So, what makes you scared? Venturing into the dark? Noises that you can’t explain? Zealots? Fucking enormous monsters with sucking tentacles? All of these and more are to be found in The Mist, Frank Darabont’s third outing with a Stephen King adaptation after The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and his first on the author’s home ground, horror.

It’s refreshing to see a horror film with a moral centre to it, and that’s what raises The Mist above most horror features you’re likely to see. A bunch of random Americans are trapped in a supermarket in the mist, and something is out there. More than one something in fact. And the longer they stay in the supermarket, the greater the tensions within the group. Consistently, it’s what people do that provides the real scares within the story: there are creatures sure enough, but it’s easy to claim that they’re acting by instinct. We’re supposed to be the ones with the capacity for reason, and that’s the first thing to go when people are under pressure.

We’ve all been in situations where things have got tense with the people around us. But we’re usually able to leave those situations, claiming other engagements or priorities. Part of King’s simple genius in this story is that there is nowhere to go…except into the unknown, about which the one thing that is known is that it’s highly dangerous out there. Imagine a dinner party with a high complement of arseholes, and the only way you can leave is to face a pack of werewolves while you’re armed with just a fire extinguisher. That’s pretty much what the characters in this story are faced with.

What with the setting being a supermarket, and there being a cross section of people there, it can’t help but feel like a microcosm of America itself under threat. And, true to life, the scariest part is when a good chunk of the people there fall under the spell of a deranged evangelist who perceives what’s happening as the realisation of all the really messed up Ray Harryhausen/Michael Bay style stuff that the Bible promises at the End of Days.

The protagonist and a few of the saner people there escape the supermarket rather than be stuck there with the zealot, driving through the mist and the monsters it contains, hoping to find an end or an answer. They come across neither. And what happens instead has to be one of the bleakest conclusions to a film I’ve seen in a long time. Which perhaps explains why the film is showing just twice a day at the cinema where I saw it, and was only selected at all because of the persistence of the film programmer at the cinema.

If that’s the case, that makes things bleaker still: are we so desperate for screenings of the film version of Sex and the City and Kung Fu Panda that we can’t stomach a film with some real intelligence and an unpopular viewpoint? Hopefully not: the recent success of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood demonstrates that there is a taste for grown up films with bleak conclusions, but maybe in the summer months we’re expected to subsist on a diet of vacuous blockbusters. And that really is a horrific thought…