King’s Way: Scare ‘Em

Horror-meister Stephen King never has been even mildly interested in making people comfortable. Creating nightmares is the prolific novelist’s idea of a good time. So it’s not too surprising that when King sat down to write his first original miniseries, “Storm of the Century,” delivering a high-voltage, spine-tingling shocker was just what he had in mind.

“People sort of come into TV with that warm and fuzzy feeling that they are going to be fed something that is going to put them to sleep,” says King, who is an executive producer of the six-hour thriller that begins Sunday on ABC. “I don’t want to put them to sleep,” says King. “I want to wake people up. I hope that happens.”

Most importantly, King says, he hopes “Storm of the Century” makes viewers think.

“Storm of the Century” is, literally, a chilling morality tale about a remote Maine island community isolated by one of the worst snowstorms ever to hit there. But something much more deadly arrives on Little Tall Island--a mysterious stranger named Andre Linoge (Colm Feore), who appears out of thin air and murders one of the town’s oldest residents. Upon his arrest, Linoge tells the townspeople that he has one simple request: “If you give me what I want, I’ll go away.”

Timothy Daly stars as the town’s earnest constable; Debrah Farentino is the constable’s wife who operates the island’s day-care center; and Dyllan Christopher plays their young son who is attracted to the evil Linoge.

King doesn’t remember the genesis of the project. The story, he says, came to him simply like the ideas for all of his best-selling novels such as “Carrie,” “The Shining,” “The Stand,” “It” and the recent “Bag of Bones.”

“It was very visual and it wanted to be a screenplay from the very beginning,” explains King, who has seen many of his books adapted for film or television. “I just sat for three months in late 1996 and wrote it. I had the best time like I do with the novels. It had three major parts of it, so I made it a six-hour miniseries.”

When he began to write, King says, he wasn’t even sure what Linoge wanted from the townspeople.

“I knew that he wanted something, but I didn’t know what he wanted or what he would do . . . I can’t remember what was going through my mind.”

King knew, though, he wanted Linoge to commit murder as soon as he arrived on the island. “Not because he had anything against that person,” King explains, “but it is a way of saying, ‘Now that I have your attention.”’

The storm, King suggests, is something that Linoge conjured up for his own convenience to cut the town and its residents off from the rest of civilization. “I said to myself, ‘I want to put him there and see what he wants and what they do.””

Though Daly and Farentino are familiar TV faces, King and executive producer Mark Carliner generally didn’t want “marquee” names in the miniseries. “I didn’t want audiences to look and say, ‘Oh, there’s Alan Alda playing the Prince of Darkness.”

Feore, who appeared in “City of Angels” and “Face/Off,” says King, “got” the role of Linoge. “Colm has done a lot of theater and he was able to underplay it a little bit. Director Craig Baxley encouraged him. When I saw the first rough cut, I thought you really don’t need special effects. He’s doing it all.”

“He wrote such a fabulous part,” says Feore of King. Though Linoge is obviously supernatural, he has limited powers. “If he can simply eradicate the entire island, then what’s the point,”’ says the actor.

“I saw him very much as God’s prosecutor. He’s like God’s Sam Waterston,” says Feore. “What was scary about him is information. He knows their souls so he can just look at them and say, ‘I know [your secret].”

Linoge, the actor believes, is really the catalyst to the community’s own unraveling and self-discovery: “It’s much more entertaining to me than saying, ‘If you don’t do what I say, ‘I’ll blow your head up.’ ”

Because “Storm of the Century” requires Feore to portray such a frightful force, he made it a point to befriend all the child actors, especially to ease their fears during the scenes when he is transformed into Linoge’s true self--a wizened, horrific creature.

“We had an enormous amount of discussion on the set as to how much the children should know [about the plot],” says Feore.

King, who always has a cameo in his miniseries, appears as a TV newscaster in “Storm”.

“The last two or three times I have picked who I wanted to be,” he says. “I like to act, but I am not very good at it. So I have to be very careful and not to try to look like a road hog.”

Pocket Books will be publishing King’s screenplay simultaneously with the airing of the miniseries. King, though, originally resisted.

“My idea was if you are going to do a novel for TV, it ought to appear in that media and just that media,” he says.

But ABC and Pocket Books, he says, ganged up on him. “They said it will help sell the miniseries. It is going to be published when the series starts, so anybody who wants to know how it ends by running out and getting the book will only have two days to read it!”

“Stephen King’s Storm of the Century,” airs Sunday, Monday and Thursday at 9 p.m. on ABC. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).