Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’ Gets An Awesome Filming Location: Plot Points Revealed?

Just hours ago, Nova Scotian publication The Chronicle Herald revealed that a mind-blowingly perfect filming location has been found for The Mist, an upcoming TV series adaptation of Stephen King’s 1980 horror novella: an abandoned Target store located in Bedford, Nova Scotia.

Stephen King's 'The Mist' has an actual Mutalith Vortex Beast in it. Just the scale is way bigger. and has 6 legs. pic.twitter.com/PWMmOglW8s

— Ando (@Andzz79) May 12, 2016

The store is a remnant of when, in April 2015, Target shut down all 133 of its Canadian locations after failing to make its mark in the country. Because of that, The Mist‘s producers do not have to worry about working around civilians or any real-world constraints like many film and TV show filming crews do.

Sources report that filming of The Mist, which will be the 16th Stephen King tale made into a TV series or miniseries, will begin in the store next week.

The news of the newly-found filming location is huge for Stephen King fans and TV buffs alike, as one of Target’s locations, which are known for being absolutely huge, will certainly provide ample space for an epic series.

As opposed to the 2007 movie adaptation of The Mist directed by Frank Darabont, which was filmed in a relatively small grocery store where the characters would always be within eyeshot of one another, the TV retelling of Stephen King’s work will be able to actually place the characters at long distances from each other.

Whenever it's foggy out all I think of is "The Mist" by @StephenKing pic.twitter.com/cMGA93Qfzn

— Dan Chibnall (@bookowl) May 17, 2016

If the show’s creators deem it appropriate, they will even be able to do something like splitting the at-odd factions that form among the customers Stephen King conceived into two tribes that live on opposite sides of the store from one another.

Creating an enclosed ecosystem inside the store would allow the Spike TV series to cover a wider variety of plot points than the “customers vs. The Mist” debacle that makes up the majority of the plot in Stephen King’s envisioning. And being able to focus on a greater array of drama within the closed set than in Stephen King’s original source material would probably gel very well with the network TV series format, both in terms of budget constraints and in terms of stretching out the storyline to cover the entire series runtime.

When it’s put that way, The Mist sounds like it might turn out similarly to Under the Dome, another Stephen King story recently adapted for network TV. Like this potential plot for The Mist, Under the Dome focused on a community cut off from the outside world. In order to elongate itself into an entire series, though, the show focused more heavily on conflicts between the community members than Stephen King did when penning the narrative — and that’s not to mention the fact that Stephen King’s Under the Dome novel is a 1,074 page tome, while The Mist is a 134-page novella.

Also unlike Under the Dome, Stephen King will not be involved at all with the filming or production of the new series, although Deadline says the series did receive King’s blessing before moving forward. Instead, The Inquisitr reported previously, the series will be headed up by superstar director Adam Bernstein, executive produced by Christian Torpe, and developed by Weinstein Company.

Both Torpe and Weinstein Company have participated in many Stephen King screen adaptations and are, for that reason, very comfortable with the source material and the tones the series should strike. They even helped out with the production of The Mist‘s feature film adaptation, which was very well-received, so Stephen King fans can rest assured the project is in good hands.

[Photo by Vladimir Rys/Bongarts/Getty Images]