The Mist is a scary pea-souper

It was only some years after I had first watched Stanley Kubrick's The Shining that I realised it was based on a novel by Stephen King, and only after I'd read King's powerful novel - about a man's obsession with alcohol - that I realised how little the movie resembled the novel. Later still, I learned that King disliked Kubrick's movie so much that he made his own version.

There have been others, of course, and now we have The Mist, which King wrote as a short novella in the mid-1970s. It's largely King's tremendous gifts for storytelling and for creating credible characters in incredible situations that make his novels so well-suited to celluloid, and this one's a corker.

After a violent storm in Maine, which brings down the electricity lines, our hero David goes into town for supplies, taking his young son Billy with him and leaving his wife behind. While queuing at the supermarket, David and the other locals look through the windows to see the town becoming engulfed by a strange white mist. There's something horrible out there. And it really is horrible.

Gradually an assortment of strange and terrifying creatures - think Hieronymous Bosch - come flapping and crawling out of the mist, to burrow, suck and feed in the most disgusting manner on any poor soul unfortunate enough to have strayed outdoors.

But the survivors, who have barricaded themselves into the grocery store, find they have another, possibly worse, spectre in their midst: a religious fanatic called Mrs Carmody, who blames what is going on outside on the sins of mankind.

Preaching hellfire and retribution, she is at first regarded as plain potty, but soon starts winning over some of the locals, who in their terrified ignorance want a scapegoat.

So far so King, and all thoroughly enjoyable it is too. That is until the ending, which is radically different. In the book, David, as the narrator, wrote: "It is, I suppose, what my father always frowningly called 'an Alfred Hitchcock ending', by which he meant a conclusion in ambiguity that allowed the reader or viewer to make up his own mind about how things ended."

But there's nothing ambiguous about film-maker Frank Darabont's conclusion and I came out of the cinema in shock - in a good way I hasten to add; we hardcore King fans need to be kept on our toes. As for what King himself thinks, according to Darabont, "he really dug the liberties I took with this story".

In its way it's every bit as good as the book and to be recommended.

The Mist is included in Stephen King's short story collection Skeleton Crew (Hodder, £6.99).

The Mist
Cert: 15