The Big Picture

The Long Walk
by Stephen King, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, has been close to adaptation but remains unfilmed.
The story’s focus on psychological conflict and its rule against violent harm poses challenges for potential filmmakers.
Despite past attempts to adapt
The Long Walk
, debates continue on whether the story’s essence should be preserved in future adaptations.

One game that’s fun to play is to try and imagine how much money has been spent, in total, adapting the work of Stephen King to the screen. A billion dollars? Ten billion? (You can just say increasingly big numbers, you don’t have to actually try and figure it out.) America’s master of horror is a prolific writer, and it seems that as soon as he’s set his idea to paper, there’s a plan to adapt it into a limited series. Some of his work has been adapted multiple times. Sometimes whole movies – even entire franchises! – are adapted from King short stories in the single digits of pages. And yet, there remain blind spots. Of course, even for these yet-to-be-adapted King properties, there have been attempts made, and for some, release could be right around the corner. One title in particular has been close to adaptation multiple times, with multiple directors attached over the years: The Long Walk. The Long Walk is a dystopian novella that King published in 1979, under his hard-boiled pseudonym, Richard Bachman. It concerns an annual contest held by a future authoritarian government, in which children are pitted against each other until there is only one survivor. That might remind you of one or two existing hugely successful franchises. But there are many who think that the reason The Long Walk hasn’t been adapted is that the story is simply unfilmable.

What Is ‘The Long Walk’ About?
Image via ABC

A few years after his writing career took off, Stephen King began writing additional novels under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. These novels, which included The Running Man and Thinner, veered away from the horror genre. Misery would also have been published under this pen name as well, but King was unmasked as Bachman in 1985. The four novels were collected as The Bachman Books, (and reclassified as novellas according to the King page-length scale.) He wrote an introductory essay explaining that he’d developed the Bachman pen name to write without the pressure of harming his newly developing brand. When the book was republished in 1996, he wrote a new essay, elaborating that the Bachman “persona” also enabled him to write in a new voice. He described Richard Bachman as “despairing even when he is laughing,” and “not a very nice guy.”

The Long Walk is not a nice story. It is set in a future, dystopian America, ruled by a leader known as The Major. Every year, there is an event known as “the Long Walk.” A hundred American males are selected, none older than 18. Beginning at the Canadian border in Maine (naturally), the boys walk down Highway 1. They walk non-stop. If a contestant’s speed drops below 4 mph, they get a warning. After the third warning, they are executed on the spot. The last kid standing receives unfathomable wealth, as well as the granting of a single wish.

The story covers the events of a single iteration of the Long Walk. We follow Ray Garraty, a 16-year-old from Maine (naturally), and meet several of the other Walkers through his perspective — some kind, some sadistic, and some mysterious. What begins as a physical endurance test becomes a psychological test as well. The kids, all of whom have signed up voluntarily, become friends, but must learn not to help each other as their bodies wear out, because it prolongs all of their suffering. One by one, they lose the will to go on.

‘The Long Walk’ Has Nearly Been Adapted Many, Many Times

Unsurprisingly, there have been many attempts to adapt The Long Walk. George Romero, the legend behind The Night of the Living Dead, was attached to adapt the story in the late 1980s. That version doesn’t appear to have gotten very far, although Romero would go on to adapt King’s novel The Dark Half, about a novelist whose “not-a-nice-guy” writing alter ego somehow manifests himself into real life. Of course, that novel was inspired by King’s experience writing as Bachman.

Frank Darabont, whose The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist are all Stephen King adaptations, also held the rights to adapt The Long Walk. He talked about his thoughts about an adaptation in several interviews around the time The Mist was released, in 2007. While acknowledging it was a project on the back-burner, he spitballed that, due to the nature of the story, a film adaptation would be “low budget” and “more of an art house film.” Darabont never got around to making that movie — in 2010 he went to work on The Walking Dead, and in the meantime, his option expired.

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James Vanderbilt, who wrote the script for David Fincher’s highly acclaimed true crime thriller Zodiac, before pivoting into more mainstream horror in the rebooted Scream franchise, was the next writer up. A longtime fan of the story, Vanderbilt had reportedly written a draft on spec even while Darabont still had the rights. After Darabont’s option lapsed, Vanderbilt secured them with the intention of developing the film with New Line Cinema, which at the time was enjoying the success of its remake of King’s It. Norwegian director André Øvredal, known for his cult classic Trollhunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe, was attached to direct, and he praised the Vanderbilt script for its faithfulness to King’s story.

