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There are few authors as well known as Stephen King, an author so unbelievably prolific that, even discounting his numerous actual novels and just focusing on his short stories, his body of work is titanic. King has reportedly written over 200 short stories, many of which have been compiled into short story collections (and can be adapted for a low, low price). A bibliography that vast inevitably draws the question as to which is the best and the worst, and while the latter is a bit murkier, there are many popular candidates for his best. The Shining, Carrie, and IT are iconic pieces of horror literature that have been incredibly influential in the genre, and are considered some of the most quintessentially “King.” But there’s another story that arguably deserves the title of King’s best, one of the most influential horror stories he’s ever written – that being the 1980 horror novella The Mist. Claustrophobic and introspective, the story juggles human drama with otherworldly horror in a way that feels masterful, and the story is short enough that it rarely ever feels like it’s dragging. However, unlike Carrie, IT, or The Shining, which have all seen iconic adaptations that cemented them in the public knowledge (despite King’s own dislike of some of these projects), The Mist has not been so lucky. While it has had two separate adaptations (a film in 2007 and a TV series in 2017) these adaptations fall shy of capturing the story’s power. They’re not horrible, but they just don’t work like the original story does.
Why Does the ‘The Mist’ Work as a Novella?
A misconception about King is that he’s just a gore and terror peddler – an author whose skill relies entirely on describing and conceptualizing horrific creatures and events. Many of those unfamiliar with his work may assume that without something stalking in the darkness, a King story just wouldn’t work. That’s always been wrong. As much acclaimed stories like The Body (later adapted to film as Stand By Me) and The Shawshank Redemption show, it’s King’s ability to write convincing everyday life that’s his strongest tool. You believe his characters, and within just a few pages, you feel as if you know them personally. It’s this strength that makes the later introduction of terror that much more impactful. If you don’t believe in the characters, you won’t care when monsters beyond traditional comprehension threaten to tear them apart.
The original The Mist has a very slow start. You get to know the main character, David Drayton, as he and his family clean up after a freak storm has wrecked their home. It’s a quaint beginning, and the story goes a long way to show you just how much our main character cares about his family and especially his young son, Billy. Partway through, you might even start to forget that you’re reading a horror story at all – which makes it all the more unsettling when clues of the coming horror start to appear. Radio stations aren’t coming through, the characters can see a strange soupy mist over the lake, and the tension continues to grow until finally, these everyday people you’ve grown to know are thrust into a situation of profound terror. Their descent into panic and paranoia is all the more impactful because you remember how it was when times were good.
King is not above homage. His book Salem’s Lot is, to put it bluntly, a basic retelling of Dracula, except it takes place in a small New England town (don’t they all). Similarly, The Mist is King’s attempt to invoke another east coast native’s writing style, that of HP Lovecraft. The creatures in the mist are not malevolent. They don’t do the things they do out of some hatred of our characters. They’re just clearly in the wrong place, animals displaced from their original ecosystem. There’s some light explanation for where they came from but no concrete evidence. Their presence is not just to trap and terrify our main characters but also to question their place in the world. Some try to ignore the danger outside or deny it outright, leading to terrible ends. Some fall to religion, like Miss Carmody when she builds her small cult, and our main characters desperately cling to those around them. It’s a story about people, not monsters, about how people survive and live on when disasters without easy explanation or reason befall them. It’s why the storm happens first in the story; sometimes nature is cruel and destroys the things you know, and it’s up to people to adapt and survive it. The story ends with the hope that there may be some survival, just the idea of it. A faint radio message that may have been misheard but nonetheless leaves the audience with some level of hope.
How Does The TV Adaptation of ‘The Mist’ Fail?
Before we delve into why the movie fails, first, we must look at how the 2017 TV adaptation tries to do something different and completely misses the mark. Between the TV adaptation and the original story, only a handful of aspects are preserved. The titular mist is here and people are trapped, but they’re all basically new characters, and rather than one location, the series spreads them between three. The immediate problem with this is that The Mist is not a full book in the same way that other King stories are. It’s a novella, and it’s short and even more condensed than other stories. Take The Stand, for example (which also got a recent, poorly received adaptation). It’s over 500k words long – that’s a story that you can have seasons of TV with. The Mist, meanwhile, only clocks in at 50k words. This isn’t small by any means, but it means that the TV series has far less to take from, and like The Hobbit film trilogy, it stretches the story way too thin. The show essentially has the same story happening in three different locations, ruining the claustrophobia that the original grocery store had while adding very little to justify it.
