The Mist exposes the horrors of a society without control. It pitches the inevitable descent into madness and corruption. Author of the short story Stephen King and director Frank Darabont spin a tale that proves the real monsters are your neighbors, not the otherworld demons outside the windows. But what if this assumption about our society, one terrible event away from chaos, is not only wrong but harmful? Ghouls explore Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell and the ways society has instead given us Disaster Utopias.
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The Mist (2007) A freak storm unleashes a species of bloodthirsty creatures on a small town, where a small band of citizens hole up in a supermarket and fight for their lives.
Director Frank Darabont
Writers Frank DarabontStephen King
The Mist: King's Disaster Societies and the Reality of Disaster Utopias by Gabe Castro
RED: Quotes, someone else's words.
Zombies are rarely the monsters we need to worry about. Any horror buff would be thrilled to explain that the real horror of Dawn of the Dead is not the infected cannibals chasing the ragtag group but rather consumerism showcased by the unsubtle location of a shopping mall as safe haven. Romero’s zombie threat reaches beyond the act of being devoured and seeps into the fear of losing our individuality. Because what is a zombie but a mindless, shambling person driven only by instinct, stripped of anything that makes them unique or able to make their own decisions? Romero himself said that the “zombie is a sympathetic character.” Having once been a person, a loved one, now reduced to impulse and monstrosity. We watch horror for the thrill of the chase, pursued by human or otherworldly monsters, and the eventual, triumph of our heroes. It is a universal cathartic experience that allows viewers to work through their own fears, with faces like self-doubt or oppression, and conquer them; reducing them to a sizzling pile of blood and goop. Whether vampire, zombie, ghoul, or tentacled beast, we can agree that these monsters aren’t what we should fear but instead, the society that survives these encounters. A society created out of disaster and horror made up of terrified and scarred individuals must also be something to fear.
Stephen King’s The Mist is such a Disaster Society. The film and short story follow townsfolk trapped in a grocery store after a mist descends upon the town. This mist proves itself more ominous than first believed, housing monstrous beings with tentacles, skittering bugs, and worse, skull-patterned spiders that lay eggs inside of you. All of these are truly and effectively terrifying stirring in us deep, unspoken fears of these creatures; making our skin crawl with the thought of them. However, this premise is easily survived, simply staying out of the mist and in the safety of the store, taking care of each other as a community is expected to do. Unfortunately, distrust and paranoia reveal themselves early in the disaster. Insidious and poisonous, the group’s structure plunges into uncertainty and violence. Their secrets and dark histories with each other warp their experiences and push them into desperate, dangerous situations. These actions put them all at risk, proving that the real monsters are your neighbors, not the otherworld demons outside the windows.
King is obsessed with revealing the seedy underbelly of society where everyone is one unfortunate event away from breaking. He lives to spin tales of humanity's supposed true intentions. His Needful Things’ thesis is precisely this, that at the heart of every person is a dark secret and desire that they would harm others to achieve. IT, though featuring one of the more notorious monsters in horror, Pennywise, reveals that the real villain is the town of Derry, ripe with racism and violence that has infected the very soil. This innate evil is what drew the creature to Derry in the first place. In this case of the chicken or the egg, evil was born long before IT’s chicken.
The Mist follows the same logic, exposing an innate violence we presumably keep under wraps when “normal” society has control of us. When Andre Braugher’s Brent refuses to believe his neighbor, David, that there are tentacled beasts in the mist and instead becomes violent; so convinced David and the other white townsfolk are playing with him, it is an expected, though frustrating, moment. We can believe that the tension and toxic history Brent reveals seeps deeper than a lawsuit. He has experienced pain and discomfort in this town of predominately white, middle-class people who’ve weaponized their whiteness against him. When the terrifying evangelical Mrs. Carmody begins preaching the end of times, claiming the creatures and murderous mist is a reckoning, a warning from God she is at first dismissed. As the rules of society crumble away, leaving a vulnerable and more pliant community in need of guidance, her words of retribution and call for expiation seem reasonable. What’s one sacrifice for the betterment of their new society? Keep in mind, the film takes place over a span of 4 days. For King, humanity is one horrific tragedy away from collapse, and it can crumble in less than a week.
