Mike Flanagan Goes Back To The Stephen King Well With A New Adaptation Of The Mist

Once he’s done with Amazon’s Carrie, Doctor Sleep director Mike Flanagan will bring Stephen King’s apocalyptic novella to the screen again.

Mike Flanagan has lined up what will be his fifth Stephen King adaptation, with Deadline saying the amiable spookmeister behind Netflix‘s The Haunting Of Hill House and Midnight Mass will write and direct a new adaptation of Big Steve’s 1980 novella, The Mist.

Now, you may recall that The Mist has been adapted twice before: once in 20007 to excellent effect by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) and once to pretty terrible effect as a TV series that originally ran for one thine 10 episode season in 2017 on what would become the Paramount Network. But Darabont famously changed the ending of the novella for his big screen version of the material, and the TV series was, as noted, absolute pants, so there’s definitely room for another take.

For those not across The Mist in any of its extant forms, it concerns a small lakeside town in Maine (there’s a shock…) that finds itself enveloped in a thick and seemingly unnatural mist after an unusual storm. “Seemingly” gets smartly upgraded to “definitely” as the various horrible, otherworldly monsters hiding in the mist begin to munch on whoever’s handy, forcing a mixed bag of survivors to hole up in the local supermarket.

But before he tackles The Mist, Flanagan is bringing us a new serialised take on Carrie, King’s first published novel, for Amazon, and we’ve no word of a release date on that as yet. And he’s also supposed to doing The Dark Tower, which seems to an ambitious time sink of a project. And even putting aside his Stephen King projects for aa minute, he’s got a reboot of The Exorcist starring Scarlett Johansson due out in March, 2027. So, yes, Mike Flanagan is doing a new adaptation of The Mist – but probably not for a while.

Bet he won’t do what Darabont did at the end, though…