When adapting a book to film, many directors tend to chafe against the author of the original story. However, Frank Darabont and Stephen King got along like a house on fire. The two men had an incredibly lucrative friendship, with Darabont adapting many of King’s books into film.

Not only did King enjoy Darabont’s interpretation of his projects, but he also acknowledged that the director put his own personal spin on the work.

Notably, the 2007 movie The Mist has a fairly different ending on screen than the one depicted on the page. During an interview with MovieWeb, King said that he “loved” Darabont’s new ending.

“I loved it,” said the writer. “It puts a button on it. The story — you know, and I thought about this when I wrote the story, if you guys have got it, you'll see that, that Frank has been very faithful to the story...when Frank and I talked about The Mist, he would always say to me, you know, it's gotta have a strong ending.”

While King’s ending left the plot unresolved, Darabont provided a more despondent, hopeless final ending that King seemed to prefer to his own.

“I won't say it's a weak ending exactly, but it was the kind of ending that my late mother didn't respect,” said the author of his own book. “She called them ‘Alfred Hitchcock’ endings, you know, and you were kind of left to make up your own mind. She had nothing but contempt for that. And so Frank came up with an ending to the movie that I thought was terrific on the page, and the only time that I ever wavered even slightly was when I actually saw it, and I said to myself, this is so shocking that there ought to be ads in the newspaper that say if you reveal the last five minutes of this movie you'll be hung by the neck until death because that's the one thing that I hate about the internet age is all that stuff goes out."