The film is effective with its scares both in the creature design and the viciousness of this community. In particular, a scene that will haunt my nightmares for as long as I live finds a young MP officer wrapped in a haunting spiderweb. It is slowly revealed that he has been used as a vessel, not for food but for incubation. During a fight with the grotesque, ghostly alien spiders, the MP’s body falls from his webbed cocoon onto the ground and in true King horror, bursts into a thousand tiny spiders. After this event which would surely break anyone’s psyche, Mrs. Carmody’s insane rants of God’s punishment ensnares the community of the store. Her ability to corrupt the minds of this small group is terrifying as they descend into chants of expiation before stabbing a young military officer as a sacrifice to her Old Testament God. The Mist is one of the most horrifying films I’ve seen in a long time. However, I couldn’t help but consider the inaccuracies of King and director Frank Darabont’s envisioned fallen society.
Thanks to a very helpful and thought-provoking video by TikTok user, BetterStrangerBooks (Matt Hershberger), my expectations of these Disaster Societies have been forever changed. In the video, he explains that people in the field of disaster studies have found in their research evidence that contradicts King and Darabont’s dark world. The field was developed to explore the way people would react in the event of disasters such as a nuclear apocalypse. Understanding how people will react will help us better control the populace and get us back on track. However, what they have found was that more often than naught, in disaster situations humans actually behave quite well. The narratives pushed in the media during times of crisis tend to highlight crimes like looting which occur far less and much less violently than they are reported to be. In fact, any looting that does occur is often from people needing to go to the store during a disaster and finding it closed or worse, fearing scarcity become desperate for those goods and take them. The Mist is a glimpse into a vision of the disaster society Authorities dream of.
What has been discovered by those in the disaster studies field as well as writer, Rebecca Solnit is that in times of crisis, people do not wait for authorities to get things back in line but instead quickly work to support and help one another. In her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit describes them as Disaster Utopias citing incidents such as 9/11 where civilians were seen helping others get to safety, even at the risk of their own lives long before the first responders arrived. Hershberger goes on to explain the Manhattan Boatlift incident in which civilians with boats from New Jersey, Staten Island, and other neighboring areas achieved a bigger rescue than that of Dunkirk in World War II. Solnit explores how the only ones this narrative of Disaster Societies serves are those already in control. Enforcing these horror scenarios in which the world is plunged into chaos if left unattended allows them to swoop back in and regain control. In an article on Alta Journal online titled, Rebecca Solnit Considers Disaster Utopias, writer Anita Felicelli enforces Solnit’s understanding of the strength of our communities without authority.
Early in the book, for instance, she disarms us with the story of a blackout in New York City in 2003 that revealed the Milky Way, long hidden from view by light pollution. Far from serving as a source of panic, the blackout becomes a metaphor for the brief utopias that bloom after disaster, showing humans what they could be to one another. Solnit explains that the current social order is “something akin to this artificial light: another kind of power that fails in disaster.” She doesn’t see our hierarchical, stratified social order as inevitable; it’s human-made, which means we can unmake it too.
Solnit reasons that we have a much stronger connection to our community and are innately capable of activism and support of our neighbors. We have a desire and need to care for each other. As Kat explained in our Swarm episode, we’re hard-wired for connection. What keeps us from that free connection and support is an authoritative minority that wields the messages keeping us obedient. These forces, like King, thrive on a narrative in which humans are vulnerable and selfish. Felicelli argues that Solnit believes strongly in humanity’s potential. If people know how to strengthen the social fabric with moral action in such instances, why is it so challenging to create a society in which we make sure neighbors are given shelter and food and civic love predominates?
In one of Solnit’s Disaster Utopias, the monsters in the Mist would be no threat at all. We can envision an alternative ending to one so notoriously grim, one in which the neighbors of this small town work together to reinforce the windows and doors and hunker down until help arrives. In this utopia, Brent and David are able to put aside their differences and work together to protect their home and neighbors. But more importantly, in this utopia, I never have to see a man disintegrate into a million spiders in my nightmares forever.This film made me realize I’m not actually scared of the ocean, not really. What I now know with every fiber of my being is that my real fear is exploding into a pool of spiders. My real fear is the hellish spider-based apocalypse that has giant acid-slinging spiders that lay eggs in your ENTIRE BODY while you are still alive. That is an apocalypse I wish to immediately die in. I don’t care if the scary part ends after 4 days, I do not need to survive this version of the apocalypse as I would never emotionally recover from seeing a whole man melt and then explode into a pool of spiders. I would be forever changed in an irreparable way, to the point where honestly you could not convince me that I was ever safe again. Before watching this film I don’t think I had seen an apocalypse scenario that I was absolutely fine with dying in the first 3 seconds of, but now I do. It is a relief to know that if an apocalypse does take place, it will likely not play out the way we see positioned in the Mist. As Gabe outlined nicely, people will more than likely rise to the occasion.
