Stephen King's The Mist novella, and its 2007 movie adaptation, both hint at the true cause of the monsters, but a deleted scene makes it explicit. Some mysteries are of course, best left unsolved, and that's very much true for cinema. Sometimes what the viewer doesn't know can be much more interesting, or even terrifying, than what they do. The saying that nothing is scarier than the unknown is a bit of a cliche, but at the same time, it's not wrong.
Perhaps that's what King and The Mist movie writer/director Frank Darabont were thinking when they decided to not fully explain where the titular substance and the Lovecraftian monsters within it came from. At the same time, it's natural to be curious about plot points not fully spelled out onscreen, and that often leads to debates on subjects such as what caused the zombie plague on The Walking Dead or who was really human at the end of The Thing.
Well, at one point Darabont planned to completely unravel The Mist's mystery, as a deleted prologue scene from an early draft of the script makes clear. It turns out that one of the speculated backstories presented in the film is actually true.
In The Mist movie, it's heavily implied that scientists working on something called the Arrowhead Project caused the mist and monsters to come to Earth. This is revealed by a soldier who had been stationed at the base, after two of his comrades commit suicide. However, it's by no means confirmed as the cause, and religious zealot Mrs. Carmody believes it's a punishment from God that demands human sacrifice to solve. In an early version of Frank Darabont's script though, the film began with a prologue scene at the base, in which scientists and military personnel are supervising an experiment in which they appear to be using a large metal tank with glass windows to open a portal to another dimension.
One of the scientists is worried about conducting the experiment during a thunderstorm, and sure enough, lightning strikes their electrical system, leading to a power surge that can't be stopped or contained. The mist then appears inside the tank, as well as a flash of a tentacle monster. Before long, the windows on the tank crack, then shatter, with the mist and monsters escaping through the portal. While this would've probably been a cool scene to witness, it also would've taken something away from the story to have things explained so clearly so early on, removing all of the mystery surrounding the titular mist.
Oddly enough, it was actor Andre Braugher (Brent Norton in the film) who convinced Darabont not to include the prologue scene, and thus, it was never shot. In hindsight, Darabont was glad he listened to Braugher, feeling that the expository sequence didn't fit with the rest of The Mist.
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