Stephen King’s 1980 novella "The Mist" has gotten an awful lot of mileage since its publication, not only as part of the horror anthologies Dark Forces and his own Skeleton Crew, but as a 2007 film directed by Frank Darabont and a new TV series, for which a trailer has just been released.
The concept is pretty simple: a mysterious mist envelopes a Maine town, unleashing horrors on the populace. What follows is an exploration of how the characters respond to them. Like Under The Dome, it’s a cool concept that seems to have a limited shelf life, and the question will be how much creative ground they can be covered without diluting the power of the source material.
Denmark born Christian Torpe serves as showrunner, and in an interview with the news site liljaslibrary he detailed his feelings about tackling King's world.
"Adapting a book, especially a book by someone I love and respect as much as Mr. King, is, well, horrifying," he said. "You want to be respectful of the material, but in this case there was already one brilliant adaptation of it by Frank Darabont. No point in doing that again. So the question becomes do you leave it, say that it’s already been done, or do you allow yourself to take the source material and reimagine it, but staying true to Mr. King’s vision? I chose the latter."
The TV version, he explained, is not the one that appeared either in the novella or the film, but there will nonetheless be parallels.
"I’ve compared it to the way they approached adapting Fargo," Torpe offered, "not in terms of content, but in how they played with the original material. Some things are exactly the same, some are totally different. Some things you think are the same as in the original, but turn out to be something else entirely. Some things you think make no sense at first, but end up tying into the original story."
He finds it an interesting creative exercise in that he's trying to keep fans of the original story in mind.
"Mr. King," he noted, "was incredibly kind in terms of these changes. He told me that as long as I didn’t do anything safe and ordinary, he would be happy. That is one of the most generous things I have experienced."