I know what you're thinking The Mist is The Fog part two but not really.

This is from the Steven King short story, which tends to put a red flag up for me because stretching a short story into a one-hundred and ten or twenty page script quite often tends to be fatal, but I'll raise my flag at half staff this time.

Don't get me wrong there is a small similarity to The Fog. After a storm moves through a small town, a mysterious fog rolls in with something violent within trapping an artist and his young son in a grocery store with people from town.

This is where the similarity ends.

When a man just narrowly escapes being killed and enters the store he tells of a top secret experiment called 'The Arrow Head Project'. To make a long story short (or a short story even shorter), the project caused an interdimensional rift that let loose different types of creatures into their world.

So you see this is more of a sci-fi horror if you really think about it.

The reviews are already out, and a lot of people don't like the dramatic nature of the film complaining of long dialogue and taking a lot of time to get to the good stuff in a horror flick.

The problem is a difficult one for a writer to master in a piece like this. The cast of characters include a lawyer that wants a logical reason for this, a religious fanatic that thinks it's the rapture, and a father just trying to protect his son.

Now that's a lot of character development to write into a script, and to add to it is Steven King's subtext of the hysteria that takes over these people while being trapped, to the point of wanting to use the five-year-old kid like some sort of sick religious sacrifice.

For those of you that don't understand why this is such a big deal to tie it all up into a neat little horror script I'm about to slip you a little screenwriting 101 industry knowledge.

Due to a book written by a man named Syd Field, a man that never sold a script, or wrote a script, screenwriters are encouraged (and sometimes flat out told) by their agents, and producers to wrap up thier character intros by page 15 (now a days pg.13). This is roughly, and very loosely, equal to 15 minutes of film time.

In some cases 15 pages of a script can be shot and edited down to 5-8 minutes.

Now in a horror film that basically means either you hint at something terrifying or people should be dead already. As a matter of fact I did my own survey asking people :

"how many minutes should be allowed to pass in a horror film from scary scene to scary scene?"

On average most people said no more than 3 minutes should be allowed to pass before something scary/gory/frightening happens. This is tough to do when you need that precious paper to explain the characters to your audience. When you don't, you get complaints like the ones we hear about in movies like 30 Days Of Night--not enough character development!

So The Mist has a lot of character development and not enough scares. I think he could have cut out some of the drama though and still got a decent effect but I think he could have gotten confused and thought he was making another Green Mile or Shawshank Redemption when he originally signed on to do a horror .

Or maybe he got caught in the middle of a changing environment, caught in the middle of a time in Hollywierd where they are trying to bring back the more brutal "R" rated horror.

Maybe time will forgive him and people will learn to love the film. Who knows it might end up on the sci-fi channel and develop a following.

Or maybe in twenty years it will become a rekmake.