game if for completely the opposite reason - rather than being too stripped down, a decent version of Herbert's novel would call for a Hollywood level budget, which is something that would seem to be impossible for the British film industry (and I do not think the US would be interested in making a huge budget UK-based horror film), only compounded by the sheer perversity of some of the set pieces as madness causes every taboo to be broken and spares no one. I do not think that even in these more 'liberal' times any film, let alone one with a blockbuster budget, could get away with a sequence in which a group of fog-exposed schoolkids attack their gym instructor, strip and tie him to the wallbars of his gym and pelt his head with medicine balls while at the same time indulging in an enormous orgy before burning themselves to death
A book v film comparison of The Mist is at
The Onion AV Club
