Stephen King on whether he wrote the novella during the Vietnam War:

"Well, it wasn’t during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was over by the time that I, I wrote it. A friend of mine, Kirby McCauley, was putting together an anthology called Dark Forces, and he wanted all these original stories from people who wrote in the field, in the genre. And I said, 'You know, Kirby, I don’t think I can do that because I’m blocked, I’m not writing anything.' And I hadn’t, I had finished like three books. There was Carrie, there was Salem’s Lot, there was Night Shift, and I was kind of stuck really, and I happened to be in the local market one time and a lot of people were shopping, little town market, and I looked at the front windows and I thought you know, if something bad happened those windows would all bowl in, because that’s the way I think. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s been a profitable thing over the years. And, I thought about... mulled it over, and this story came out of it, and I’ve always been grateful to The Mist because it kind of broke me out of a place where I couldn’t seem to do anything, and this story just came very, very naturally, and in terms of Vietnam or any other conflict, if you’re writing seriously, by which I mean trying as hard as you can, the issues that are in your mind, the things you’ve been through are all going to play a part."

King on state of fundamentalism in The Mist and how it relates to the Vietnam War era:

"Well, Mrs. Carmody was there back then, and Mrs. Carmody in Frank’s movie is very much the Mrs. Carmody that was in the story, and, you know, I don’t want to go out and make political statements. I’m a story teller, and Frank’s a story teller, and that’s, that’s what we do. But I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that if you’re trying to do your best work, uh, these things are going to come up, they’re going to become part of the story, and, and uh, people are going to ask questions about it. Is The Mist a political story? Is The Mist a story that has to do with the dangers of entrenched religion, fundamentalist religion? Is The Mist a story about red vs. blue? I’m not going to answer any of those questions. You go see the movies, and those, those questions will come up and maybe you’ll discuss them. If it serves as a springboard, that’s great."

On how he has dealt with the evolution of fear and how its changed in his work:

"Fear is a survival function, right? If you’re afraid of certain things, uh, walking down the center line of a highway at night, going out in hunting season in Maine which is what’s going on now, and you’re not dressed in something that’s red, or orange, there’s always... you’re afraid that you might get shot. So I think of fear as a survival function, and in the stories that I write, the only thing that I’ve tried to do is provide people with nightmares, which are really safe places to put those fears for a while because you can say afterwards that, well, it was all just make-believe anyway, so I just took my emotions for a walk. And this is a negative emotion. It’s a kind of a pit-bull in the human mind, and it needs to have a place to walk, and it needs to be petted every now and then, too, and that’s what these stories try to do. And a lot of you have seen the movie, maybe all of you, and you know that these people are trapped in a supermarket, and things happen to them that are inexplicable or not normal, but sooner or later every one of us faces those things in our own life. You might call it cancer instead of things in the mist, but we’re all afraid of those things, and it seems valid to me to explore them. But if I have any more ideas about fear, just that I’m glad I do what I do, because it’s allowed me to sort of vent a lot of this stuff and get paid for it whereas people - I’ve said this before - who go to shrinks pay them. This is a... this is a win-win for me."

King on the line between sci-fi and the supernatural, and why he wasn't involed as a producer:

"I was writing the book. That’s the short answer to that. And in terms of the science fiction - I’ve written a lot of stories that I think of as sort of science fiction, you know. And for me it always has to be sort of science fiction because I was a 'C' chemistry student, and a 'B-' physics student, so I was never a geek, and I never had a lot of those skills, or that knowledge base. But on the other hand, I saw a lot of movies in the 50’s like The Thing, and Them, and I know that like radiation causes monsters, and most important of all I know that if we mess around too much with the unknown something awful will happen."

Stephen King Interview Page 2