THE LONG WALK. The Dreams and Nightmares of King Adapters

Given how frequently new adaptations of Stephen King’s prose hit both big and small screens, it’s surprising that some of the master of horror’s finest works have still never been filmed. The Long Walk, published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1979 (just a few months after the release of the monumental The Stand), is a perfect example. Set in an unspecified dystopian future, the novel tells the story of an annual national event — the titular Long Walk.

The rules are simple: one hundred teenage boys walk forward at a set pace, accompanied by a military vehicle. If any of them slows down too many times, he ends the walk with a bullet to the head. The march continues until only one participant remains — the lucky winner receives a cash prize and one wish of his choosing. Although attempts to adapt the book began as early as the 1980s — with George A. Romero and Frank Darabont at various points attached to direct — King’s fans had to wait until now for the story to finally make it to the screen.

WARNING! This text contains spoilers!

I’ve long counted myself among those eagerly waiting. By the time I first read The Long Walk, I was already a fully committed King devotee, and the book quickly became one of my absolute favorites (perhaps alongside It). I bonded deeply with the characters and returned to the novel regularly. As a pretentious middle schooler, I even used to argue passionately that The Long Walk and The Running Man weren’t rip-offs of The Hunger Games. So you can imagine my dread when, two years ago, it was announced that the film adaptation would be directed by Francis Lawrence — the man best known in recent years as the go-to filmmaker for The Hunger Games franchise (a fact that the Long Walk marketing campaign eagerly highlighted).

It’s not that I have anything against Suzanne Collins’ series — quite the opposite, I devoured the book trilogy in three days. The issue is that King’s work is a different beast entirely. Sure, there are similarities — teenagers forced into a deadly game for the amusement of the masses, and media as a tool of oppressive control — but The Long Walk, written as a reaction to the Vietnam War (yet still painfully relevant today), is above all a bleak, meticulously crafted chronicle of slow dying.

The world-building in King’s novel was deliberately vague; we learned about the dystopian setting only from throwaway remarks and scattered hints. The story’s nominal villain, the Major who oversees the march, was less a character than a symbol of systemic oppression. The boys’ occasional “rebellions” amounted mostly to juvenile gestures of defiance — flipping off the soldiers watching from the roadside. What truly mattered to King were the raw realities of the walk itself: the deaths of newly made friends, the erosion of humanity into primal survival instinct, the physical exhaustion, the creeping madness, and the blistered feet.

I’ll admit, the premise might seem nearly impossible to adapt. But that’s the challenge with King in general — adapting his work is harder than it looks. Yes, his fiction is full of cinematic hooks: haunted cars (or hotels, laundromats, toys, and who-knows-what-else), vividly drawn characters, and bursts of spectacular horror.

Yet King’s writing also leans on metatextual reflections about the creative process, a delicate balance between sincerity and dark humor, naturalistic world-building, and tension built through characters’ interior monologues. Just look at the two film versions of Pet Sematary to see how treacherous that path can be. On the other hand, there’s a long list of films that turned King’s most “unfilmable” works into bona fide classics — Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption, Taylor Hackford’s Dolores Claiborne, or Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me.

That last title, Stand by Me, is in fact the best point of comparison for The Long Walk. The plot of the novella The Body, which Reiner adapted, also follows a group of kids on a trek from point A to point B, with the narrative substance lying mostly in their aimless conversations. Even The Long Walk’s two central figures, Ray Garraty and Pete McVries, resemble older, darker versions of Gordie Lachance and Chris Chambers. In both stories, the emotional core is the relationship between a sensitive, somewhat naïve dreamer and his symbolic “older brother.”

Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner carry this thread into their film but make some major story changes along the way. In the novel, Garraty was an everyman who, like most participants, joined the Walk on a teenage whim. His arc was one of gradual disillusionment and loss of innocence. McVries, though loyal to his fellow walkers, was a boy prematurely hardened by life, full of self-loathing and suicidal impulses. In the film, however, Garraty enters the Walk with a clear purpose — to kill the Major in revenge for his father’s death, a political dissident (a detail present in the book but pushed to the forefront here).

McVries, meanwhile, becomes the protagonist’s moral compass, guiding him back toward his humanity (forgive the melodrama — blame the screenwriter). While the “naïve kid/wounded sage” dynamic remains intact, the changes in motivation steer the story into slightly different territory.

