It feels like you can barely turn around these days without bumping into an adaptation of a Stephen King story, with the prolific author’s back catalogue having proven to be incredibly fertile ground for film and television projects over the last four decades. There are currently fourteen movies and six shows in development based on his novels and short stories, with The Outsider and The Stand both debuting this year.
Given the sheer volume of page-to-screen works based on the 73 year-old’s output, then, it isn’t surprising that the quality has varied wildly from undisputed classics like The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile to the tedious Dreamcatcher and The Dark Tower, with The Stand currently receiving tepid reviews after premiering on CBS a couple of weeks ago.
King isn’t always the biggest fan of seeing his words ripped from the page and transplanted onto either the big or small screen, having been famously critical of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to the point that he views the 1997 miniseries as the superior version, but in a recent interview, he revealed his favorite episodic twist on one of his works, saying:
“Storm of the Century is my absolute favorite of all of them. I loved Colm Feore as Linoge, and I loved the story. They filmed it in Southwest Harbor in Maine in the wintertime and they got the snow, so you get the sense of this awesome blizzard and the people trapped in it. They did a terrific job.”
What makes Storm of the Century so unique is that it never even existed as a book, with Stephen King writing an original screenplay for the 1999 three-episode miniseries, although a novelization was published prior to it airing on ABC. The plot sees an isolated town forced to deal with a deadly blizzard, while a mysterious stranger also shows up to terrorize the locals.
Storm of the Century was massively popular at the time and drew in an average audience of close to 20 million viewers, but over the last two decades, it’s been somewhat overlooked and forgotten, which probably has to do with the fact there was no pre-existing source material.
