The Mist

The Mist website: http://www.themist-movie.com/

The film The Mist has been released onto DVD in Britain after a strangely long wait. I bought my copy from the United States on a Region 1 DVD which means I can only watch it on my computer. But HPANWO-readers in the UK can now get their copy from a local shop. Here are some of the reviews of it:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mist/
http://www.timeout.com/film/newyork/reviews/84961/The_Mist.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/oct/26/dvdreviews-drama

The story is based on a horror novella by Stephen King and runs thus: It’s set in a small lakeside town a short distance from a secret government laboratory. After a terrible storm which blows down trees a thick mist washes over the town and reduces visibility to a few feet. The catchphrase of the film is “There’s something in the mist!” and there is! Bizarre and unearthly monsters appear and begin attacking the people. The survivors take refuge in a supermarket and wait for help. Inside their impromptu shelter they have to fight both attempted encroachments by the monsters and their own rising panic and insanity. It is revealed by one of the survivors, an army guard from the laboratory, that the scientists there were working on something called “the Arrowhead Project”, an experiment to open a “stargate”, a portal between our world and a parallel dimension. The Mist is a frightening horror film but also very thought-provoking. The idea that there are parallel dimensions is one I’m very interested in. I’ve written about it before here: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/09/flatland.html . A friend of mine, Brian Allan (http://www.p-e-g.co.uk/ ,) has researched this in depth and has written a series of absorbing books on the subject. He believes that the UFO phenomenon is interdimensional rather than extraterrestrial; that alien beings and their craft travel to our world through stargates, rather than plodding across light-years of space. In fact in his address to the conferences we’ve both attended (like this one: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/06/now-thats-weird-conference-2008.html) he describes something that I consider a real-life parable of the scenario of The Mist (although unintentional and slightly less malevolent!): the Rendlesham Forest Incident; it is one of the best-documented UFO close encounters of all time and I describe it here: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/06/rendlesham-forest-incident.html . Close to where the strange object appeared at RAF Bentwaters-Woodbridge was the secret military signals laboratory at Orford Ness, closed down since the end of the Cold War. The powerful radio transmissions from the station might have weakened or even broken the fabric of spacetime that surrounds our universe in higher dimensions, allowing the Rendlesham Forest UFO to slip through into our world and give Lt Col. Halt and his fellow airmen such a fright.

In The Magicians Nephew, the first book in the enthralling The Chronicles of Narnia series by CS Lewis, the Uncle Andrew character is talking about stargates and traveling to other dimensions, although that terminology was not used by the author; it was actually uncommon at the time the book was written. He says “You could meet anything! Absolutely anything!” and he’s correct. In a “multiverse” of higher dimensions, a la Flatland, The laws of physics could vary considerably and the physics of our universe could simply be one frequency line on an infinite spectrum of material and spatial structures. I once described The Mist as a worst-case scenario of screwing around with other dimensions, but it’s not. The worst-case scenario would be something we can’t imagine. Not “can’t imagine” in the sense that we’ve not thought of it yet, but literally unimaginable! Something beyond the ability of our minds to perceive and comprehend. This brings me back to my concerns about the Large Hadron Collider, and I’ve amended my views somewhat since I wrote this article: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/03/large-hadron-collider.html . Pretty soon we will have a machine that could possibly do the very thing that “The Arrowhead Project” does in the story, and more besides. What will happen? And if it does will we be able to comprehend the terrible thing we’ve done, or will we be unable to do even that because this universe will cease to exist in the form that we know it.

Hope I've cheered you up! Sleep tight!