In King’s version, the camaraderie among the boys arose organically from their shared awareness of impending death — a great equalizer. Even the bullies, familiar King archetypes from high school hallways, gradually revealed themselves as frightened, helpless kids. Lawrence emphasizes this further, exploring the desperate clinging to solidarity under impossible circumstances. Two moments stand out in particular: the formation of the “Musketeers,” a friendship pact given much more weight than in the book (where it happened almost by accident), and the later decision among survivors to swear a pact not to help one another — a pact they ultimately break, unlike their literary counterparts.

This aspect of the film works largely thanks to the cast. While Cooper Hoffman (as Garraty) and David Jonsson (as McVries) shoulder most of the emotional weight, the entire ensemble is excellently chosen, giving even the minor characters a spark of life. The actors carry the story forward — even when the screenplay stumbles, which, unfortunately, it does quite often.

Still, I must first praise Lawrence for his restraint as a director. I feared he might turn the titular walk into a string of flashy action sequences, desperate to spice up the endless march. Thankfully, I was wrong. Although there are moments of grim physical struggle (like the scene where a boy suffers a bout of diarrhea mid-walk), the deaths retain the disturbingly mundane tone of the book — often just a single, simple gunshot.

This grounded brutality only makes the more intense sequences stand out more — especially the harrowing hill-climb scene, where soldiers shout warnings, bullets whistle through the air, and Garraty’s fellow walkers drop around him like flies.

There are, however, elements in the film that clearly drag it down. Although Lawrence and Mollner, following King’s lead, deliberately reduce their vision of the future to a series of readable symbols, they still make the mistake of overexplaining in several key areas. The military propaganda’s stated justification for holding the Walk each year — to “inspire ordinary people” to work harder — feels unnecessary and raises a flood of questions about how this world actually functions, even if we understand that the Major’s repeated rhetoric is just another tool of control.

The subplot involving Garraty’s father, who once gave his son forbidden books and was “removed” by the oppressive regime, feels especially heavy-handed. Lawrence indulges in several such explanations, and the result is that the film’s allegories come off rather clunky.

While I understand the pragmatic reasoning behind reducing the number of Walk participants from one hundred to fifty, I have to admit that this change robs the story of some of its narrative momentum. It’s not just that my fan’s heart mourns the characters who didn’t make it into the movie (though that’s true too). Trimming the cast does allow the filmmakers to keep the story focused and manageable, but it also strips away the sense of multiplicity that gave the novel its depth — both in defining the world and in fleshing out the psychology of its participants. Gone, too, is the crucial element of emotional numbness that built the book’s fatalistic tone: that chilling moment when the ever-present sound of gunfire fades into a dull, background hum.

Then there’s the ending — arguably the film’s most problematic element. In the novel’s finale, Garraty, after “walking into the ground” the last of his fellow contestants, sees a hazy figure beckoning to him in the distance. Ignoring the cheering crowd and the Major congratulating him on his victory, he begins to run toward the mysterious shape on the horizon. Who calls to Garraty — Death? The vision of a fallen friend? Someone else entirely? We never find out. What we do know is that his fate doesn’t look hopeful. I understand the difficulty of translating such an ambiguous, dreamlike scene to the screen, so I’m not surprised the film opts for a different ending — but the execution is lacking.

In the movie, Garraty dies sacrificing himself for McVries, who fulfills his friend’s last wish by killing the Major before continuing the march alone. On the surface, it sounds like a fittingly fatalistic conclusion — our protagonist dies, while his idealistic friend abandons his principles in an act of vengeance. And if someone wants to read the final scene metaphorically, as McVries’s own death or a hallucination of a delirious mind, there’s room for that, too.

The problem is that King’s ending flowed organically from his vision of the world, while Lawrence’s feels more like a tacked-on shock moment — a quick, hollow twist that doesn’t fully connect with what came before. It’s meant to hit hard, but instead it leaves the viewer shrugging indifferently.

To be clear, I don’t believe that every deviation from the source material is inherently bad. On the contrary, King’s adaptations often benefit from creative reinterpretation. We all know the story of The Shining and King’s feud with Stanley Kubrick, but there’s also Frank Darabont’s The Mist, Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, and Andy Muschietti’s two-part It — all films that took liberties with King’s text, often with his blessing.

The Long Walk, however, encapsulates both the greatest potential and the greatest pitfalls of adapting King. In a strange way, it manages to both simplify the original and honor it at the same time. Francis Lawrence’s film certainly deserves attention — it’s ambitious, sincere, and occasionally powerful — but it’s not entirely successful. Fans of the book, myself included, might grumble about that fact, yet perhaps it’s time to move on. After all, the flood of King adaptations — like the Long Walk itself — never really ends. And on the horizon, we can already see Edgar Wright approaching with his take on The Running Man.