Play Misty For Me

Since I saw The Mist last November, not a single foggy day has passed without me wanting to watch it again. Walking outside into a milky vapor instantly transports me back to the theater, and I find myself worrying less about whether or not I remembered to wear socks and more with how I’m going to survive an encounter with acid-web-spinning spider thingies, should any cross my path. I’m pretty sure I’ve come within inches of killing a pedestrian or two on my way to work, staring up at a blank, murky sky in search of six-legged, tentacled AT-AT walkers instead of watching the road in front of me. When I go to the supermarket, I subconsciously hoard boxes of Cocoa Pebbles just in case some religious zealot should suddenly label them a tool of Satan and ban them from stores.

Contrary to popular belief, this is not my normal behavior.

I don’t often get this fixated on a single movie. The last time I can remember it happening was the first time I saw Scanners, when I kept rewinding and rewatching the head explosion to see if I could figure out what happened to the guy’s nostrils. Poorly rendered tentacles notwithstanding, I’ve got mad, mad love for The Mist, the kind of affection most people reserve for sports teams and hair care products. And now that the movie’s out on DVD, I’m determined to infect everyone else with that love, until the point where the movie sits in its rightful spot beside The Thing and other what the fuck were we thinking when we collectively let this tank at the box-office movies.

I’m not prone to hyperbole (unless I’m talking about Steve Guttenberg), but I can’t escape the feeling that this must become a horror classic. Even if it costs me my Cocoa Pebbles.

More Mist:

• Dread Central Podcast interview with Frank Darabont
• Darbont, Greg Nicotero, and Thomas Jane discuss the making of the Mist monsters
• Darabont on adapting Stephen King