Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’: ‘Destruction’ Trailer Shows There Will Be Blood

Several hours ago, Spike TV released the second trailer for its upcoming TV series based on Stephen King’s novella entitled The Mist. Bloody Disgusting observes that unlike the first trailer for The Mist, which showed next to nothing that could actually be considered horror, this trailer shows a hefty amount of the gore and hellish creatures that contributed to the intensely graphic horror in Stephen King’s written work. It’s for that reason that King fans and TV buffs can breathe a sigh of relief, as it looks like Spike’s The Mist is not to be another castrated-in-order-to-appeal-to-families King interpretation.

Unlike most TV or movie trailers, this most recent look at The Mist comes with a sub-title: “Destruction.” The name is an apt one, because the trailer delivers a lot more of the carnage horror fans crave.

The first trailer for The Mist did contain a few of the loud tones that are present in pretty much all mainstream horror trailers today, but it was fairly quiet for the most part other than that. The last few seconds did contain a few cuts of some serious action, but the 95-second clip was mostly a look at the mysterious mist and the people who are trapped in it.

This trailer, on the other hand, spends much more of its runtime focusing on the intense and gruesome sequences that will set The Mist apart from other recent page-to-TV adaptations based on King’s work that did not contain enough of that kind of thing — Under the Dome, the last Stephen King TV series, fell prey to that particular criticism. When a character is shown in the footage, he or she is more often than not badly bloodied or in the process of getting that way. During a few shots, in fact, viewers might forget this show is actually headed for a cable network. The highlight may be a shot where we see dozens of tiny bat-like creatures flit out of a character’s bloody mouth. The gore makeup doesn’t look half-bad, either. It’s all just sadistically delightful.

It’s not just the people falling victims to destruction, either; the trailer features plenty of scenes involving glass breaking, guns firing, cars crashing, and people beating something with a crowbar. Fittingly, the trailer ends with one of the main characters musing out loud that “few things are more beautiful than destruction.”

Another aspect we get treated to a lot in this trailer for The Mist that we didn’t see enough of before is the creatures. King’s story is about a thick mist that rolls over a town and brings with it hordes of hellish creatures from another dimension. Obviously, the monsters themselves are a pretty big draw, and part of what made The Walking Dead co-creator Frank Darabont’s 2007 film adaptation of The Mist so great is that it showed off the terrifying and exotic things at every available opportunity. The first trailer suggested that the TV show might be shorting its viewers in this regard, but the more recent one puts those fears to rest.

That being said, both trailers make it look like this iteration of The Mist will be presenting the titular rolling fog as a carrier of a kind of rage virus that turns the humans trapped in it against one another. In both King and Darabont’s versions, the mist did not serve such a function. The “rage mist” will create conflict, to be sure, which makes it conducive to an entire TV series. It could also be seen as detracting from the idea of The Mist, though, which is that people can turn brutal simply from being put in dire situations.

As the Inquisitr noted several weeks ago when the initial trailer for The Mist was released, the show will star Morgan Spector and Alyssa Sutherland and has been described as a “twisted cousin” of the novella. Despite this title, Stephen King himself has endorsed Spike’s The Mist, stating that the first episode is “pretty damn good.”

Hopefully, King’s fans and horror connoisseurs will be just as happy as the author is with The Mist. If the most recent trailer is a good indication of how much creepy/dangerous action the series will contain, they very well might.

The Mist will premier on Thursday, June 22.

[Featured Image by AMR Image/iStock]