Streamin’ King: ‘Storm Of The Century’ on Hulu, A Supernatural Miniseries That Inspired Mike Flanagan’s ‘Midnight Mass’

Streamin’ King is grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on streaming. This time we’re watching Storm of the Century, the 1999 ABC original miniseries penned by the author.

STREAMIN’ KING: STORM OF THE CENTURY

THE GIST: As a coastal Maine island of about 400 people hunkers down for the titular historic weather event, a captivating and commanding stranger arrives to start killing people and offer an unforgettable ultimatum. Aired in three installments totaling four-and-a-half hours on ABC from Feb. 14-18, 1999, averaging over 19 million viewers each night.
PEDIGREE: Executive producer King wrote Storm of the Century exclusively for TV and worked with director Craig R. Baxley, a pairing that was reprised three years later for another ABC original miniseries, Rose Red. Baxley has 98 stuntman/driver/coordinator credits to his name in addition to a directing career that started with the A-Team show and Action Jackson movie. Immense cast (numbers-wise, not names-wise) includes Emmy nominee Tim Daly (Wings, Madam Secretary), Colm Feore (The Umbrella Academy), Emmy-winner Julianne Nicholson (Mare of Easttown, Winning Time), Casey Siemaszko (Back to the Future), Kathleen Chalfant (The Affair), Emmy nom Becky Ann Baker (Weir matriarch on Freaks and Geeks, Horvath matriarch on Girls), and Debrah Farentino (Capitol).
Jeffrey DeMunn is a walking embodiment of the Stephen King universe, having appeared in Frank Darabont’s trio of classics (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Mist) and narrated the audiobooks of The Colorado Kid and Dreamcatcher, deploying more of his nuanced depictions of Mainers. “I enjoyed working with Jeffrey DeMunn, I think, as much as I’ve enjoyed working with any actor except for maybe Steve Weber,” King said on the Storm of the Century DVD commentary, referencing the star of the Shining miniseries SK penned for ABC only two years prior. He added that it’s “eerie how good” DeMunn’s accent work is.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Without a doubt. One of the author’s very few times penning an original script not based on an existing work, and Storm is the pinnacle, born from a single image—the “extremely evil” Andre Linoge sitting in a jail cell, staring unblinkingly—and crafted carefully for the screen from there. (He noted in the published script’s introduction that “every image of the story seemed to be a movie image rather than a book image.”) Linoge quickly etches his way into the SK villain pantheon and forces Little Tall Island (home of Dolores Claiborne, who gets name-checked) to make a vicious choice the likes of which have never been seen in King’s work before or since, although you don’t reach it until you’re nearing the four-hour mark. If you stick it out, you’ll get an all-time great sequence in the form of a town meeting, and an ending that messes you up the way The Mist does. Just brutal on top of brutal.

It rewardingly weaves in familiar SK threads and juicy parallels including Needful Things, both iterations of The Shining, ’Salem’s Lot, and the vibe and practices of Randall “The Man in Black” Flagg. You can feel the Stevie who directed Maximum Overdrive gleefully coming out in the “let’s really smash these boats, docks, and buildings around, destroy some landmarks” moments. In his screenplay intro he recalled “writing a special-effects nightmare into my script—a snowstorm bigger than any that had been previously attempted on television,” and the network spending $2 million on flakes of potatoes and plastic to make the snow, the biggest item on the budget. He also emphasized how Storm “isn’t really a ‘TV drama’ or a ‘miniseries’ at all” but rather “a genuine novel, one that exists in a different medium,” as well as “the most frightening story I’ve ever written for film.” Earlier this year, he tweeted that SoTC remains “my favorite of the miniseries I’ve written.” If the runtime or datedness become roadblocks, there’s a case to be made for simply reading the script and letting the legend of Linoge live in your head.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Is a late ’90s/early ’00s TV aesthetic a high barrier for entry? If so, that’ll be tough to clear, but the craftsmanship is all on point and the horror it implants in your brain is timeless. Feore is the main draw for lookie-loos, with a killer voice and spellbinding presence, although Andre Linoge has a bad case of catchphrase-itis. (If he gives you a Hannibal Lecter vibe, ABC execs at the time agreed, with King saying on the DVD commentary that they wanted to cast Anthony Hopkins, who categorically would not do TV.) The length is a tough sell when you could watch Mike Flanagan’s unimpeachable 2021 miniseries Midnight Mass on Netflix in just a few more hours and get more richly-examined characters and heartier food for thought. Storm of the Century is very plot-plot-plot despite cultivating familiarity with a ton of townsfolk, part of which is achieved by having the characters call each other by their full names an obscene amount, children included.

9 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. For a going-on-24-year-old project, King was particularly excited to share that Storm has hit streaming:

   STORM OF THE CENTURY, my favorite of the miniseries I've written, is now available on Hulu, UNCUT and UNRATED.

   — Stephen King (@StephenKing) September 2, 2022

   What better way to end the summer than with a monster snowstorm?#StormOfTheCentury

   — Stephen King (@StephenKing) September 3, 2022

   STORM OF THE CENTURY: If that looks like a real blizzard instead of a Hollywood blizzard…it was.

