Editorials
Spike TV’s Failed Attempt to Bring Stephen King’s “The Mist” to the Small Screen [TV Terrors]
Horror and science fiction have always been a part of the television canvas, and constant attempts have been made over the years to produce classic entertainment. Some have fallen by the wayside, while others became mainstream phenomena. With “TV Terrors,” we take a look back at the many genre efforts from the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s, exploring some shows that became cult classics, and others that sank into obscurity.
This month we revisit the short-lived small screen adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Mist.”
- Aired in 2017
- Aired on Spike TV
In the age of modern television where every network has sought their own hit genre series in the vein of “The Walking Dead” and “American Horror Story,” tapping into Stephen King’s massive oeuvre for content is just common sense. King has no shortage of short stories, novellas, and massive epics to keep his own streaming service afloat. Sadly, while tapping his writing for content is a good idea in theory, it doesn’t always translate into a surefire hit.
2017 was a tumultuous year for Stephen King content and his fans. On the one hand we got brilliant adaptations like It: Chapter One. On the other hand we got… Spike TV’s “The Mist.” Premiering on the now defunct Spike TV in the summer of 2017, “The Mist” TV series seemed like a great idea at the time. The premise for “The Mist” felt episodic anyway; we’re shown in the finale of the story that the carnage has spread almost worldwide, so we could have had something equally cold and relentless like “The Road” meets H.P. Lovecraft.
In early 2017, the series adaptation landed onto the network with a flurry of viral marketing and exclusive peeks at what promised to be a chaotic extension of the Frank Darabont-directed movie, but its own entity. Spike TV did a bang up job of hyping the series, providing cryptic television ads of the show for the first half of the year. They even allowed viewers to watch the first two episodes on Spike TV’s website, uncut, and with limited commercial breaks. I took advantage, of course.
Set in Bridgeton, Maine, we meet Kevin (Morgan Spector) a somewhat passive man who’s married to Eve (Alyssa Sutherland), his wife who is hiding some kind of mysterious past. They have a daughter named Alex (Gus Birney) who is suffering from her mother’s overbearing behavior. Things take a turn for the worse when during a party Alex is drugged, raped, and blamed. All of this occurs before a mysterious gargantuan mist makes its way into town. When it does quickly consume every crevice of civilization, they’re all split apart, forced to hide in various locales with the mist blocking any and all access between them.
To say “The Mist” was a botched television effort is an understatement. “The Mist” is not just terrible, but it almost seemed to set out to make the viewer miserable. The movie had very solid implications toward the mist being more about the blackness of humanity, and how religion may have been a part in Mrs. Carmody’s survival. But the titular mist presented in the series, we learn gradually over every episode, may not be some kind of portal from another dimension. Instead in the series it’s some kind of otherworldly fog that can judge people based on their sins past and present, and their ideas of morality. The producers work hard to make it abundantly clear that this isn’t the movie. That becomes a fact when Mrs. Carmody herself appears in the very first episode for two minutes and quickly suffers a horrendous death by the mist lurking outside.
The mist almost becomes a non-entity in some episodes where it literally has nothing to do in the show except become a flimsy catalyst for characters to act monstrously moronic. Other times it can literally do anything, including tack on clunky religious symbolism. In one scene a survivor has a bug crawl under his skin only for it to morph out of his back, wings fully spread, presenting a weird angelic image. There’s also the town’s shady priest Father Romanov who, in an attempt to flee, sees the four horsemen of the apocalypse appear in the mist.
The mist does whatever the current episode needs it to, and never has any real rules or limitations to it. And forget all of the vicious wildlife we saw in the movie. The Gray Widowers, the Arachni-Lobsters and the Behemoth are nowhere to be found. Instead now the mist can inexplicably dig into the minds and psyches of its victims and can conjure up scenarios involving their sins, regrets, and horrible secrets. The various characters within the throes of the mist have to either confront these beings, or else suffer its wrath. To what end the mist is conjuring these visions, is anyone’s guess, as it just seems to enjoy messing with these townies.
Is the mist sentient? Is it the product of a portal accidentally opened, or is it the end of humanity and the beginning of judgment day? Kevin struggles to make it to his wife and daughter, and along the way meets up with the unnamed soldier, and a criminal attempting to overcome her past drug abuse. All the while Alex and her mom are stuck in a large mall with other town folks, including the man that might have raped her. It only takes a little over a week for the survivors inside to begin fighting for space and food. Along the way we get to know so much more about the characters than we need to, while their season arcs are played out with ridiculous twists and lingering questions.
Who raped Alex? Who is this soldier? Why should we care? By the fourth episode I was sick of hearing about Alex, her evil best friend, as well as mom Eve’s shady past, and wanted some kind (any kind!) of interesting turn of events. The series jumps back and forth from glacially-paced storytelling to downright absurd plot holes and leaps of logic.
“The Mist” opened with strong ratings initially, and as it dragged on, the viewership dropped more and more. Spike inevitably just axed the whole series after ten episodes and almost no backlash. With the big brand change from Spike TV to the Paramount Network and the complete format reboot, the network cut out a lot of the former series from Spike TV, including “The Mist.”
At least we’ll always have Frank Darabont’s vicious monster movie classic.
Is It On DVD/Blu-Ray/Streaming? Although Spike TV is long gone (including the show’s website), you can still stream full, uncut episodes online through various services like Amazon Prime Video, iTunes, Netflix, and Google Play.
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
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