The Mist by Stephen King
The first trailer for the new Spike show, The Mist, was just released and it looks AWESOME. Based on Stephen King’s 1980 novella, the trailer promises paranoia, creepy creatures and a whole lot of fog. Check it out above!
The show premieres June 22 on Spike, and stars Morgan Spector, Alyssa Sutherland, Gus Birney, and a wide cast of characters caught in the mist. But while King’s The Mist novella takes place mostly in a grocery store, following an artist named David Drayton and the other survivors who have taken refuge there, the show is going in a different direction.
According to Entertainment Weekly, creator Christian Torpe calls the series “a weird cousin to the original material.” Though the show will keep King’s central premise – that an unexplained mist spreads through a town in Maine, concealing strange creatures and creating a panic among the survivors – Torpe chose to focus on different characters in new locations. Expect to see a church, the wilderness, and a mall where people are hunkered down to wait out the mist as they all try and figure out what is actually going on.
But even though the locations and the survivors might have changed, the core of the story hasn’t. King’s The Mist is mostly about fear of the unknown and how panic can drive us to do things we never thought possible. And, based on the trailer alone, the show is diving deep into the psychological effect of that fear. The Mist follows characters like Gus Redman (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), who’s trapped in the mall and decides that he’s the right person to lead the rest of the survivors. Or Eve Copeland (Alyssa Sutherland), a wild child teacher whose sexuality threatens the town even before the mist shows up. With so many complicated characters and dynamics, the show will focus heavily on the human ways that fear can reshape a community and, often, lead to disaster and blame.
As long time fans of The Mist, we’re definitely ready to see how the Spike show goes down. But we’re already crazy intrigued by the trailer, with the boiling tensions and the glimpses of blood and all that heavy fog. We’re just hoping that it has the same magnetic, slow-boiling quality of the novella, or of the movie adaptation that came out in 2007. Frank Darabont, a long-time King adapter, released a film version starring Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden that was a much closer telling of King’s original novella. Except for that infamous ending, of course, which still has fans like us reeling (and was apparently Stephen King approved!). It’s clear that the Spike show will give us a new angle into this mist, drawing on all of the narrative possibilities that arise when you throw a bunch of paranoid people with no idea what’s happening into a confined space.
King is busy these days — he also has Castle Rock coming out on Hulu, a team up with J.J. Abrams that goes into production sometime this year. Not that we’re complaining. As the master of horror (and maybe of storytelling in general), King’s work seems perfectly suited to the big and small screen. Which is why we’ll be counting down the days until June 22, just waiting for that mist to roll in.
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