The Mist: A Cthulhoid Extravaganza

I never read the novella, and first heard of the movie when I was googling for info on Cloverfield a few months back; it was one of a number that Cloverfield got compared to by viewers, with mixed reactions. It wasn’t enough to motivate me to see it at the time however, and I promptly forgot about The Mist until it showed up in our Blockbuster mail rentals a few days ago.

Although I doubt there are many people who have not yet seen it that would still be interested, I’ll throw in the mandatory disclaimer: this is full of spoilers. That said I can’t say I’d recommend this to everyone, so reading this may be preferable – for now I’ll just say that the movie is well done, but has 1-2 parts that may be a bit much even for regular horror fans...

This was a very creepy movie. I don’t like everything that I’ve seen/read from Stephen King, but he is undeniably a master of character development and of getting under the viewer’s skin, and both effects were in full throttle throughout this flick’s 2 hrs 5 minutes.

The movie’s namesake shows up rather quickly and without a lot of advance warning – you get introduced to the main character David Drayton and watch some brief character development before the cast is assembled in a supercenter (kind of a colossal general store a la Walmart), where they will be spending most of the movie trying to hold it together and keep the creepies out.

As it happens a nearby military base has been conducting experiments on ways to view and interact with other dimensions, and (surprise!) Something Went Wrong ™ (and in fine Evil Government tradition the experiments of course have to be conducted at a base near a population center).

We don’t know what exactly happened there, but it seems likely that the base wasn’t overrun all at once; among the supercenter’s refugees are 3 soldiers who had originally planned on stopping just to pick up supplies and leave town before the mist overtook them, so there was probably some initial attempts at a holding action.

The mist turns out to contain a variety of invariably nasty things; basically a collection of weird super-predators from beyond, who are mostly confounded by the tall sheets of plate glass separating them from the folks huddled inside the supercenter, only accidentally getting inside once.

Early on, the citizens learn that no one survives for more than a few seconds outside or near open doors (well almost no one – in a miraculous stroke of serendipity one woman manages to walk home and reach safety though we only learn she made it at the end of the movie), so everyone cringes together watching the mist through the windows, slowly going to pieces.

A little after darkfall, a swarm of massive dragonfly/wasp things dot the glass, attracted to the lights inside. By itself this isn’t a problem, except that these huge bugs are being hunted by man-sized pterodactyl flyers which end up cracking and then breaking the glass as they fly down to snatch their prey, and soon both species get their first taste of human.

Although most survive to see morning, this event accelerates the crowd’s descent into collective madness and causes them to merge around the town’s crazy woman Mrs. Carmody in a scenario reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. Mrs. Carmody interprets the Mist as the biblical Armageddon, and doesn’t have to work very hard to sell the idea to her terrified co-refugees.

One thing I do want to say on this – a lot of the reviews I’ve read of this movie are careful to mention that the reviewers found the people scarier than the monsters. Come on. I know it’s cool to do the I’ve seen the enemy and it is US thing, but seriously, while I do agree it would be quite alarming to be stuck amidst a mob of desperate hysterical people like this, I have to say I’d take the lot of them over a nest of tentacles wetly splitting open to reveal hissing, vertical mouths lined with fangs, and I suspect most anyone else would too were they faced with the situation. I mean there’s a reason why these people are sticking together and not running outside to escape eachother and take their chances with the monsters – it’s because the monsters are frickin’ scary, and not merely in a metaphorical sense.

Anyway, before long the scared mob has turned angry and begins arranging human sacrifices under Carmody’s direction, in an effort to appease the things in the mist (never mind that this is set in Maine where most if not all of the people in the store would be familiar with the idea that leaving food outside just attracts large predators).

As a result Drayton finally feels compelled to lead the last few Independent Thinkers away from the frothing herd in a last dash for safety, killing Mrs. Carmody and losing a few of their own to outside critters in the process, and ultimately making a triumphant drive by the storefront windows in the hero’s Range Rover as the others look on in slack jawed despair like so many cavemen whose last carefully hoarded ember has extinguished in the rain.

We get to see the state of the countryside in the mist’s aftermath – giant spiders have everything webbed and cocooned, including Drayton’s wife who he left at home in the beginning of the movie. Strange hoots and grunts sound in the mist, and at one point a towering six legged thing slowly stomps past, not noticing their tiny car below.

This is the point where I’m told the novella ended at – a scene of uncertainty amidst sprawling tragedy, ruin, desolation and general monstrosity. Unfortunately screenwriter/director Frank Darabont chose to extend it a few scenes farther, following Drayton’s rover until it runs out of gas – he and his passengers then agree that he should mercy kill them with the remaining four bullets in his revolver.

