Stephen King Loved How This Brutal Movie Adaptation Changed His Book Ending

Stephen King is the master of horror, but he also has a big heart. With ghosts and vampires and killer clowns, to name a few, King has thrown all sorts of horrid situations at his characters over the years, but he also writes them with a great deal of compassion and sincerity, often underlining the perseverance of ordinary people put into extraordinary circumstances. And in 2007, one of his stories of this kind was adapted into a feature film with an ending so macabre and bleak that even King didn’t go there. The Mist was directed by a frequent King collaborator, Frank Darabont, who also helmed The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Darabont had accomplished an incredible feat, turning these two more dramatic King stories into massive movies that were hits with audiences. But he finally dipped into King’s morbid world of horror with The Mist, based on a 1980 novella King first published in a larger anthology book containing horror stories from a variety of authors.

The story follows a group of people trapped in a supermarket as a mysterious mist covers their town and Lovecraftian alien forms start to swarm them. King’s story has endured as one of his greatest works and was republished in multiple new editions as a standalone and in collections of King’s short-form writing. The film adaptation, starring Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden, is a fairly faithful and straightforward one. That is, until the final scene, where the two depart in a stark and horrifying manner. Many fans and critics prefer the gut punch of the film’s ending, and even King himself admires it as a bold, subversive change that improved upon his story. But this ending’s effect starts and stops at shock value, and does not work nearly as well as the novella’s original conclusion.

How Does ‘The Mist’ Change the Ending of Stephen King’s Original Story?

In the final minutes of The Mist, David (Thomas Jane) drives down a road with his son and the three other survivors of their group, seeing massive creatures in the mist that reveal a larger scale of invasion than they’d seen at the supermarket. The car breaks down. Sensing no way out, David and the three adult survivors make a silent agreement that he will mercy kill them with the four remaining bullets in their gun, including David’s young son. David leaves the vehicle after making this unimaginable sacrifice, only for the mist to clear immediately after the deed was done, and for help to arrive in the form of the military.

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It is a relentlessly bleak, tragic ending, like the most sickening Twilight Zone twist amplified by 100, and a stark departure from King’s original. The novella sets the characters on the same path, and at one point, David even has a passing thought of making that same sacrifice to alleviate their group from the horrors of the mist. But they stop for the night. David stays up, scanning the radio for any signs of civilization. Through the interference, he believes he hears the word “Hartford.” Despite the dire situation, there may be some refuge waiting in Hartford, Connecticut. The story ends on an ambiguously hopeful note.

Here’s Why ‘The Mist’s Shocking Ending Doesn’t Work as Well as the Novella

The unresolved ending of the novella may not have worked entirely well in a cinematic adaptation. It works perfectly on the page, but one can understand the need to give moviegoers a more solid sense of closure, good or bad. But the choice Darabont made doesn’t work for two primary reasons. The first is that it undercuts the themes of the story. The Mist is a story about how people respond to unimaginable crises unfolding before them. Many lose faith, many reaffirm their faith, many go mad, and many more just fight like hell to keep their humanity. King often writes his stories in such a way that you somehow feel like everything will be all right for those who survived, if they just keep that hope alive. The story ends on a note that maintains that hope, underlining how there is a way forward for those who keep their heads and hearts right in the face of something so evil.

The film adaptation crushes those hopes, and the results are effectively shocking, but only on the first watch. And that brings us to the second reason it doesn’t work. The Mist‘s shocker ending only really works one time, and subsequent viewings reveal it as an abrupt move that does not feel motivated by anything beyond shock value. The characterization of the survivors in David’s group throughout the film simply does not gel with the massive, morbid leap they make in agreeing to a mass-suicide. The decision, which is never hinted at prior, is made without much hesitation. The moment comes and goes so quickly that it doesn’t feel earned when you see it play out a second or third time. This makes it an unsatisfying conclusion.

A morbid ending like this could work especially well if the movie laid the groundwork for it, but it is not in the bones of this particular one. The Mist reduces King’s story of resilience and hope into a tragic serving of irony that goes down bitter every time. It is a frustrating conclusion to an adaptation that is otherwise about as good as it could be. And the new ending does not even ruin the film — it is absolutely still worth watching, and the drastic differences between the two are interesting to compare — but it is a rare and strange case where an author endorses a major change that seems misaligned with the source material. The Mist is a pretty great adaptation for the most part, but as far as the ending is concerned, King got it right the first time.