Stephen King's horror fiction is getting a fair bit of attention from the worlds of film and TV at the moment. The latest adaptation of one of his novels, The Mist, looks fucking terrifying.
The book, originally written in 1980, was made into a film 10 years ago, but the TV revamp, for channel Spike, looks like a step-up in every sense of the word.
The show first airs on 22 June, and as you might expect, it involves a supernatural mist. After a lovely summer's day comes a thunderstorm, and then in rolls the mist - which conceals monsters within, because of course it does.
Advert
As visibility is reduced to near-zero, these strange creatures lurk to attack anyone, or anything, that ventures out into the open. The story centres around the survival stories of a large group of people who become trapped in the town's supermarket - watch the trailer below.
Credit: Spike
Advert
The show's creator, Christian Torpe, told Entertainment Weekly that he wanted to make the 10-part series completely different from the movie, starting with its location.
The Danish writer said: "I wanted to be respectful to the source material, but my feeling was there was already a great adaptation out there by Frank Darabont [the man behind the TV adaptation of The Walking Dead].
"The novella is 200 pages and one location, and we needed to change that to make an ongoing series. But we wanted to remain faithful to the heart of the story."
Advert
Credit: Spike
He continued to explain that the TV series spreads further than the supermarket. "We are not just in the mall," he added. "We establish different little pressure cookers under the influence of whoever the leader would be in those locations.
"Each of them come up with different theories or beliefs about what's going on. Eventually, the story lines will dovetail and turn into conflicts."
The main characters include Alyssa Sutherland as schoolteacher Eve Copeland, and her husband Kevin, played by Morgan Spector. Their disturbed neighbour, Nathalie Raven, played by Frances Conroy, is a self-proclaimed prophet who claims to have a spiritual connection to the couple.
Advert
Credit: Spike
Torpe added: "Eve was sort of a wild child, and the town still subliminally holds her sexuality against her. There's a lot of misogyny under the surface. Kevin believes in all the right values of kindness and forgiveness, but they are easy values for him.
"He's never been tested. I wanted to test: does he have the courage of his convictions, or will he break under enough pressure?"
Advert
Dark backgrounds and underlying tones are common in the recent adaptations of King's work. A remake of It is due for release soon - but one shocking scene from King's original novel that's unlikely to make the script is based around a child orgy.
The children at the heart of King's novel, part of the 'Losers' Club', defeat a killer shape-shifter in the first half of the story, or so they think, but then end up stuck inside a network of tunnels that they can't seem to get out of.
Beverly, the only girl in the group, decides that the only way to bring unity back to the group is to have an all-out sex session.
The 11-year-old tells the other six boys of the same age: "You have to put your thing in me." King even goes into detail in the book about what happens.
The 1990s miniseries skipped on it, and don't be surprised if the film misses it out too, but it is written in the book.
Years later, explaining why he wrote it, King said: "I wasn't really thinking of the sexual aspect of it. The book dealt with childhood and adulthood -1958 and Grown-Ups. The grown-ups don't remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children - we think we do, but we don't remember it as it really happened.
"Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It's another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children's library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues."
Erm.
Featured Image Credit: SpikeTopics: Stephen King