Including his young son, who has just awoken from a shock induced nap.

This accomplished, Drayton has no bullet left for himself and must nerve himself up to leave the car and wait for the nearest creepy-crawly to make a lunch out of him.

It is not to be however, as the US military chooses that moment to make a grand entrance with tank treads rolling and flamethrowers blazing – too late for Drayton’s son and fellow travelers though, in a parting attempt at Hitchcockian irony. Or something.

This is what I was getting at when I said not everyone is going to be glad they saw this movie; it wasn’t that the director chose to sacrifice a small child for gruesome effect – after all this is a “horror” film, not merely a “thriller”, and so this scene is therefore not (quite) out of bounds even if it is a tasteless kidney punch.

There were two material reasons why I hated this ending. Number one, it makes the last two hours of grueling struggle for survival seem almost silly when the military can abruptly show up, fan away the mist and casually wipe out all the baddies that previously had seemed so hopelessly insurmountable – you can almost hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic blaring away in the background as the Good Guys arrive and save the day in true B movie fashion.

Number two and even more importantly though – to end the movie with the military so supremely dominant is to all but deny the possibility of a sequel, at least one with anything approaching the same level of epic scale; if the army can smush these bugs so easily, then no critters will be left for a sequel save those that managed to find a basement or abandoned warehouse to hide in, which is still creepy but not the kind of pervasive miasma of dread that is the brand of The Mist.

This by the way gets at one of my pet peeves with Hollywood; the sense that movies must start in the here and now, and must end there as well, or as near as possible - you just can't burden the viewer with either the sense that the movie's events might have sweeping and long term effects (too scary even for a horror movie I guess), or with having to pick up part 2 where the story left off at the end of part 1. In the novella, the world (seemingly) ended, and stayed that way - in the movie, we just had a Close Call.

Although the talk of dimensions and the mist’s origins were very brief and vague, they (along with the mostly unique and slimy appearance of the monsters of course) did a great deal to support the sense that this movie was a kind of Cthulhoid feature – literally small town folk being menaced by extra-dimensional horrors. I don’t know why but I find those sort of movies strangely appealing, and so The Mist was a bit of a treat for me even while I was pretty much constantly wincing in anticipation of the next critter pounce; so it was that much more annoying to me to have the door slammed on the idea at the end – particularly after the book itself apparently did such a good job of setting the stage for further adventures.

Personally I would have liked to know more about the nature of the experiments that opened the portal onto the other dimension, and even a bit about what was on the other side; I pictured a crazy jungle world of titanic proportion (hence all the mist flowing through - I'm picturing something like the jungle in King Kong 2005 but on steroids), teeming with all manner of nasty flora and fauna struggling to eat and not be eaten.

The sequel practically writes itself; Drayton's crew could pick up a lone survivor who turns out to be one of the scientists from the base, a ghost of a woman stricken by her conscience and who convinces them their only hope is to help her get to the heart of the dragon’s lair and close the portal. It would give us a look at the aftermath at the base, and a chance to see more critters – maybe some new ones… not to mention the portal itself, sure to be a pretty dramatic sight.

The scientist could be a "xenobiologist" whose job was to study and catalogue the different life forms on the other side of the portal; maybe she was married to one of the other scientists on the team, and had misgivings about the whole idea but ultimately went along with it. Her survival in the aftermath could then have come from a combination of insights into how to evade the critters by staying in their "blind spots" and perhaps some bits of sophisticated lab tech she was able to grab on the way out (whose batteries would now be very low on juice), and so she would be a source of specialized info on the gribblies in the mist, which would provide Drayton with the tools to take a more aggressive role in Mist 2, as well as providing some info for the audience's morbid curiosity; what exactly are all these freaky claws, fangs, tentacles, toxins and other random appendages etc evolved in response to? If they're going to go to so much trouble to make these critters original why not share some of the details with the viewers?

The idea of following a horror movie with a horror/thriller is not without precedent - think about the Aliens series. Alien is indisputably a horror flick first and a sci-fi flick second, while the two elements are more evenly balanced in Aliens. Similarly you could have The Mist with the ending from the novella, followed by something with more allowances made in the plot to give a look at "ground zero" and the other dimension.

But no. All that potential gets tossed aside in favor of a Really Clever Twist to ring in the credits. The other 95% of the movie was good, but this was one time when a movie suffered from a lack of cut scenes, as though the Director decided he was going to show those know-nothings in marketing and swap in the “director’s cut” for mass release at the last second. Or maybe everyone on set thought it was a good idea to tack on the new ending.