This is not to say that there aren’t people out there who would absolutely use the apocalypse for the staging ground of their darker desires surrounding violence and control, the argument mostly is that those people do not make up the majority. If we’re following Assassination Nation logic, then 10% of people are good, 10% bad, and 80% somewhere in the middle, but can be inspired in either direction. The important piece is which direction people are inspired to follow. In the book Gabe brings up A Paradise Built In Hell Solnit reinforces the idea that the direction people are inspired to follow matters, by saying: Belief lags behind, and often the worst behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism. From the earthquake that shattered San Francisco in 1906 to flooded New Orleans in 2005, innocents have been killed by people who believed or asserted that their victims were the criminals and they themselves were the protectors of the shaken order. Beliefs matter. This take, suggests that society has an influence on our perception of what good and bad can be. Morality, as much as many people would argue is objective, is scientifically from an anthropological standpoint, subjective to the individual, group, etc. Someone’s understanding of justice will influence how they act in an emergency scenario. The beliefs we have about our fellow humans also influence this, which is why media that reinforces allegiance to the oppressor is dangerous. Media that perpetuates mistrust of the humans around us reinforces our isolation from each other. The media we consume influences our perception of other people, and can either be used to unite us, or divide us.
This could transform by how connected you are to people within your community. Many communities are already built on the understanding of looking out for one another, with committees and people within it that act as an inspiration to the people who live there to follow that understanding. So if you’re like me and don’t know any of your neighbors, and actively avoid talking to anyone you don’t already know…this might help motivate you to establish lines of connection to the people around you. It is the people around you that make survival in these scenarios possible. So as motivation for establishing these connections, and building spaces of comradery and care for each other, you increase your chances of surviving this kind of scenario, as well as any other disaster. Solnit says: The argument against such keeping is often framed as an argument about human nature: we are essentially selfish, and because you will not care for me, I cannot care for you. I will not feed you because I must hoard against starvation, since I too cannot count on others. Better yet, I will take your wealth and add it to mine- if I believe that my well-being is independent of yours or pitted against yours- and justify my conduct as natural law. This understanding sounds familiar as it is built into much of our understanding of capitalism, in terms of individualistic thinking, and the survival of the fittest mentality. The media we usually see surrounding the apocalypse generally suggests that capitalism and the harsh, cruel way it operates is inherent to us. It is built into human nature. That even in the deconstruction of society, humans will lean into this way of thinking. The book positions the opposite, and although I don’t know if this was their intention, it inspires a reality where we are not doomed to capitalism forever. In fact, it’s argued that to act in this individualistic and selfish way, where we reject protecting each other creates a world where everyday life becomes a social disaster. When in reality, while sometimes disasters intensifies this, sometimes it provides a remarkable reprieve from it, a view into another world for our other selves.
We saw this play out somewhat during the pandemic, where many community groups, families, and neighborhoods worked together to uplift each other. Creating support systems for childcare, food, etc. Family units becoming more connected and realizing that being home and away from work was more meaningful. Many finally slowed down enough to be able to see what was happening around them. We even saw a slight shift in our government providing aid it previously claimed was impossible through stimulus checks, increases to welfare programs, healthcare, unemployment support, etc.. Inversely we saw companies exploit already vulnerable populations to expand their own wealth. Both exist, but both show the great capacity for good the majority of people have, as well as the true face of others. The book continues to really position the power of belief and how that influences our actions as humans, it also provides many anecdotal experiences of people building strength and community in times of government and media absence. The take away being that if we truly believe that humans will act as they do in the Mist, it is more likely to play out that way, but if we believe and inspire kindness and care, most people will return that energy.
Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: What is a Disaster Utopia by Kat Kushin
RED: Quotes, someone else's words.