The worst offender by far, however, is the mist itself. In the original story the monsters are just animals, and they hold no ill will towards the people in the same way that a coyote doesn’t hold any contempt for a chicken. The TV series goes an entirely different route. This time, there are no monsters but rather manifestations of the character’s own guilt and self-perceived “sins.” This is a massive change, and while change is not always bad when adapting something, this change completely derails the entire point of the original story. Rather than just a disaster, it’s a punishment. It has less in common with the original story than it does with one of the stories it directly inspired: Silent Hill. It’s an adaptation that feels entirely at odds with the original story, and while that has worked before with King adaptations, this time, it just doesn’t. By making the mist a personal force, it takes away a lot of the unique horror of the original and turns it into a by-the-numbers morality tale.
The original The Mist also works because of the central dynamic of the story, that being the relationship between a father and son. Everything else spins around this central dynamic, David wants to ensure that Billy is safe, and thanks to the start of the story and King’s excellent writing, odds are you as the reader want the same thing. In the TV series these characters are absent, and the cast feels so sprawling that it’s hard to care about anybody. Not to mention the show is unbelievably bleak and cruel, and the characters are so nasty that it just all falls apart. It commits the storytelling sin that King’s stories often avoid, and you end up not caring about the characters. Low ratings doomed the show, and it was cancelled after just one season. Maybe the creators could’ve righted the ship with more time, but the story had already been stretched so far it might’ve just gone further and further from what made the original so good.
Why Does the Movie Version of ‘The Mist’ Fare No Better?
At first glance (especially considering the TV adaptation), the 2007 movie feels like a much more faithful adaptation. We have our original cast, we have our original setting, and the story, by and large, follows the same basic plot beats of the original. There is one large deviation in the middle that undercuts some of the horror – that being the confirmation that these creatures came from a military experiment gone wrong, literally explained by a soldier that’s in the grocery store. The idea that the mysterious “Arrowhead” project was at fault was heavily hinted at in the original story, but there’s never any confirmation of this. This heavy-handed explanation robs the monsters of some of their incomprehensible Lovecraftian horror. However, it doesn’t ruin the movie. That comes later.
The moment that truly cements why this adaptation doesn’t work comes at the very last moments of the movie. Trapped in a van together with his ragtag team of survivors, David pulls out the group’s revolver and summarily executes every other person there, including his own son. He stumbles out of the van, planning to let the monsters of the mist kill him, only to witness a military column of tanks and soldiers parading into the mist to vanquish the monsters. The mist fades at the exact same time the soldiers show up. David had murdered his friends and family for nothing. Not only is this ending relentlessly bleak, it feels like an utter slap in the face to what the original story was about. The novella literally has a line mocking the idea of the National Guard just showing up and solving the problem, and the film just runs with that! This ending completely ruins any Lovecraftian terror, and the film feels less like a story about a group of people surviving a natural disaster and more about what happens when you lose faith in institutions – needlessly bleak at best and nakedly propagandistic at worst. The TV series doesn’t work because it turns the mist into a simple punishment, and this movie fails by doing much the same.
With this choice of ending, the entire film is now cast in a completely different light. The Mist, at its core, is a story about how people act under intense pressure. Some people grow paranoid and murderous, but some grow closer. We want to protect each other, shelter our loved ones, and believe in the hope that this will lead to a better tomorrow. The movie instead takes this and comes to the conclusion that without our institutions, people will just kill each other and that’s the end of it. That if we lose faith in our military (that I will remind you, in the lore of this movie, literally caused the monsters to show up in the first place), then we’ll be doomed. There is none of the hope that the original story has. The story rightfully criticizes Miss Carmody and her doomsday preacher’s adherence to belief in a cruel and vengeful god, but the ending still punishes our main character for losing faith, not in god but in government. It’s an ending that was already on shaky footing after the U.S. government completely botched the recovery of Hurricane Katrina two years before and has aged a little worse every year since.
The original story is so impactful because even after all the horror, there’s still an idea of hope. It could be a lie – just a misheard crackle of radio static – but hope nonetheless. It shows how powerful hope can be and why humans need it. Interestingly, The Mist director Frank Darabont echoed that sentiment in a different King adaptation, The Shawshank Redemption, which posits that, no matter how foolish or unbelievable it might seem, we must hold onto hope and the people we love because sometimes that’s all we have. Imagine if Shawshank ended with Andy getting caught and being sent back to prison, all his dreams of hope and escape crumbling into nothing – would it be remembered fondly? Or would it not be remembered at all? The Mist is one of King’s best short stories, but the best way to experience it remains just sitting down and reading it yourself.
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