One Moment From 2007's The Mist Genuinely Scared Stephen King
Frank Darabont has plenty to be proud of. The writer-director behind the likes of "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile," and showrunner for "The Walking Dead" has earned legions of dedicated fans over his multi-decade career. He's long been considered one of the best adapters of author Stephen King's work, and in 2007, he helmed another of King's stories, "The Mist," for the big screen. With a terrific ensemble cast, gnarly creature effects, and an ending that will make you either love the movie or hate its guts, "The Mist" earned wide acclaim and stands as one of the top horror movies of its decade. But what Darabont is most proud of is terrifying the author of "The Stand" with a real-deal Holyfield jump scare.
The 2008 DVD release of the film contains an informative special feature, with a chat between Darabont and the horror maestro himself. In "The Mist: A Conversation With Stephen King & Writer/Director Frank Darabont," the director gushes over the moment he "got" King with "the oldest trick in the book," a feat he would describe as his "favorite moment, possibly in life, but certainly [during] the whole experience of 'The Mist.'"
King, who had previously only seen a rough cut of the film, wasn't prepared for some parts of his own story. Darabont recalls:
"My favorite moment, possibly in life but certainly the whole experience of 'The Mist,' was we were at a New Jersey test screening, you flew in for that, you were very kind, you showed up to show your support. I was sitting right next to you [...] and there was this one moment in the movie, something happens, Stephen King jumped three feet out of his chair and landed, and I thought, 'Man, I rule. I scared King [...] with his own story!'"
Watch for the hand.
To viewers who haven't yet seen the movie, King gives a cryptic caution, "Watch for the hand." The rest of the interview doesn't specify what scene gave him a start, but there's one solid scare that fits the description, and it's a surprisingly bloodless, creature-less moment. It follows one of the most horrifying scenes of the movie, especially if you're remotely arachnophobic.
David (Thomas Jane) leads a small group to the nearby pharmacy on a medicine run, where they find a festival of nightmares that includes human cocoons, acidic rope-like substances, and arachnid creatures of all sizes. It's a genuinely creepy scene that's lit entirely by the actors' flashlights, according to cinematographer Rohn Schmidt. The surviving members of the party punctuate their return by banging on the glass front of the mist-entrapped grocery store; specifically, it's the hand of "The Shawshank Redemption" star William Sadler (one of the ensemble known as Darabont's Traveling Players alongside Laurie Holden and Jeffrey DeMunn) that gets the honor of frightening King out of his chair. Like any jumpscare worth its salt, the sudden mayhem is preceded by dead silence and growing unease as the trapped shoppers await the fates of the bravest among them.
So it wasn't the acid spiders, it wasn't the barbed tentacles, neither flying venomous bugs nor cosmic abominations that got the author of "It." As it turns out, you can still catch a seen-it-all (wrote-it-all) horror head off-guard with the oldest trick in the book.