Prolific horror author Stephen King has written about some pretty nightmarish things over the course of his long career, but one of his earliest works is also among his most brutal. First published under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman, in 1979, “The Long Walk” is a deeply disturbing novel about a dystopian alternate U.S. that holds an annual walking contest with only one winner — the last person walking. “The Long Walk” was later collected in “The Bachman Books” and has since become appreciated as among the author’s most impactful works, though it’s been notoriously difficult to adapt into a movie or television series. There’s been plenty of apt comparisons to Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” novels and their film adaptations, but “The Long Walk” is its own unique and truly nasty beast with its origins in King’s personal history.
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Director Francis Lawrence, who’s helmed every “Hunger Games” movie to date save for the 2012 original, has taken up the challenge of overseeing an adaptation of King’s novel for Lionsgate, and that means going back to where it all began. In an interview with Vanity Fair, King opened up about the inspiration behind writing “The Long Walk” all of those years ago, explaining that it was based in a very real, very tangible horror for the young author: the Vietnam War and the U.S. military draft.
King wrote The Long Walk as a college student during the Vietnam War
According to Vanity Fair, King started the novel in high school and finished it in college, during which time the number of young men drafted into the military and sent to war in Vietnam grew exponentially. King’s peers were similarly being drafted and sent across the world to fight in absolutely devastating conditions where, even if they made it back home alive, it was extremely unlikely they would make it back unscathed. King discussed his headspace at the time, saying:
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“You write from your times, so certainly, that was in my mind. But I never thought about it consciously. I was writing a kind of a brutal thing. It was hopeless, and just what you write when you’re 19 years old, man. You’re full of beans and you’re full of cynicism, and that’s the way it was.”
King’s not overstating things; “The Long Walk” is exceptionally bleak. It has a total bummer of an ending that will likely have to be changed in order to make the movie satisfying enough to not leave audiences feeling burned, but it’s hard to blame King based on the context. If he hadn’t been in college himself at the time, he could have been drafted and sent to Vietnam, possibly to die. That’s a pretty bleak fate to stare down at 19 years old, and while King has said he wasn’t trying to write a political or social allegory, he absolutely did with “The Long Walk.”
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Mark Hamill plays a grizzled Major who sends young men to die in The Long Walk
In the upcoming film adaptation of “The Long Walk,” Mark Hamill stars as The Major, a grizzled military man who is in charge of sending young men out on the titular long walk and ensuring that they follow the rules, lest they be shot. (In the novel, participants in “the contest” must maintain a pace of at least four miles per hour and cannot slow down or stop at any time.) It’s not a big stretch to see the similarities between King’s situation as a young man in the U.S. in the 1960s and the men in “The Long Walk” who are also being sent to their deaths by a man in a uniform.
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It might seem strange for “Star Wars” fans to see the former Luke Skywalker playing such a wildly different character, but according to Lawrence (speaking with Vanity Fair), seeing the actor play the older, weathered version of Luke in “Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi” helped the filmmaker see how this casting would work. Not only that, but apparently Hamill also grew up in a military family, which really aided him in understanding his character.
There are quite a few different projects based on Stephen King novels in the works, but “The Long Walk” is shaping up to be seriously exciting, even if it’s bound to be a pretty miserable time at the movies. You can watch the film for yourself when it reaches theaters on September 12, 2025.
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