If you were gripped by David Drayton and the supermarket crowd barricading themselves while the mist pressed in—and by the doomed pharmacy run—you'll feel that same vise tighten in The Ruins. A handful of travelers are trapped on a hilltop with something predatory encircling them, and, much like the tentacled horror in the loading dock, the threat is terrifying precisely because its nature stays just out of reach. The group dynamics fracture under pressure, echoing the way Mrs. Carmody’s faction splinters the store.

If the pharmacy expedition and the brutal choices David and Ollie had to make kept your pulse up, The Girl with All the Gifts delivers that same survival heat. A small band escorts a unique child through a hostile landscape swarming with predators, where every street corner can turn into the supermarket’s loading dock all over again. It’s the same relentless calculus of who risks the next step—and who doesn’t come back.

If the bleak turn in the store—the mob mentality around Mrs. Carmody, the sudden crack of Ollie’s gun, and the way decency erodes—stuck with you, The Troop goes just as dark. A stranded scout troop faces an invasive horror that strips away civility. The escalating desperation and cruelty mirror how quickly the supermarket’s fragile order collapses once the mist makes ordinary rules meaningless.

If the way King leaves the mist’s creatures largely unexplained—their shapes glimpsed between aisles or in the pharmacy’s webs—made it scarier, Bird Box thrives on that same restraint. As with David shielding Billy from what’s outside, characters here navigate a world where looking can kill. The minimal explanations and strict rules of survival deepen the dread in the same way those half-seen tentacles did.

If the vast shapes in the fog and the final, awe-horrified drive past that towering behemoth gave you chills, Annihilation channels that same uncanny, reality-warping vibe. Told through a first-person field journal, it captures the creeping, unclassifiable menace that lurks just beyond comprehension—much like the way the mist turns the familiar Maine lakeshore into an alien frontier.