One thing I’ll grant The Mist is that its monsters are threatening the way Hostel‘s torturers or 28 Days Later‘s infected or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s Leatherface is threatening. There’s no hardy-har-har-it’s-a-monster stuff or pauses to stand slackjawed and gawk at them “wow!”-style, reinforcing that it’s just a movie, like, at all. The film convincingly articulates the idea that if you see these things coming after you, you will either have to kill them or be killed yourself. I feel like it’s been a long time since a movie did that with non-humanoid monsters–the bug sequence in King Kong stands out in that regard too, but before that you’d have go back to, what? They still weren’t scary, but you did at least feel that kill-or-be-killed panic.

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