Released from Development Hell…at least 10 years ago, on the late, lamented Coming Attractions web site, I first read that Frank Darabont was working on an adaptation of SK’s coolest & oogiest short story/novella, The Mist. Then I heard nothing…until a TV commercial said it’s coming this month! Why wasn’t I informed???
Anybody heard any buzz on this?
Saw the trailer on TV a couple nights ago. It looked good! But then all trailers look good. Except for the trailer for Fred Claus – that trailer even looked bad in the theater.
I’ve been hearing about The Mist movie for awhile on some horror-related boards.
They won’t have to spend a lot of money on special effects, which is good. The terror of The Mist is all about the unknown, and being trapped in a grocery store with Fundamentalist crazies. 
The sequel will be about being trapped in an organic food store with a bunch of PC crazies. 
November 21, baby!
You can actually film a short story of Stephen King for $1 and send it to him. They’re called Dollar Babies. As long as the story is not already licensed elsewhere and as long as you do not sell it or show it commercially without permission, go for it. It’s a forum for young moviemakers to experiment.
Guess who did a version of *The Woman in the Room * back in 1983? Yep…Frank Darabont.
You can view some of them at www.liljas-library.com.
My 8 year old son wants to go see this. Having watched “The Fog” (or some damn thing like that) on a foggy night (how did they do that? The timing was impeccable) I’m fairly sure I’m not taking my kid to see The Mist.
I’m not a big King fan, but is the story any good?
Well, I remember liking it enough to get jazzed about a film adaptation. Definitely not an 8-year-old kinda movie.
I don’t remember crazed fundamentalists, but then they wouldn’t be as memorable as scary flying things & tentacled things & BIG stomping things out there in the fog.
Trailers are available here.
The story is great, good old fashioned monster movie material. I am absolutely frothing at the mouth for this - I, too, had not heard anything about the movie getting made for years, until we saw a poster in a theater recently. The short story finally getting filmed was so far from my mind, I was like “The Mist? What’s that about, then?” :smack:
It’s just a shame this couldn’t have come out before Halloween, because it scares the bejeezus out of me to this day. Definitely not an 8 year old, IMO (although, that’s about how old I was when I read it, I suppose).
Mrs. Carmody…she started talking about blood sacrifices and stuff as the night wore on.
Y’know, I remember thinking to myself while reading the short story, “this would be a great film.” Then my college roommate had the story on a cassette tape with “3D sound” and it was a faithful reading of the story with different voices for the people and sound effects and everything, and the 3D sound actually made you feel like you had people around you. It was very creepy. I sure hope the film can hold up to my mind’s eye while I was listening to that story.
I saw the trailer for this the other night and started whooping and hollering - my husband thought I was nuts! Then I explained. He is not a King fan, and doesn’t know the story. I hope it scares the crap out of him! 
It’s gonna kill me not to spoil it for him. I want to see it the first night, but we’ll probably wait until Black Friday…
I’d watch it, just to see the bitch get shot!
Hah! You and me both, although
I’m having trouble picturing Marcia Gay Harden in that role
I’m really, really, really excited about this. Darabont did such wonderful work with Shawshank and The Green Mile.
Most of the time, hubby and I discuss which movies we’ll go see. Not this one. I said “Hey, we’re going to go see this. You might like it, you might not, but it won’t kill you, and we’re going!”
I used to have that cassette! It was great!
I had the text-adventure game version of The Mist, but never managed to make it very far out of the supermarket (yeah, I sucked at those games). Does anyone know how the game ended?
“The Mist” is perhaps my favorite King story, short or otherwise. I can’t wait.
I’m excited as well. I read The Tommyknockers in the 4th grade (different story, just referencing age), but still my most vivid memory as a young reader was the “giant foot stomping” scene mentioned earlier that occurred at the end of the story.
Almost all my favorite King stories are of the short variety.