Which is a scary thought.

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Cloverfield - What the Hell Is It?

Note: this post is my best attempt at making some sense of this movie and tying together as many loose ends as possible, by researching the internet and filling in blanks with my best guess, so for people like me who saw the movie and had a lot of questions, this might be your thing - for folks who haven't seen it yet and just want the general flavor, this is not a movie review.

I saw the "JJ Abrams Production" trailer last Fall, thought it was cool, and then forgot about it till shortly after the movie came out, when I overhead some people talking about it (full disclosure: the "people" I overheard were other World of Warcraft players) and remembered why it sounded familiar. After that I got completely caught up in the E-buzz, saw the movie, and then spent lots and lots of time playing the "game"; I googled like never before looking for images of the Cloverfield monster, the parasites, anything I could find on the movie.

Since then I've caught myself lying awake at night thinking about it, and decided enough is enough, so I'm going to put down my best shot at making sense of it all and tying it together in hopes of getting it out of my head:

Wild Cloverfield Speculations

Cloverfield Origin

First and foremost it should be kept in mind that the design of Cloverfield and his parasites emphasized form over substance, per their lead creature designer Neville Page (“make it cool first then justify it later”), and I think everything about the movie proceeds from there.

What we do know about Cloverfield is that he is a newborn baby, who had previously been in a gestative state at the bottom of the sea for “thousands and thousands of years”. His motivation for attacking Manhattan? He is confused, frightened, angry, and itchy.

Physiologically he is around 250 feet tall, bipedal with two long primary arms and a smaller pair of secondary arms tucked in around his lower abdomen, a nasty fishlike face with some kind of breathing bladder on the back of his head and a flattened tail which [may indicate] an evolution from something more fishlike/aquatic, according to Page.

So, was he terrestrial or extraterrestrial? While the designers were careful not to commit 100% either way, I’m betting on terrestrial; not only did Neville Page seem to lean heavily in this direction, the only comments even potentially suggesting otherwise are Matt Reeves’ references to the falling object at the end of the movie; I’m not sure what his intentions were in emphasizing that but don’t think he was suggesting some kind of an “alien crash landing” background as that would be inconsistent with the declaration that Clover had been in the ocean for “thousands and thousands of years”, above.

(That said, I wouldn’t put it past JJ to still go with the alien origin in Cloverfield 2, just to throw fans a curveball – that would be in keeping with his style in Lost).

However going with the terrestrial origin does raise more questions namely “when and where would the species first appear” and “how would it have lived”?

There are a few hints suggesting that cloverfields have always lived in (or under) the deep sea, suggesting something a bit like “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, where fantastic creatures have lived in deep places undiscovered for untold millennia.

Personally I favor something a little more integrated with the known world (not because it’s more plausible but because I think it’s cooler), so here’s my spin: going from the Hasbro toy model you can see that it has (almost) nothing in the way of really obvious tools for aquatic living; I see just the very traces of webbing between its fingers and toes, and no fins beyond the slight protrusions on the sides of its (not very long) tail – the one real exception here is the “breather bag” on the back of its head.

Since it wouldn’t be much of a swimmer, the best it could really hope for then in the way of catching a meal underwater would be to maybe dig a (really big) hole, cover itself up, and try to grab passing fish/sharks/whales/etc with its insanely long primary arms. Not very likely though – the creatures who do this kind of thing tend to be flattened for easier concealment e.g. crabs, rays, flounder etc, and not ginormous gangly upright things like Clover.

More likely then Clover belongs to a species of giant amphibians whose heyday was back in the age of the dinosaurs, when they would lurk just offshore and grab large prey that came too close to the water’s edge – there were lots of big things to eat back then, and Clover’s mantis/bat-like primary arms are among his most obviously specialized features so I can’t think of a better application for them than that. Being amphibious they could also make short dashes from the water if needed, like a massive crocodile.

This would explain them being 99% suited to hunting on or near land with the ability to hang out under water while sleeping, mating or otherwise waiting for the next meal to come walking by (which is also the only place something that large could exist for any real length of time, incidentally, without super-thick legs to support it – although there may be more to it than that). Being incredibly large and tough they probably were also capable of trudging along the ocean floor, and I imagine them making trips in this manner to the deepest parts of the ocean when spawning or in the final years of their life (returning to their instinctive spawning place).

