After such nuanced and contemplative successes as “Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” both adaptations of Stephen King novels, it can easily be forgotten that writer/director Frank Darabont was also responsible for resurrecting “The Blob.” He also wrote for HBO’s “Tales from the Crypt” and wrote sequels to both “The Fly” and “Nightmare on Elm Street.” An avid reader, Darabont fell in love with King in high school when a copy of “The Shining” fell into his hands, and he has obviously been studying the man’s work with close attention ever since. His first directorial effort in 1983 was, in fact, an adaptation of the short story “Woman in the Room,” from King’s “Night Shift” collection.

Darabont and King seem to share a thoughtful and well exercised affinity for the creeping darkness of life, which has certainly helped qualify him far better than the hundred other directors who have tried to translate for the screen King’s infamously wicked characters and situations.

Darabont also shows deep appreciation for good old-fashioned cheapo drive-in monster movies, and with “The Mist,” he has set out to create exactly that. Borrowing a TV production crew from a recent job directing TV’s “The Shield,” he attempts here to update some classic genre conventions by infusing the proceedings with the distinctly modern “shoot from the hip” docu-cam style recently made popular by the “Bourne Identity” films. The scenario the crew captures is rather familiar: A random group of plain folks are thrown into tight quarters and forced to survive together against clearly insurmountable odds. From “Attack of the Killer Shrews” to Hitchcock’s “The Birds” to Carpenter’s “The Thing” to every single installment of Romero’s “Living Dead” series, we’ve seen this storyline applied over and over again—to wildly divergent returns. The most effective would seem to be the films that treat the monsters as incidental and focus on the human side, exploring the inner mechanisms at work as the characters deal with each other’s reactions to mind crushing stress.

In “The Mist,” when our motley microcosm of townsfolk (played, by the way, by a crew of some of the best character actors at work in modern cinema—a parade of familiar faces, even if you might not remember their names) get Alamo’d in a small town grocery store by a mysterious and murderous fog that evidently conceals no end of increasingly Jurassic nightmares, the moral of the writers’ view is nicely wrapped up by the store’s pasty assistant manager (Toby Hooper) with the line, “As a species, we’re fundamentally insane. Put more than three of us together and we start figuring out ways to kill each other.”

And so the story goes. Even as defenses are improvised, weapons devised and ammunition inventoried, factions begin to split off from the tribe: those who want to confront the threat head-on, those who want to wait it out, and eventually (this is Stephen King, after all) those who want to sacrifice others to the beast to save their own hides.

The best part of “The Mist” may be how well Darabont presents all the different players as thinking they’re the good guys. They all make strong and articulate arguments (although, for an audience, it can be admittedly difficult to swallow a plan that involves walking headfirst into a seething nest of fanged tentacles—we all kind of know how that’s going to go). Each of them thinks himself the hero, which really makes none of them the hero. Square-jawed Hollywood hunk Thomas Jane, as resident upstanding everyman, would traditionally be the front runner for the position. But, as he clings weepily to his son through half the action, there’s an uncommon shift that allows the toadish half-pint assistant manager—who proves a crack shot and a decisive leader—to step up and get things done.

On the other side of heroism, we’re offered a fabulous turn by Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden as the town’s local religious crackpot turned prophet. King’s loathing and distrust of Bible-thumping evangelism has been at least a rib, if not the backbone, of half the stories he’s written, and it’s wonderfully realized in the character of Mrs. Carmody. Hissing out quotes from Revelations like smoldering coal smoke, the clarity and conviction of her beliefs in the face of the obscurity and confusion of their dilemma proves a hard influence over the bleating sheep of the group. Turning them one by one into her own personal moral majority, she’s an absolute spitfire, and possibly too much fun to hate.

As with the best of history’s creature features, however, the drama here is at its highest when the beasties remain off-screen. Although Darabont has made much noise about how quickly and inexpensively he pulled off this flick, the seams really start to show when the creatures emerge from the haze. All creepiness of effect achieved by the terrors lurking just out of sight is rendered summarily void by Darabont’s computer animation team’s insistence on revealing said terrors in the vivid, overzealous detail that they do. Sure, giant bugs, man-sized spiders and hideous tentacled land-leviathans are all very intimidating, but all the eye-pop comes at the unfortunate sacrifice of any connection to the pathos of the characters. Whatever advancement their internal and political struggles have made is irrevocably reduced to a simplistic, over-graphic video game.

But maybe that’s what Darabont was shooting for. Even with his addition of a solid, if pretentiously overarching, gut-punch to the audience at the very end of the picture, he’s clearly not aiming for any Oscars with this one. Then again, he probably wasn’t with “The Blob,” either. In his continuing effort to echo the scare fare of previous generations, there are apparent plans afoot to release a black and white version of “The Mist” with its DVD release, which might serve to blunt some of the film’s misplaced, sharp modern edges. It might have far better suited his mission, if only he’d seen through his own creative mist to think of that before.