Stephen King's only condition for The Long Walk movie adaptation was that the audience had to watch teenagers getting shot, as he thinks it's "wrong" that so many films show violence without consequence.
"If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see… some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks, but you never see any blood," King said in a new interview with The Times. "And man, that’s wrong. It’s almost, like, pornographic.'
Of the latest big-screen adaptation of his work, he added, "I said, if you’re not going to show it, don’t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie." Indeed, our own The Long Walk review says the movie is "not for the faint of heart."
Based on King's 1979 novel of the same name (which was originally published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), The Long Walk is set in a dystopian version of the US and follows a group of young men who enter an annual televised competition to walk US Route 1.
Walkers have to maintain a minimum speed at all times of three miles per hour at risk of execution, but the winner gets untold riches and a single wish.
Directed by The Hunger Games helmer Francis Lawrence and written by JT Mollner, the cast includes Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Ben Wang, Mark Hamill, and Judy Greer.
The Long Walk arrives in theaters on September 12. In the meantime, check out our guide to all the other best upcoming horror movies still to come in 2025.