   — Stephen King (@StephenKing) September 4, 2022

2. Uncle Stevie cameos early on as a litigation lawyer delivering a Saul Goodmanesque pitch on TV, exhorting folks to dial 1-800-1-STIK-EM:

3. On Storm’s DVD commentary, SK spoke about how criticism of adaptations is too often based on side-by-side comparisons of his books and the resulting films, and how an original miniseries would subvert this:

   “If we actually did an original, we wouldn’t have to deal with that—I wouldn’t have to deal with that. And the other thing is, I’m thinking it would be kind of exciting for people not to know the end, to be able to really do something and hide it at the end of the show, and get something—put something over on people, maybe authentically shock them. You know, be able to jump out of the dark and go ‘boo!’ where they least expect it. Where people who’ve read the book can’t tell their friends, ‘Well, you won’t believe he’s gonna take after her with a mallet,’ or, ‘You won’t believe this character’s gonna die when you least expect it.’ … Everybody gets it for the first time.”

4. King penned his intro to the script while postproduction was underway, saying, “I’m looking at footage with temporary music tracks (many of them lifted from Frank Darabont’s film the Shawshank Redemption), and so is composer Gary Chang, who will do the show’s actual score.” He also slammed Graveyard Shift and Silver Bullet (which he adapted), and said ABC committed $33 million for Storm “on the basis of three first-draft scripts, which were never significantly changed.”

5. Multi-time Kingverse visitors besides MVP Jeffrey DeMunn (see PEDIGREE): Julianne Nicholson (The Outsider), Casey Siemaszko (Stand by Me), Adam LeFevre (Hearts in Atlantis), and Sky McCole, who made her debut here as a child and played young Charlie McGee in the Firestarter 2: Rekindled miniseries shortly after. (There’s also the fact that Tim Daly did Storm directly after King’s Shining miniseries starred his Wings co-star/onscreen brother Steven Weber.) As for behind the camera talent, director Craig R. Baxley was announced in 2018 to be adapting “The Gingerbread Girl,” a powerful short story from ’08’s Just After Sunset, with many-time SK producer Mitchell Galin (Pet Sematary, The Stand, Thinner, more). Storm’s cinematographer David Connell, composer Gary Chang, and EP Mark Carliner all stuck with Baxley on the King-penned TV projects Rose Red and Kingdom Hospital. Assistant producer Alex Coppola only has two other credits, on The Tommyknockers and The Shining.

6. King did a fun Late Night with Conan O’Brien interview to promote Storm of the Century, where they talked about the time he saw a ghost in a coat check room and why good horror is like a peanut butter cup. Coco also rifled non-scary subjects at Steve to have him scarify them.

7. Linoge’s wolf-headed cane morphs into a St. Bernard when luring the children, who disgracefully have not seen Cujo.

8. Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game writer/director Mike Flanagan tweeted of Storm, “The town meeting sequence at the end is one of the most heartbreaking scenes I’ve ever seen. I thought about it a lot working on MIDNIGHT MASS (where the sheriff also has an office in the general store.” Another example of why he’s the preeminent King-adapter working today.

9. SPOILERS for Storm of the Century and The Stand: In SK’s 1978 opus, the good-at-heart survivors of the apocalyptic superflu face terrible odds to take a stand against the Man in Black and his followers in Las Vegas, with costly but successful results. In Storm, the townsfolk—also having scary visions beamed into their nightmares from a supernatural antagonist who appears to be a normal man—opt not to make a stand at all, selling their souls and enabling centuries of continued demonic havoc in the process. And for those who think Linoge targeted the Anderson family and that the offering of choice was an illusion, King said in the DVD commentary it “never crossed my mind, as many people said that it did, that it was a setup job.”

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: A relatively positive mixed bag. The New York Times charitably deemed it “as chilling and gripping as any [King] film since…The Shining” and accurately pointed out how “the townspeople have a collective dream, played out on screen, that is one of the most haunting of all Stephen King images.” New York mag called SK “Walt Disney’s Evil Twin” and said there’s “no question that he’s an anthropologist in his very own rain forest”—small-town Maine—“sending back monographs on the table manners, kinship patterns, linguistic systems, and symbolic folderol of the aboriginals.” The Losers’ Club podcast turned the phrase “a refreshing exercise in hopelessness,” and Entertainment Weekly opined that “irregular as his contributions to television have been, King is the only person writing for the medium today whose stories actually gain in impact the more airtime he’s allotted.” A savage Washington Post diatribe slagged Stevie as a “pesky old hack” peddling “the same old slogging, soggy spookery, derivative and uninspired, protracted beyond all sense of decency” leading to a “hideously lugubrious downer that ends on a note of hopeless unhappiness.”

CAREER CONTEXT FOR STORM OF THE CENTURY (1999): King’s only screenplay to get the fancy mass-market publication treatment, just before the premiere. That year also saw The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Hearts in Atlantis, the Green Mile movie, and the author being near-fatally hit by a van while out for a walk.
Zach Dionne writes and records Stephen King things regularly at SKzd on Patreon.