Many a filmmaker has come a serious cropper in the attempt to translate Stephen King’s page-turning horror fiction to the screen; for every Shining, there’s a Lawnmower Man, for every Dead Zone, a Silver Bullet. Director Frank Darabont, however, has now scored an impressive hat-trick, following the hugely popular Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile with an often superb screen version of the author’s 1980 novella The Mist.

The film’s premise is quite as simple as that of the source mat­erial: after a freak storm trashes his house, David Drayton (Thomas Jane) takes his young son into town to pick up some supplies. Here, he finds himself amongst a motley group of locals under siege in the local grocery store when a mysterious mist descends on the town, blanketing everything in white and containing unseen horr­ors that pick off anyone unwary enough to venture outside.

From the start, there’s a lot going on behind the deceptively simple set-up. On the one hand (or, should I say, tentacle?), we’re in Lovecraft territory (think ‘The Colour Out of Space’), with suggestions of something ghastly coming from far beyond the Earth. On the other, this is a variant on Night of the Living Dead’s picture of social breakdown, as one of King’s trademark ‘knowable comm­unities’ dissolves under pressure into mutually antagonistic interest groups identified by race, class and creed. And set apart from the rest are the three soldiers from the local military base (shorthand for every black op, secret project and reverse-engineered alien techno­logy you’ve ever read about) trapped with the townsfolk. Could the mist – and the oversized nasties writhing, flapp­ing and scuttling within it – be the result of some terribly hubristic man-made scientific disaster, the equivalent of the radioactive horr­ors of the 1950s film cycle that King once said was the original inspiration for his tale?

The film’s visual style is as back-to-basics as its subject, offering a far grittier approach than you’d expect from the director of the elegant Shawshank Redemption; this is fast, low-budget film-making characterised by simple set-ups and fluid, sometimes documentary-style, camera-work. The mist itself – its terrifying whiteness (the colour of Moby-Dick or the Mountains of Madness) a dazzling inversion of the horror film’s preferred MO – is, at least for the film’s early stages, a wonderfully evocative and effect­ive presence, claggily tangible and filled by the imagination with every unpleasant possibility. Some of this suggestive power, inevitably, is lost when such fears are made concrete through not always entirely convincing special effects, although these do add to the pleasurable feel of a particularly memorable B-movie.

On the debit side, King gives us yet another portrait of a religious nutcase in the shape of Mrs Carmody (a way-over-the-top Marcia Gay Harden), who manipulates the townspeople with her apocalyptic interpretation of the mist as God’s anger at sinning humankind. This trite subplot, which Darabont obviously and mistakenly thinks is important, takes up far too much screen time and induces some unwelcome drag into the film’s middle section. Also problematic is the ending that Darabont has added to King’s inconclusive original – some have seen it as powerfully dark, but it’s really just glib, ratcheting the film’s horror down a few gears from the cosmic to the merely personal. Darabont should have learnt from the other great movie that hovers over his film from start to finish: Hitchcock’s The Birds. The Mist, I suspect, should have simply faded to white.