So why weren’t any fossils found? Fossil locations are found in places where animals die, and something that large and tough probably couldn’t be killed by anything else, which would limit potential remains to the extreme ocean depths (any killed by their own species likewise would have been dragged far down for later consumption).

Slusho/Tagruato

Here is where we get into the pre-1/18 viral marketing. What was Slusho and what was its connection to Clover? At the Slusho site they relate the story of how the parent company CEO Ganu Yoshida discovered a fluid on the ocean floor that was “near frozen” and under “amazing pressure”; this stuff has all kinds of amazing properties most notably of making people ecstatically happy, and became the base ingredient for Slusho, called “Seabed’s Nectar”. This seems to have occurred in 1989, when “a brilliant young engineer named Ganu Yoshida was in search of an avenue to support his off-shore drilling revelations” and took over the ailing Tagruato Corporation, backed by a team of investors (the company is described as having its “main focus” on “deep sea Petroleum excavation”, but this sounds like an early sop to investors while Tagruato explored various profitable uses for Deepsea’s Nectar such as Slusho and biomedical applications, and ParafFUN wax which appears to be a kind of nectar/petroleum fusion).

The first such rig was Jimmu Station, built in Japan’s Inland Sea in 1991. Thirteen more have been built since, the latest being Chuai Station, located in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and going into operation in 2007.

Shortly afterward January 08 is a busy month; we learn that Seabed’s Nectar gains approval from the “AFA” (a sometime stand-in for the FDA), and that Ganu himself has come to New York to discuss the distribution of Slusho into the US via “pre-established public waterways”. Furthermore the Chuai Station is destroyed under mysterious circumstances that are blamed on a random eco-terrorist group, and tankers are going missing en route to New York (according to the translation of the Japanese report), and finally, early in the movie we learn on the news cast that the last one capsized in New York Harbor just prior to Cloverfield’s rampage.

Sifting through this jumble of info-bits you get the sense that Deepsea’s Nectar is a kind of super-enriched amniotic fluid (in particular note the comments re: its effects on puppies and kittens – “Kittens love Slusho! It reminds them of mother’s milk!”, and also the description of Ganu’s dream at Slusho wherein a whale (i.e. mommy-Cloverfield) tells him to drink the Deepsea’s Nectar and in doing so he himself grows to great size) secreted back in the age of the dinosaurs by a mommy-Cloverfield to contain her embryo(s). The extreme cold and pressure could have helped the stuff last over time, and there are also clues strongly suggesting it was covered over (“There are great reservoirs under the ocean floor that no one can get to due to obstruction by physical elements”), which would be necessary to protect it from hungry deep sea critters and which would in turn also necessitate active drilling to reach it.

Given that this was going on since 1989, it seems likely that many Cloverfield nests exist in our seas and oceans (it doesn’t say which rigs are devoted to petroleum and which to nectar, though we know Chuai and likely Jimmu at minimum are for nectar extraction), hidden beneath the seabed where they remained undetected until Ganu reached them with his advanced techniques and equipment (“This groundbreaking feat of industrial triumph allows for research and retrieval in areas previously unexplored by man”). However as Tagruato sought to increase production output, making “each [rig] more efficient and productive than the last”, it also caused more and more disturbance at the drill sites, finally resulting in sufficient commotion to awaken the nest’s occupant at the latest rig, Chuai Station.

From there, Clover destroyed the rig and followed the tankers that were carrying away its amniotic fluid to their destination in New York (presumably it was able to track the stuff thru the water by smell, the way a shark smells blood), where it threw a big tantrum on discovering that the Statue of Liberty was NOT Mommy (probably the last straw at that point).

Cloverfield Parasites

These are “parasites”, and therefore not some sort of offspring or otherwise related to Clover. They are eight legged, four eyed, chitinous things about the size of a dog, with a snout like an animal trap and the ability to survive long falls unhurt by folding up into a spindle. The best picture I’ve managed to find so far is a modelling clay sculpture here.

Shed by Clover as he makes his way about New York, they scuttle around and serve mainly to keep the sense of threat ever-present by denying humans any sanctuary; not only can they reach you wherever you hide, they can even get inside you by way of their peculiar saliva/venom, which is administered through a bite and can cause you to later explode if enough of the stuff gets into you (the brief view of the soldier on the gurney shows the end result to be the evacuation of the torso/abdominal area by the way and not an exploding head).

Now how exactly does that effect work? Is it some kind of gas or chemical reaction, and if so to what purpose – simply killing the victim, or is death the byproduct of making the victim easier to consume? Or is it some form of reproduction a la Aliens?

