10 Fascinating Stories Behind Stephen King's Most Famous Books

2. The Mist Was Inspired By A Freak Thunderstorm & A Visit To The Supermarket

The Mist has earned a reputation for being one of the many great Stephen King film adaptations, made more famous for the horribly bleak ending poised at the end of Frank Darabont's movie. The book is an awesome work in its own right, though, and one that came to King as he experienced some of the events of the story in real life. Really.

The premise of The Mist hinges on a freak thunderstorm that unleashes a strange mist over a small-town in Bridgton, Maine, which offers up zero visibility for all its inhabitants. As a result, a ragtag group - two of which are father and son David and Billy Drayton - find themselves cut off in a supermarket, unable to leave, only to discover that the mist contains a number of grotesque monsters hellbent on murdering them.

So what happened to King to inspire such a plot? Well, pretty much everything except for the part with the monsters, really. One night, King found himself astonished by a particularly aggressive thunderstorm that felt apocalyptic in its magnitude. The next day, King visited the supermarket with his son and had a vision of what he called a "big prehistoric flying reptile" flying around the story, which inspired the monster aspects behind The Mist.

No clue why King was thinking about prehistoric flying reptiles, but who are we to argue?