It’s my favorite King story. By far, it contains the seeds of movie masterpiece. This movie, gutteral Chking. Believability, suspense, and horror of a dimension slightly left of your own, no matter your politics. Real characters in interdimensional coordinates. Because that’s a king hero… fucked by the universe.
I saw the ad a few days ago and told my fiance I am not going to see this. I must have read the short story ten years ago and it still freaks me out. I still remember how it ends, although I assume they’ll have to have a different ending for the movie. Here’s how I remember the ending:
[spoiler]The narrator and a few other survivors are driving through the mist trying to get something on the radio. He says he thought he heard a word through the static. It might have been “Hartford” or it might have been “hope”.
That strikes me as a little ambiguous for Hollywood. Any suggestions for alternate endings?[/spoiler]
I’m a wimp when it comes to horror. I like Stephen King, but not the nightmares I get after reading his stuff. If it weren’t for the prospect of nightmares, I’d be psyched up about this. Instead, I’ll do what I usually do – rely on you folks to tell me how it was.
I don’t know about taking an 8 year old - it would depend on the particular kid. If the idea of a dad and kid trapped and cut off from Mom, not knowing if she’s alive or dead, would bother him, give it a miss. But the story is great, and (in the right hands) is perfect for a movie adaptation.
What I’m really looking forward to seeing on the big screen is the storm and the mist rolling in. Even just described in words, King did a great job of evoking the feeling you’ve had if you’ve ever stood and watched an ominous, gothic summer thunderstorm advance toward you, with twilight dark and bruise-purple clouds rolling in as you stood in sunlight. Weird and viscerally unsettling, but fascinating at the same time.
From the tv ad it seems they’re sticking with the *Jaws *approach - showing the people trapped in the store and their development much more than showing monsters attacking. That sets my mind at ease - when I heard of the production, I worried it would be a CGI monster fest. That’s not what the story is about.
As I’ve mentioned before, I can in some cases see where I’m certain King gothis inspiration. Not merely some chance resemblance that just happens to be similar, but such a close resemblance that it’s very clear to me that this is what inspired King, and it’s happened so often that it seems to be a modus operandi for King. The Running Man looks an awful lot like Robert Sheckley’s The Prize of Peril (so much so that Sheckley called up Harlan Ellison and had a real long telephone conversatioon about what he ought to do). Thinner steals the storyline from an early 1960s Marvel comic story drawn by Steve Ditko – right down to the gypsies and their curse. The Ten O’Clock People shares the plot and practically the title of Nine O’Clock in the Morning (no way that’s a coincidence) and so on. I’m not saying that he always does this (“The Shining” doesn’t owe anything to anybody) or that he’s a plagiarist (Nine O’Clock is a short, abbreviated story of implications. "Ten O’ Clock is a longer, fully=fleshed out dscriptive narrative with an awful lot going on), but it’s clear that King has often used other people’s ideas as jumping-off points.
The same in this case.
**
The morning after a huge thunderstorm, people in a remote country region find that they’re being invaded by an army of grotesquely oversized alien bugs. It turns out that a secret military project has opened a rift in space and time.
**
That’s the plot of The Mist. And of the 1950s British film The Strange World of Planet X, which was shown on American TV countless times on independent TV as The Cosmic Monsters from the early sixties on. I know. I saw it often enough. the Boston channels used to show movies of this kind ten years later, so I’m sure they and probably stations in Main did the same. The film starred Forrest Tucker as the square-jawed American hero (FT seemed to be the 1950s Brit movie default for American heroes), and some really cheesy special effects.
The Mist is a helluva lot better written, and will have better effects (I ain’t just going to be fog. I call bull on any claims anywhere that “you don’t have to show the monster” They sold Forbidden Planet by saying that the monster was going to be invisible, but they ended up showing it anyway. There will bne CGI monsters in this one, I predict. And it will need them.) It will have a lot more charascter development and plot. But it did have a predecessor.