There is no definite answer to this since Marlena meets her end behind a tarp, however we can find some clues in the comments of Abrams and Page, where the parasites are described as flea-like and causing Clover skin irritation.

To succeed as a flea on something like a cloverfield, you would need a very specialized means of feeding off of it. After all if Clover’s hide can stop tank rounds, bombs and RPGs, you aren’t just going to be able to latch on and expect to get any blood or digestible material with a simple bite – you need something like the anti-coagulant of a flea or mosquito.

We know that the anti-coagulant of the above critters does indeed cause the itching described by Abrams, so proceeding on that assumption we could assume Marlena exploded due to a massive super-hemorrhage (I’m no medical student, but “hemorrhage” is described by www.thefreedictionary.com as “Excessive discharge of blood from the blood vessels; profuse bleeding”, which does seem to fit with the idea of an anti-coagulant – and you can’t get more “excessive” than what happened to poor Marlena). This theory is further supported by the fact she was bleeding from the eyes as well as the nose and mouth just prior to blowing up, and the only thing I know of that can cause that kind of bleeding is a massive increase in blood pressure.

So, adding all that together I think the parasite bite effect is most likely caused by a monster-strength anti-coagulant in the parasite’s saliva, and is not a means of reproduction.

But where would the parasites come from and why haven’t they been seen before – not even fossil remains? Well if you go with the idea of cloverfields as shoreside lurkers, then it follows that these bugs would be all over the place, so the only way to avoid fossil remains would be if their hardest parts were a kind of cartillage i.e. nothing hard enough to stay around long enough for fossilization. This would help explain why they were able to survive the 200+ foot fall from Clover’s back, as well as being in-line with Page’s comments on the parasites being “thin and vertical and light” AND for that matter would also explain why mere humans were able to squash them with clubs and axes.

I imagine the ones in the movie to have been trapped in the Deepsea’s Nectar, shed by Clover’s mom during the egg laying process the way fleas fall off animals every few seconds, and kept alive in a state of suspended animation by the same process that kept Clover alive all those years.

Cloverfield Resilience

How was Cloverfield able to survive hits from rockets, missiles, bombs, tank rounds and etc?

Being 250 feet tall, Clover has a lot of mass to absorb incoming damage. As far as I know this is way beyond the scale of anything we know today (the largest recorded whales were around 100 ft long, as were the largest recorded dinosaurs), and so the effects of conventional weaponry are a bit of an unknown here (and remember he is just a “baby” – an adult Cloverfield probably stands somewhere in the neighborhood of 500-1000 feet).

We do know that the military succeeded in hurting Clover, from Abrams’ comments about the critter being maddened by the stinging of our shells and rockets, and from the way it briefly collapsed after being carpet bombed near the end – and yet it never seemed to actually show any signs of bleeding or long term debilitation.

I’m thinking that the lack of bleeding was due to a super-powerful blood coagulating ability, something that actually seeded wounds with stem cells rather than just lots of interlocking platelets (giving the sealed wound the appearance of whole flesh) and which might have evolved in response to the super-anticoagulant in the saliva of their parasites.

It would also be inherently tough from being adapted to surviving extreme ranges of pressure in its journeys about the ocean floor – yes some deep sea creatures are soft and flabby, but that doesn’t mean something else couldn’t adapt by being super tough. This could include a lack of any gas or air pockets within its body, which are the most vulnerable to decompression and are minimized or omitted entirely by things living at extreme depths. Lacking those cavities would make it that much more resistant to punctures and concussions.

But probably the single most dramatic defense Clover possesses is at the cellular level – more than likely the properties found in Deepsea’s Nectar (“accelerated cell growth, increased strength, increased soft muscle tissue growth, sharper eyesight [and] better digestion”) persist within the creature itself, making it incredibly strong and resilient even for its size (which could explain not only its resilience but also why it can remain out of water for long periods of time, and defy the normal laws of physics mandating thicker legs for large land creatures).

All that being said, I do think the military could have taken it out – given enough time. But Clover denied them that opportunity with its mobility and ability to destroy anything shooting at it before the incoming firepower could focus and wear down its defenses.

And that's it. Needless to say I loved the movie and do hope they come out with a sequel (Aladgyma?); it would be cool to see more Cloverfields emerging, or more of the original one, whatever. While I wouldn't object much to another Blair Witch/camcorder style angle, I kind of would prefer something a little more classical -- the schtick worked great for me in Cloverfield 1 but doing it repeatedly might get old.

And hopefully no more of the viral marketing either. Continue reading