The movie adaptation of Stephen King's The Mist has an infamously dark ending, but the book it's based on is actually more hopeful in its conclusion. Out of the dozens of movies made based on Stephen King's work, it's fair to say most of them don't really come close to replicating the book. This is fine for the most part, as what works on the page often doesn't work when done visually. One of the movie adaptations that sticks closest to its literary counterpart is 2007's The Mist, written and directed by Frank Darabont.
Darabont has shown a knack for capturing the essence of Stephen King's stories, most famously with 1994's The Shawshank Redemption, a movie often held up as one of the greatest in cinema history. Darabont also earned acclaim for writing and directing 1999's The Green Mile. One thing those two King adaptations have in common though is that they're two of King's fairly rare non-horror stories. With The Mist, Darabont finally took a shot at reproducing a King narrative built entirely on terror.
While most King fans enjoyed The Mist, and thought it was a well-done adaptation, there was one major sticking point that divided audiences: the ending. The Mist's ending onscreen is unrelentingly bleak, and hits the viewer like a punch to the gut. While King's book ending isn't exactly happy, it's much less heart-wrenching, and a bit hopeful.
The Mist Had a Hopeful Ending (In Stephen King's Book)
As anyone who's seen the film no doubt can never forget, The Mist movie ends with a seemingly hopeless David Drayton and his fellow grocery store escapees deciding it would be better to die by gunshot than by monster mouth. David uses his four remaining bullets to effectively put the rest out of their impending misery (including David's young son Billy), and prepares to become food for the creatures within the mist. All of a sudden, the mist begins clearing, and it's revealed that the military is mounting an effective campaign against the Lovecraftian monsters. David has just killed his friends and son for nothing, and is left a blubbering, screaming, mess.
The Mist's ending is one of the most shocking and harsh in the history of horror films, and is still capable of dividing new viewers. In Stephen King's book, however, the story ends on a less depressing note. While David and company don't escape the mist, they do manage to travel a considerable ways, and plan to continue to do so until they're no longer able, or until they reach the end of the titular phenomenon. As David puts Billy to bed after they've stopped off for the night, he whispers two words in his ear, Hartford and hope. David was able to pick up a brief radio transmission with the word Hartford in it, and chooses to believe that the city might offer some type of sanctuary for himself and the others. Will his hope be rewarded? King never wrote a sequel to The Mist, so we don't know. But we can certainly hope it was.