After re-watching it early this morning (my third viewing of the film in total), I think Frank Darabont's The Mist (2007) has earned its place near the top of my list of best Stephen Kind film adaptations. It's up there with Kubrick's The Shining and Cronenberg's The Dead Zone for me. I love the film's plot - a pure 1950s sci-fi pulp story crossed with a classic Twilight Zone episode and filled with cool Lovecraftian monsters, moments of patented King horror, and an ending that is devastating and tears me apart each time I see it. A mostly great cast (headed by Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden) brings some very interesting dynamics between the characters who are trapped by the mysterious titular mist in the supermarket, and the screenplay manages to effectively touch on topics like fear and denial, the wildfire way in which a mob mentality can spread, and blind religious devotion (and using religion and the Bible as an easy crutch against a horror you just can't understand enough to face rationally). Very evocative use of "The Host of Seraphim" by Dead Can Dance on the film's otherwise very minimal soundtrack.
Darabont also wrote the screenplay for The Mist, adapting King's 1980 novella. And it's interesting to see a few actors who would later turn up in Darabont's The Walking Dead(Laurie Holden, Jeffrey DeMunn and Melissa McBride interacting as different characters). Darabont's other Stephen King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile get a lot more accolades and TV runs than The Mist, but it absolutely holds its own and is easily the best of the three if you are looking for something that gives a good modern take on an earlier and more traditionally scary Stephen King tale.
