10 Killer Horror Films Now Streaming On Shudder
1. The Mist
After directing the Stephen King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (and receiving three Oscar nominations in the process), Frank Darabont again turned to his favorite author for inspiration and made one of the best horror movies of the 2000s.
One thing you notice about The Mist now is how many of the film’s actors – Melissa McBride, Laurie Holden, Jeffrey DeMunn, Sam Witwer, Juan Gabriel Pareja and Tiffany Morgan – later appeared in The Walking Dead, but this is a much darker vision of humanity than appears on AMC. The real horror in this film isn’t the monster lurking in the mist but the reactions of the people trapped inside a grocery store, whose behaviour becomes increasingly erratic as the world falls apart.
Like King’s novella, it’s essentially a 50s monster movie given a modern spin, but Darabont gives the material a more downbeat feel and adds what turns out to be one of the movie’s most memorable scenes – a grim ending that’s very different from the source material. The perfect post-9/11 monster movie, The Mist brings on the apocalypse not by imitating George Romero’s vision but by throwing regular people (flawlessly played by a terrific cast) into an irregular situation and watching them react.