Yesterday afternoon, my laptop was laid low due to a virus, so I had to resort (gasp!) to reading a book. From some guy selling used books on the street corner, I picked up a copy of Stephen King’s “The Mist”, which I’ve actually read before but not for a long, long while. Upon re-reading it, what struck me most was that this story was simply a re-working of “Night of the Living Dead.” Different characters, different monster, but a strikingly similar situation and resolution.
The Lovecraftian beasties within the mist are really not that different from Romero’s zombies: they are inexplicable mindless hordes that feast on humans. They appear as if out of nowhere and are immediately everywhere. While a possible rationale for the zombies/mist beasts are proposed in each tale, their origins are almost beside the point. One morning, it’s just another ordinary day in the lives of the very ordinary protagonists; before the day is done, everyone is hunkered down under seige somewhere. And the monsters continue to loom around the perimeters of the house/store under seige, ready to strike if anybody ventures out.
Also in each story, the monsters really serve more as a plot device to force a lot of disparate characters to abruptly hunker down together and begin squabbling. The real crux of each story is really the in-fighting among the people forced to take refuge together and the breakdown of societal mores under stress. Power struggles among the beseiged occur.
Both stories feature an attempt by a smaller sub-group of the beseiged to go on a small mission. In “Night”, a small group attempt to drive the truck to the gas station to refill it. In “Mist”, there is an expedition to the drugstore in the same mall. Both attempts end disastrously, with numerous characters getting killed.
Ultimately, each story ends with the beseiged survivors turning on each other and ending up in open conflict with one another. The end of each story is fairly ambiguous. (In “Night”, all the main characters are dead, and the local law enforcement are mowing down zombies, but there’s no confirmation that the crisis is over.) The ultimate moral to each story is that mankind will eventually fall victim to outside calamity because society is too acrimonious and divided to work together to save itself.
I know there’s numerous theories about how there are really only so many different types of stories that can be told, and King certainly added his own unique twists, so that I wouldn’t call it a blatant ripoff. But the similarities are just too close for me to think it’s just a coincidence. He must have had the original movie in mind when he wrote “Mist.” I am just curious about other instances of stories you’ve read, movies you’ve seen, that you realize are really just reworkings of other stories/movies.