Ultimately, the project did not move forward with Øvredal, but in late 2023 there was more positive momentum as Francis Lawrence was attached. Relevantly, Lawrence directed the last three entries in the Hunger Games franchise, including the most recent The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The Hunger Games, of course, is that other story about a dystopian last-teenager-standing contest, so the attachment is a little on the nose. There has also been a lot of talk about Lawrence directing a sequel to Constantine, his extremely 2000s debut feature. It’s not certain which project will move forward first.

Is ‘The Long Walk’ Really Unfilmable?

First things first: no Stephen King property is “unfilmable.” Productions have already demonstrated they will strip a King story to the bones and start from scratch. Most famously, The Lawnmower Man, about a scientist who uses advanced virtual reality technology to address a patient’s disability, which transforms him into a killer being made of pure energy, changed the (far more lawnmower-focused) source material so much that King sued, and won.

The more interesting question to ask is if there is something special about the source material that fans should be keen to protect. For example, The Long Walk, notably, does not explain how its dystopian world came about, leaving that to the imagination. An adaptation that decides to shoehorn in a lot of additional backstory would be disappointing. However, as we’ve seen in the recent Civil War, as well as in comparable math-y authoritarian-dystopian horror movies like Cube and The Platform, leaving out the backstory can work well, and is perhaps even the genre norm.

This Aspect of ‘The Long Walk’ Should Be Preserved in Any Adaptation
Image via Warner Bros. 

But there’s one particular rule of the Walk that an adaptation cannot dispense with: the rule preventing the contestants from harming each other. The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, Squid Game, and even zero-budget The Long Walk ripoff The Human Race are all about competitions where the rules are designed to produce only one survivor (more or less). But in all of those movies and shows, the contestants can kill each other, and the story relies on that external tension. The Walk is different in that it is purely an endurance test, no violence allowed. That makes the story peculiar, internal, and “art house.” But it also gives the story its heart.

As the story begins, we start expecting it to come down to a two-man competition between our (arbitrarily) favorite competitor, Garraty, and our least favorite, the racist Barkovitch. But King swerves dramatically away from expectations. The horror instead derives from watching children befriend each other, and then fight their own instinct to help each other survive – all while knowing that this is a fate that they volunteered for. This element is most of what makes the story feel “unfilmable.” The story focuses on a lot of internal conflict.

Richard Bachman has, figuratively, taken on a life of his own. He’s canonically older, grittier, and meaner than King. Would Bachman allow The Long Walk to be transformed into a violent brawl? Perhaps. But it’s important to remember, Bachman didn’t write The Long Walk. He may have written The Running Man, or Thinner, insofar as Stephen King was in Bachman Mode when those stories were written. The Long Walk is different; King actually wrote it in high school and college, and put it in a drawer. The grizzled Bachman was invented to be the name on that novel, but it was written by a teenager. The Long Walk wasn’t written by Stephen King, successful author. It has a certain sincerity to it that’s unique in his large ouvre. Turning it into a Hunger Games clone would make it easier to film, but a lot would be lost with that fundamental alteration to the story’s DNA.

What’s Next for Stephen King?

For Stephen King, there is no such thing as a lull period. Having written over hundreds of novels, short stories, and anthologies, you can expect a new work by the horror master at any moment. His next publication, You Like It Darker, comes out on May 21 and features 12 short tales, some of which have never been seen by the public. A long-awaited adaptation of King’s Salem’s Lot is set to release on Max in 2024 on an unknown date. The film, directed by horror staple, Gary Dauberman, who worked on King’s It 2017 adaptation, and the Annabelle and Nun series, initially planned for a theatrical release, but it was pushed to straight-to-streaming after numerous post-production delays. Pennywise fans also need to look out for Max’s Welcome to Derry, a prequel series about the events that lead up to IT.

Another contemporary horror visionary, Mike Flanagan, is currently in post-production of his feature adaptation of King’s The Life of Chuck, a genre-bending novella about the life of an ordinary man named Charles Krantz. The film stars Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Karen Gillan. Production of Flanagan’s film was delayed due to the SAG-AFTRA strike in 2023. No official release date has been confirmed.

The Hunger Games is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.

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