What Scares Stephen King?

Posted on November 23, 2007

Stephen King recently talked to Sci Fi Wire about director Frank Darabont's (The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption) adaptation of his short story "The Mist" into a feature film. Darabont changed the ending, and King loves it.

Stephen also revealed what scares him. It's a long list. He gets story and novel ideas out of some of the things that scare him.

King: I'm afraid of everything. It shows in my work. Elevators. Cars. One of the things ... the thing that started the new book was basically a combination of an accident that I had and a truck that was backing up, and the beeper was broken and somebody said, "Look out!" And a whole big long novel came out of that. But I'm with Frank on this, and that's one of the reasons why I love this movie, because it was a little bit like having somebody scratch a place on the middle of my back that I couldn't reach myself.
I mean, every night when I go to bed and nobody's popped a rogue nuke somewhere in the world, I feel this sort of combination of "I don't believe we escaped for another day," and gratitude because we did escape for another day. Because there's so much of that stuff out there. And I've written a lot of different things about that, from The Stand to The Mist, where you say a lot of people out there, they're afraid, they're angry, because fear and anger go hand in hand. They're the original-sin version of the Bobbsey Twins, you know, fear and anger.
And when they do there's always somebody to say, "Well, we had the answer, we had the only answer," because whatever the religion might happen to be, they're the ones who say, "We have the only answer, so let's get down on our knees and pray about it," and then on your way out there's guns in the vestry.

The new ending of The Mist is shocking and quite unexpected. King said in another interview that if he'd thought of it, he would have written it that way. And no, we're not going to spoil it for you. But be warned, it's really disturbing.