Exclusive: Stephen King's The Stand Comes to Life Again
The timing is freaky.
June 2020
Exclusive: Stephen King’s The Stand Comes to Life Again
A new version of the legendary plague novel—starring Alexander Skarsgård, Whoopi Goldberg, James Marsden, and legions more—was in production just as COVID-19 hit. A preview of our worst nightmares.
By Anthony Breznican
May 20, 2020
FORCE FOR GOOD
Whoopi Goldberg as Mother Abagail, the 108-year-old whose followers hold fast to their humanity.By James Minchin/CBS.
Stephen King didn’t call his novel The Virus. He didn’t call it The Disease or The End of the World As We Know It or anything that nihilistic. He wanted his 1978 book about a global pandemic that takes all but a fraction of human life with it to be called The Stand. When there are no rules, his thinking went, survivors have to make a choice: Do you go full Darwin and indulge dark, selfish instincts or do what’s right for the sake of others? “I wanted to write about bravery,” says King. “At some point, people do have to make a stand.”
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It’s important to note that the virus in The Stand is not an organic virus that leapt to humans from another species. “It’s a literally weaponized human-made device,” says Elmore, noting that an aspect of King’s story was the way humans too often engineer their own self destruction. And there will be no reference to the actual coronavirus. “This is an alternate version of how things could have gone.”
The disease in The Stand is also catastrophically worse than anything we’ve seen in real life, killing more than 99 percent of the population. King tried to quell some fear by tweeting this fact in the early days of the pandemic, but even he now acknowledges the unsettling similarities that have turned up in real life. “When you hear reports that 100,000 or 240,000 people are going to die, you’ve got to take notice, and it is going to be bad. It’s bad right now,” says King, who wrote a new ending to the story that serves as the miniseries’ final episode. “It’s brought the economy to a complete stop. In a lot of ways, I mean, you see the pictures of Times Square or London, and you say, ‘It really is like The Stand.’”
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https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/05/stephen-kings-the-stand-exclusive-first-look#intcid=recommendations_default-popular_edfd14f4-1309-468a-811d-1e5166d6d4c0_popular4-1
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When I was reading the Shining, my husband was the closer for his store and didn't get home until 11 or later. We lived in a house that was surrounded by huge overgrown shrubs, they grew up against almost all the windows. So reading this book about killer shrubs, I'd hear our shrubs rubbing against the house and it really freaked me out. I had to quit reading this at night when I was by myself because it scared me so much. I also had all the shrubs trimmed way back so they didn't scratch the windows anymore. I slept much better after that. 
