I nearly missed out on The Walking Dead. You shouldn’t

I’m ashamed to say it took me a while to watch an episode of The Walking Dead, the fifth season of which has just begun. I was put off by the zombies. Too sophomoric, as far as I was concerned, only one notch above vampires. I’d stick with more grown-up fare, like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.

I changed my mind after seeing The Mist, a forgotten horror film directed by Frank Darabont, the developer of The Walking Dead. I’m not a fan of The Shawshank Redemption, Darabont’s most famous film — all that heavy-handed Christian symbolism — but The Mist is a solid B-movie. It’s about a group of ordinary townsfolk trapped in a supermarket by giant squid-like monsters. These monsters are no less silly than zombies, but the film isn’t about them. It’s about the human beings they are trying to kill and the lengths those people will go to in order to survive.