With so many Stephen King adaptations rolling out, we’d almost forgotten that Spike was working on a TV series based on The Mist. Well, it’s found its leading lady.
THR reports that the brilliant Frances Conroy, star of Six Feet Under and American Horror Story, has been cast as “Nathalie, a modern-day ecological martyr. While she is seemingly more connected to nature than most people, her instincts about her fellow humans are dead on.”
Conroy is the first to join The Mist, which is the first scripted drama for Spike (they’ve had a few get close, recently, including the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Harvest and Red Mars). Christian Torpe is writer and executive producer, and he’s best known for creating the Danish TV series Rita.
The site describes The Mist as a “harrowing story about a seemingly innocuous mist that seeps into a small town and creates immense havoc.” In King’s novella, that mist contains legions of terrifying creatures which attack the small town’s residents, who have taken refuge in a supermarket. Is it the end of days, or does the secretive army base and Project Arrowhead have something to do with it?
The story and film’s lead character was David Drayton, played by Thomas Jane, and the antagonist was evangelical Christian and general horror Mrs Carmody, beautifully played by Marcia Gay Harden.
Frank Darabont’s film was a superb and weirdly underrated combination of old school creature feature and incredibly tense thriller, as factions formed in close quarters and words like “sacrifice” start getting thrown around. Darabont jumped from The Mist to The Walking Dead, and King’s story does seem like it could lend itself to that kind of formula, where the people are the real threat and the monsters occasionally pop up to gruesomely dispatch the expendables.
At any rate, we love Conroy (Ruth Fisher is still one of the greatest characters to ever grace television), so this is definitely good news.
The Mist will air in 2017. Keep up with the latest genre news with the new issue of SciFiNow.
