10 Horror Movies That Embarrassed Other Movies Released At The Same Time
6. The Mist EMBARRASSED The Happening
Released just six months apart, it's easy to get The Mist and The Happening mixed up. Both feature a gaseous substance causing death and destruction and bringing out the absolute best and worst in humanity.
Similar in many ways to Bird Box, and perhaps a direct inspiration of the book that film was adapted from, M Night Shyamalan's The Happening features Marky Mark as the hapless everyman at its core, and is constructed around a natural catastrophe where an airborne toxin is causing mass suicide.
On the other side of the coin, Frank Darabont's The Mist is adapted from Stephen King's novella of the same name and pits Thomas Jane against the titular mist, which harbours monsters and terrors of all kinds, and which is responsible for the destruction of most of North America. The Mist is clearly the superior film, not just because it was first out of the gate, but because it is well paced, convincingly tense, and even does suicide better -- as if you've ever forgotten that scene.
Shyamalan set himself up for a fall by releasing what seemed to many a blatant rip off so close to such a positively received and emotionally taut film. But The Happening didn't need The Mist to show it up, as it is by most people's measure a bad, bad film. Stephen King, it is not.
Ironically, King himself quite liked The Happening.