“Crash to black” — We need to talk about the ending of ‘The Mist’ from 2007

Frank Darabont changed the ending of Stephen King’s novella. King loved it. Then, why did it rub so many people the wrong way? It might even have killed Frank Darabont’s directing career.

It has been almost 10 years since the movie was released in cinemas, and the new TV series based on the same Stephen King novella is about to premiere, so it’s time to take a second look at the movie and try to make sense of it all.

The movie can be summarized like this: After a violent storm hits a small town in Maine, the protagonist, David, his small son, Billy, and their neighbor drive into town to get supplies. While they are in town, a strange omnipresent mist descends on the small community supermarket, and everyone inside gets stranded. The movie then follows all the other townspeople caught in the supermarket and how everything starts to unravel as they lose the ability to get out or to communicate with the outside world.

Misleading marketing

When The Mist came out in 2007, it was tailgating the mainstream horror revival of the early to mid-00s. It looked on paper like a guaranteed hit. It was based on a novella…