It's...not a good show.
But if we're looking for reasons why The Mist has failed so spectacularly, it's worth considering a decision creator and showrunner Christian Torpe and his writers made, a decision that - at least in theory - might have worked to the show's advantage. That decision has, instead, resulted in even more unconvincing and unpleasant moments that fall far closer to "silly" than they do to "horrifying."
It's easy to forget that Stephen King's original story is just that - a story. It's not one of King's back-breaking brick novels. It's about 135 pages and first appeared in a collection of King's short stories. There's not really a ton of incident or narrative momentum in The Mist. The story basically goes like this:
- Guy and his son go to the store
- Thick mist rolls in
- Mist contains horrifying Lovecraftian monsters
- People barricade themselves in the store
- People occasionally die in horrific ways
- Lady in store becomes a religious fanatic, goes crazy
- Guy and his son break out of store, leave town
Really, that's about it. The Mist is a fine story, but not a lot really happens, all things considered. So if you're going to adapt it into a TV show, even just for the now-standard summer cable run of 10 episodes, you have some work to do in expanding the story to fill your runtime.
Torpe and company settled on a number of ways to do that, almost all of them cringe-worthy - the less said about Adrian, Alex and the pre-mist rape sub-plot, the better. One of the choices that has fared particularly badly is the show's laughable attempts at personalized psychological horror. Essentially, the mist of The Mist is a kind of personalized hell for anyone caught in it.
Writers love this sort of thing, of course. "Psychological horror" is the respectable sort of horror, the sort that wins you applause from skeptical critics. After all, it doesn't rely on such cheap tactics as scary monsters or sickening gore - it delves into the psyche of characters, and in the age of Prestige Drama, we love nothing more than deep, probing character work.
Here's the thing: while much of King's horror work is psychological, The Mist is decidedly not. There's nothing personalized about the horrors that lurk in the mist. They're terrifying creatures from another dimension, massive clusters of tentacles and claws and fangs, warped pterodactyl-esque flying beasts, huge spiders that cocoon their human victims in nests of webbing, giant crab creatures that bisect people with a snip of a claw.
None of these creatures are subtle, and none of them are artisanally crafted for the unique contours of the victim's sub-conscious. They're just fucking scary, and they work on that level. They're huge, they're deadly, they're like nothing we've ever seen on Earth. That makes them effective.
Spike's adaptation went a different way. There are some monsters out in the mist, of course, though they tend to be very small scale - deadly insects, mostly. But in the show, the mist works in a different way - by playing on its victims' fears and memories. The mist presents its victims with visions that haunt and taunt, visions that drive victims insane with self-loathing.
In theory, at least. Our protagonists mostly just seem briefly annoyed by their visions before running away.
Look, could this work? In theory? Sure. Better actors could sell the horror more convincingly. Better characters - with more fully developed interior lives and personal histories - would make these visions more compelling. And better writers could sketch out more dramatic and horrifying scenarios.
But that's kind of a cop-out - good writers, good actors and good characters can make more or less anything work. It's no great defense of the adaptation's decisions to say that they could, conceivably, have worked better in a world where everyone involved with the production was more competent.
One imagines that some part of the decision-making process here was driven by financial considerations. The Mist is a hilariously cheap-looking show, outside of one or two striking visuals in each episode and some occasionally effective gore effects, and it's obvious Torpe and his writers aren't working with much of a budget. Casting an actor for a one-off appearance as a mist vision is surely cheaper than creating a convincing Lovecraftian hell beast, whether you're using CGI or practical effects.
Still, I would submit that the fatal flaw here is the belief that personalized psychological horror is inherently superior to - and more dramatic than - the kind of creature-based horror of King's original story.
Yes, the "psychological" horror of Spike's adaptation reads like an old person's stereotype of a Millennial's view of horror: "Sure, that 20-foot-tall homicidal spider is scary, but it doesn't really speak to me, you know?" And yes, the show's attempts at personalized terror have been limp and laughable - Kevin sees an image of himself...but a darker, more violent version of himself! Mia sees her dead mom! Alex is spared by a (legitimately spooky!) shadow monster because the thing a teenager fears most is rejection!
But the failing here goes beyond The Mist's unique shortcomings in writing. There's a place for bespoke horror that speaks to the unique psychology of specific characters. But there's also a place for the more universal horrors laid out in King's original story, for the kind of terrifying creatures and demons that - when done well - elevate us out of our individual fears and remind us of something more elemental in our natures.
In other words, we're all scared of 20-foot-tall homicidal spiders that threaten to spin us in a nest of webbing so they can return later and consume us at their leisure. They don't remind us of the trauma we suffered on the playground in third grade, but they're still scary.
Much of the praise for psychological horror is rooted in a kind of disdain for genre fiction. Implicit in it is the idea that traditional horror - with its monsters and madmen and demons from hell - exists on an inferior plane, somewhere far below respectable literature that understands true drama is the clinking of silverware on plates in a tense family dinner. Bringing that keen understanding of a character's inner life to horror makes it far more like "literature," and is thus inherently superior.
And look, there's nothing wrong with psychological horror, or with horror that plumbs the depths of a character's psyche. King himself has tilled that soil quite well for decades.
But King has always possessed a keen understanding of the right balance between the personal and the universal. One of the most terrifying scenes King ever wrote was the moment in The Shining where Jack Torrance, having finally succumbed to the evil of the Overlook Hotel, beats his own face in with a roque mallet while his son watches, the illusion of Jack's humanity finally gone forever.
Yes, it's terrifying because it's personal - a son watching the shell of his dad perform such an extreme act of self-brutalization. But it's terrifying to the reader because it's also universal, because the visual of this...creature walking around afterward with a caved in non-face is sickening and horrifying. The scene doesn't rely entirely on psychology - it proudly and unapologetically calls upon forces that the critic might consider "lesser."
That balance between specific and general, personal and universal, is one of the central tensions of all storytelling, of course. That Spike's adaptation of The Mist fails to achieve this balance is no surprise - it fails at pretty much everything it tries to accomplish. But there is a lesson in that failure, one writers and critics alike might do well to heed - horror doesn't have to be psychological to be effective. There is no reason vivid, well-drawn characters can't exist in a story where the horror is grander than their own traumas.
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