Warning: This article discusses key plot points of several recent films.

In the final moments of Frank Darabont's "The Mist," the "Shawshank" director's bid at a Stephen King-fueled redemption of his own, there seems to be some solace in store for the characters. After a days-long assault from a host of prehistoric monsters in a tiny Maine supermarket (among them pterodactyls, a scorpion the size of a jet and Marcia Gay Harden), our dutiful hero and his shrinking band of sane-minded survivors rush away from the store. With a fleeting sense of hope, they drive south into the milky white cloud that gives the film its title.

Up until that point, the movie had freely killed characters typically off limits, including a sweet grocery clerk who dies suddenly from a sting that makes her throat look like a watermelon. But now the survivors drive through the mist, away from that, and they finally seem at peace.

Then it begins. David Dayton, played stolidly by Thomas Jane, trolls up the driveway of his quaint lakeside home and finds his wife wrapped in a spider web. He mutters to himself, and after obligatory point-and-shoot looks of grief, the group drives on, intent to go as far as it can.

It's not long before the old truck chugs its final drop of gas. The mist still surrounds them. There's no sign of anyone else. The ticks of ravenous monsters begin to close in.

David pulls out a pistol. "There are only four bullets left," he says. But there are five people in the car, besides him an old woman, an old man, a pretty teacher and David's grade-school son, who begins to awake from a nap. The old man says they gave it their best shot - "no one can say we didn't," he reassures nobody in particular - and with that, as the boy's eyes open with just enough time to see his father point the pistol in the direction of his head, the camera cuts to the outside of the truck. There are four gunshots that make it clear David has shot everyone but himself.

And right then, after suggestive sounds from the blurry wilderness that surrounds him, a military force emerges from the mist. It's a quarantine team collecting survivors and exterminating the last of the creatures. David has killed his only child for nothing.

Roll credits.

Get it? It's daring! It's existential! It's . meaningless. I sat on this for a while, because unlike many others (including the Daily's critic, who said the movie "stalls in a succession of mud puddles"), I found the better part of "The Mist" an inspired slate of creature-feature horrors. If not useful as a moral exercise, it is as a play on a classic genre cliché - sic monsters on townsfolk! - and it works as a simple, progressively nasty thriller.

Better yet, "The Mist" knowingly tempers its allegorical ambition so that it doesn't undercut the value of the spectacle (even when the resident religious fanatic takes over, her inevitable human sacrifice quickly becomes monster food), at least until the cruel, greedy conclusion. Darabont is so desperate to make us sick with apocalyptic anxiety that he wakes the little boy just before his father shoots him so we know he saw what was coming to him. The zeal with which Darabont enters the military saviors directly after immediately gives him away: This is a stunt. It betrays the characters as much as it does the audience for the sake of a soulless, nonsensical downer.

But as vial as Darabont's aims for "The Mist" turned out to be, and as utterly inane as that final sequence is, the ending is worth discussion outside of its merits because I imagine the opposite conclusion - even one as simple as allowing the characters to disappear into the mist with no indication of their fate - would likely have inspired an even more averse reaction from much of the audience. It's a familiar condemnation of the American insistence on a happy ending even when there clearly isn't one logically possible, a final, optimistic image transparently tacked on to salvage an otherwise bleak, hopeless narrative.

Don't worry, we're still talking about movies. This audience outrage arises no more often than it does within the science-fiction and horror genres; scarcely a new film is released without some blog chatter about how the original ending was sliced by the studio to broaden the audience or placate test-screening crowds.