This film made me realize I’m not actually scared of the ocean, not really. What I now know with every fiber of my being is that my real fear is exploding into a pool of spiders. My real fear is the hellish spider-based apocalypse that has giant acid-slinging spiders that lay eggs in your ENTIRE BODY while you are still alive. That is an apocalypse I wish to immediately die in. I don’t care if the scary part ends after 4 days, I do not need to survive this version of the apocalypse as I would never emotionally recover from seeing a whole man melt and then explode into a pool of spiders. I would be forever changed in an irreparable way, to the point where honestly you could not convince me that I was ever safe again. Before watching this film I don’t think I had seen an apocalypse scenario that I was absolutely fine with dying in the first 3 seconds of, but now I do. It is a relief to know that if an apocalypse does take place, it will likely not play out the way we see positioned in the Mist. As Gabe outlined nicely, people will more than likely rise to the occasion.
This is not to say that there aren’t people out there who would absolutely use the apocalypse for the staging ground of their darker desires surrounding violence and control, the argument mostly is that those people do not make up the majority. If we’re following Assassination Nation logic, then 10% of people are good, 10% bad, and 80% somewhere in the middle, but can be inspired in either direction. The important piece is which direction people are inspired to follow. In the book Gabe brings up A Paradise Built In Hell Solnit reinforces the idea that the direction people are inspired to follow matters, by saying: Belief lags behind, and often the worst behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism. From the earthquake that shattered San Francisco in 1906 to flooded New Orleans in 2005, innocents have been killed by people who believed or asserted that their victims were the criminals and they themselves were the protectors of the shaken order. Beliefs matter. This take, suggests that society has an influence on our perception of what good and bad can be. Morality, as much as many people would argue is objective, is scientifically from an anthropological standpoint, subjective to the individual, group, etc. Someone’s understanding of justice will influence how they act in an emergency scenario. The beliefs we have about our fellow humans also influence this, which is why media that reinforces allegiance to the oppressor is dangerous. Media that perpetuates mistrust of the humans around us reinforces our isolation from each other. The media we consume influences our perception of other people, and can either be used to unite us, or divide us.
This could transform by how connected you are to people within your community. Many communities are already built on the understanding of looking out for one another, with committees and people within it that act as an inspiration to the people who live there to follow that understanding. So if you’re like me and don’t know any of your neighbors, and actively avoid talking to anyone you don’t already know…this might help motivate you to establish lines of connection to the people around you. It is the people around you that make survival in these scenarios possible. So as motivation for establishing these connections, and building spaces of comradery and care for each other, you increase your chances of surviving this kind of scenario, as well as any other disaster. Solnit says: The argument against such keeping is often framed as an argument about human nature: we are essentially selfish, and because you will not care for me, I cannot care for you. I will not feed you because I must hoard against starvation, since I too cannot count on others. Better yet, I will take your wealth and add it to mine- if I believe that my well-being is independent of yours or pitted against yours- and justify my conduct as natural law. This understanding sounds familiar as it is built into much of our understanding of capitalism, in terms of individualistic thinking, and the survival of the fittest mentality. The media we usually see surrounding the apocalypse generally suggests that capitalism and the harsh, cruel way it operates is inherent to us. It is built into human nature. That even in the deconstruction of society, humans will lean into this way of thinking. The book positions the opposite, and although I don’t know if this was their intention, it inspires a reality where we are not doomed to capitalism forever. In fact, it’s argued that to act in this individualistic and selfish way, where we reject protecting each other creates a world where everyday life becomes a social disaster. When in reality, while sometimes disasters intensifies this, sometimes it provides a remarkable reprieve from it, a view into another world for our other selves.
We saw this play out somewhat during the pandemic, where many community groups, families, and neighborhoods worked together to uplift each other. Creating support systems for childcare, food, etc. Family units becoming more connected and realizing that being home and away from work was more meaningful. Many finally slowed down enough to be able to see what was happening around them. We even saw a slight shift in our government providing aid it previously claimed was impossible through stimulus checks, increases to welfare programs, healthcare, unemployment support, etc.. Inversely we saw companies exploit already vulnerable populations to expand their own wealth. Both exist, but both show the great capacity for good the majority of people have, as well as the true face of others. The book continues to really position the power of belief and how that influences our actions as humans, it also provides many anecdotal experiences of people building strength and community in times of government and media absence. The take away being that if we truly believe that humans will act as they do in the Mist, it is more likely to play out that way, but if we believe and inspire kindness and care, most people will return that energy.