It may not be an entity that metamorphoses into a clown to kill children, but even a light drizzle — let’s call it a Mist — as rendered by Stephen King can be an element of horror. And, indeed, the first, just-released trailer for the series adaptation of his early (1980) novella, The Mist, is pretty terrifying.
The series, which debuts on Spike on June 22, will diverge from the novella, seemingly using it rather as a starting point. Creator Christian Torpe said in Entertainment Weekly of adapting King’s work:
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 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.
King’s version is set in a supermarket in the small town of Bridgeville, Maine where people have taken shelter to protect themselves from the mist, and the less amorphous monsters it brings with it. The classic “the monster is within” story saw people in the supermarket gradually unleashing their own anxieties and cruelties on each other; now, as EW points out, and as the trailer depicts, the series is set in various places on lockdown in the town; each milieu, as Torpe describes, is a “different little pressure cooker under the influence of whoever the leader would be in those locations.” In this vein (and even in a bit in the trailer) it sounds a little Leftovers-y: a mysterious force brings about a change in the world that leads society to fracture into desperate (and sometimes violent) cult mentalities.
One of the more exciting elements of the trailer below is the presence of Frances Conroy — Six Feet Under‘s Ruth Fisher, and American Horror Story‘s…assorted odd characters — as Nathalie Raven, who EW describes as “part prophet, part wannabe martyr.” She’s part of what looks like a huge ensemble cast of people running, hiding, fucking, and becoming zealots in the wake of the spooky clouds that’ve engulfed their town.
Watch her, and a gaggle of other New Englanders, get paranoid and frantic while fighting the wet, monster-stuffed weather:
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