If you’re looking for a family movie to enjoy this holiday weekend, you’ve got lots to choose from. But let me warn you: The Mist is not for kids, Grandma or anyone prone to bad dreams. Having years ago become jaded by horror movies, I’m not kidding when I say that this is the stuff of nightmares.

If you’re familiar with the Stephen King novella on which it is based (originally published as part of Skeleton Crew), I can tell you that the film follows it closely except for the ending. (Does the new ending wimp out? Lord, no.)

For those of you new to the story, The Mist begins with a nasty thunderstorm in a small town inhabited by a combination of locals and summer people. A group of people are at the local supermarket stocking up on supplies when a thick mist they had noticed creeping over the lake surrounds the building. As they’re puzzling over this, a horror-stricken man bursts out of the mist, warning them not to enter it. There’s something in it, and it’s deadly.

What is in the mist is not as important as how these people react. They learn soon enough than the warning is accurate. As best they can tell, the mist and its dangers have taken over the whole area, maybe the whole state, the country, the world. So what do they do?

The one thing they don’t do is agree. David (Thomas Jane), a commercial artist, sees the horrors in the mist with his own eyes. Concerned with the welfare of his young son and worried about the wife waiting at home, he heads a group trying to deal rationally with the situation. His neighbor Brent (Andre Braugher), a posturing lawyer, writes everything off as a hoax. And then there’s Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), who runs a shabby antique store. She knows the Final Days when she sees them. And she seizes a chance to turn self-righteousness into a position of power.

There are monsters a-plenty in The Mist, and they’re suitably frightful (especially the last one we see—scored to Dead Can Dance’s creepy “The Host of Seraphim,” it’s an image I found hard to shake). But what’s truly scary about this story is the speed with which these people, faced with disaster, begin to go for each others’ throats. To say the least, it is not an optimistic view of the human condition.

The Mist was scripted and directed by Frank Darabont, who is no stranger to Stephen King: He previously adapted King’s The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. He also made the neo-Frank Capra feature The Majestic, with Jim Carrey. This new film will remind you of none of those. It’s an angry, despairing movie, shot largely with hand-held cameras (taking advantage of techniques he learned while directing some episodes of the edgy cable series The Shield). The monster scenes oddly function as comic relief—they’re not funny, but they allow you a little fantasy respite from the more realistic fare of people hastening their own destruction.

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In person they look like a couple of guys you might find in a South Buffalo bar, a tall guy with a limp and farmer jeans that hang off him, and a stocky bearded bald one with an impish grin. But Stephen King is the most widely-read American writer of his time, and Frank Darabont is the first filmmaker to treat King’s novels as something more than disposable schlock (an assessment King isn’t always inclined to dispute). At a press conference last week to launch The Mist, they took questions for an hour, as much from each other as from the packed room of journalists. Some of their comments:

On what inspired King to write The Mist in the late 1970s:

Stephen King: [After publishing] Carrie and Salem’s Lot and Night Shift I was kind of stuck. I was in the local market one time and a lot of people were shopping, and I looked at the front windows and I thought, if something bad happened those windows would all bowl in, because that’s the way I think. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s been a profitable thing over the years.

On the nature of fear:

SK: I think of fear as a survival function. What I try to do is provide people with nightmares which are really safe places to put those fears for a while. Fear is a negative emotion, it’s a kind of a pit-bull in the human mind, and it needs to have a place to walk, and it needs to be petted every now and then too, and that’s what these stories try to do. Sooner or later every one of us faces these things in our own life. It might be cancer instead of things in the mist, but we’re all afraid of those things, and it seems valid to me to explore them.

Frank Darabont: The Mist is an examination of people operating in a pressure cooker where fear replaces reason. That’s why I’ve always loved this story. It wasn’t so much about the mist outside the windows with the groovy critters in it. It’s about what the people are going through inside the market. And it winds up being pretty real, and pretty disturbing because there’s nothing scarier than human nature and human behaviors.

On their collaborations:

SK: I don’t work with Frank, I just stand aside and let him do his thing. And I’m comfortable that what I get from him is usually gonna be extraordinary. I was in a supermarket in Sarasota one day, I’ve got my little cart, and I come around the corner and there’s this woman, she was about 95, and she said, “I know who you are. You write those awful horror stories. I don’t respect that. I like uplifting movies like that The Shawshank Redemption. And I said, “I wrote that.” And she said, “No you didn’t.” And she left. Talk about going surreal. And I’m thinking to myself, for a minute, Jeez, it’s not very much like my other stuff, maybe I didn’t write that one!

On the one or two (okay, 10 or 20) bad movies that have been made from King’s stories:

SK: Either they’re good or they’re bad, and if they’re bad I just laugh. There’s a story about the college newspaper reporter who came to see James M. Cain toward the end of his life. The kid was bemoaning what Hollywood had done to his books, and Cain pointed at his bookshelf and said, “They haven’t done a damn thing, son, they’re all right up there.” And that’s the case. It’s good, sometimes, and sometimes it’s…Children of the Corn. You just can’t tell what’s going to happen. But I’m always interested to see.

On what scares them personally:

FD: People. Check out the 21st century so far. I’m afraid it’s going to make the 20th look like the Romper Room. That’s actually what this movie is about. It goes back to Greek tragedy, what are people capable of when they’re influenced by lack of reason and fear.

SK: I’m afraid of everything. It shows in my work. Elevators, cars. Every night when I go to bed and nobody popped a rogue nuke somewhere in the world, I feel gratitude because we escaped for another day. Fear and anger go hand-in-hand. And when they do there’s always somebody to say: We have the only answer, so let’s get down on our knees and pray about it, and then on your way out there’s guns in the vestry.

FD: And do as you’re told or we’ll kick your ass.

SK: Or we’ll kick your ass because our god’s bigger than your god. Now I’m not saying The Mist is about those things, because that’s for you to decide, but I’m not saying that it’s not. To a degree it’s about big bugs too.

FD: Yeah, baby. We love the big bugs.

On the new ending Darabont wrote for the film:

SK: I loved it. The story has—I won’t say it’s a weak ending exactly, but it was the kind of ending that my late mother didn’t respect. She called them “Alfred Hitchcock” endings, where you were left to make up your own mind. She had nothing but contempt for that.

On whether King will ever direct another film:

SK: I’d never say never. I think it would be great sometime to direct a movie when I wasn’t coked and drunk out of my mind and see what came out. But I’m not crazy to do it.

On anger and getting older:

SK: I’m not as angry as I used to be, because I’m not 25 anymore, I’m 60, and you know, that’ll kick your ass every time. There’s an Elvis Costello song that says “I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.” And I’m not amused, but there’s a little more despair in some of my work than there used to be.

FD: He’s getting less angry, but I’m getting more and more pissed off. There is still the sunny optimist in me. He’s just getting a little beat up lately. I’m clinging to hope but it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do. I’m stuck in the middle of that argument [in Shawshank Redemption] that Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman have: Is hope a good thing or is it just stupid?

On whether the character played by Marcia Gaye Harden represents an attack on religious fundamentalists:

FD: The thing I find fascinating about watching this movie with an audience is that people really get to hate her, even superseding what the story provides. I think people are sick to death of extremists, whether its religion or politics, and they’re sick of the manipulation. Most of us want to be reasonable but extremists are screwing it up for the rest of us, and that’s why we are getting such a strong reaction to this movie.

Read interviews with The Mist co-stars Marcia Gaye Harden and Andre Braugher and director Frank Darabont at Artvoice.com.