As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance
- One of the bugs that broke into the store was about to kill Mrs. Carmody, but ended up sparing her. It recognized her as a fellow monster.
- It's more likely that she remained calm and so it moved on; the bugs appeared to sting mainly in defense, as we don't see them actually eating anyone (half of a corpse is lying right outside and they ignore it). Ironically, the bug is just an animal while Carmody is truly a monster...
- The creatures from the Mist aren't evil, they're just animals in an alien ecosystem. The scorpion-flies are attracted to the lights of the store and predominantly sting when startled or threatened. The pterobuzzards seem to be interested in eating the flies (their usual prey) more than the humans, and once they make it inside the store, their reaction isn't slaughter so much as panic at being trapped inside. The spiders are the only actively aggressive species, and they're only doing what spiders do naturally.
- Supported when the characters encounter the Behemoth at the end of the story. Since they're neither its normal food nor big enough to threaten it, the Behemoth just walks past them.
- While the end seems to suggest "bitter coincidence", the events do line up. The religious nut proposes that the boy be made a human sacrifice, something which is resisted by the sane members of the group. On the road, after the boy and the other members of the group are dead, everything is better. In effect, after the boy - who was proposed to be a sacrifice - dies, the problem goes away.
- There is always the dim hope that one of the Really Big Things stepped on the store, even if any of the Small or Medium Things didn't somehow get in (that plate glass and those loading bay doors: they can't hold out against accidental perforation forever). Not that that helps the few nice people left behind, there, though.
- We never see what happens to the remaining supermarket survivors after the main character's group drive away. Thus, we never see if the others from Mrs. Carmody's "cult" snap out of their fanaticism once she's dead, or if they rationalize her death as "martyrdom" and continue to embrace her crazy beliefs. Which is a disturbing possibility in the movie, but a horrific one in the story, because there's another small child - a little girl - in the novella's grocery store. Did she get sacrificed in Billy's place?
- As if being some of the scariest creatures in the Mist wasn't bad enough, the Gray Widowers also seem to be the most likely to come into direct contact with humans. The frequency with which their nests are encountered once the survivors leave the market suggests that they are likely to invade any structure that they can get into. This means that more people probably died to Gray Widowers - an especially horrible fate even by the standards of the Mist monsters - than to any other kind of monster.
- Alternately, the Gray Widowers merely happen to be the only creatures that leave visible evidence of their presence (webbing) behind. The creatures we never actually see could be much, much worse....
- Mrs. Carmody has a line, said quietly and easily dismissed as a throwaway, but it drops her and the events she sets into motion into a very scary place. Specifically, she says "My life for you." To someone not familiar with King's works, this might sound like a simple bit of pious devotion. Except King frequently invokes this phrase to be said by characters following Randall Flagg, King's version of the devil. This puts her Ax-Crazy cult's creation and actions in a very different and chillingly plausible context.
- If the cult survived (chances are that they did), then they likely ended up getting away with the murder of Jessup and the attempted murder of an innocent child. After all, apart from Jessup's bloody handprint on the door, there's little to no evidence that either crime took place.
- The group of survivors we've been following the entire time since leaving the store has been going in the literal opposite direction of the military cleaning things up. They were actively running away from rescue. Also means it is likely the cult like survivors at the store probably were saved hours before the military reached our group of heroes.
- Worse: they were going in the same direction as the military, but they were too far ahead of the pending rescue to realize they were only minutes away from being rescued.
