Stephen King adaptations are spotty at best. For every successful conversion there are a handful that fail to live up to expectations. I am a fan of King's work, although I have not read any of his novels in years. The Stand is my favorite novel, one that I have read at least a dozen times. But for every Carrie or Misery there is a The Mangler or Sleepwalkers. So, when it was announced that The Mist would be getting the big screen treatment, I greeted the news with trepidation.

The story has all the elements of a super-creepy feature, but it could just as easily go down the road of camp crap. I have never been able to put my finger on why, but it strikes me that King's work is very difficult to adapt, and seems to work much better on the page than on the screen. This thought has never struck the Hollywood minds that see King's name as synonymous with cash.

Enter Frank Darabont. He has crafted two of the more successful King adaptations of recent memory, including the very highly regarded The Shawshank Redemption. With Darabont on board, the film would seem to have a better than even chance of turning out halfway decent.

I've never read The Mist, which was originally published in an anthology called Dark Forces in 1980 and then as part of King's Skeleton Crew collection in 1985. My first experience of the story came on CD in the early 1990s, when it was turned into an audio play and released in "3D Sound" that was meant to be listened to through headphones. It was a really creepy performance and showed that the story could work effectively off the page.

The new, Frank Darabont-scripted take on the tale remains basically true to the story, while being expanded and changed slightly and given a new ending. The result of the conversion is a film that brings new definition to the word bleak, and provides the cinema-going audience with one of the finest pure horror experiences of the year.

Many horror films are formulaic, and that is not always a bad thing. Sure, working from a pre-existing framework can hinder the development of your original work, but it does not have to. The Mist has a familiar setup: a group of strangers are trapped somewhere, beset by an unseen horror outside, and must work together if they are to survive. The formula has proven successful ever since George Romero mined it for all it was worth in his pioneering horror film Night of the Living Dead.