Once, long ago, in the mid-1960s, a shortsighted college freshman began writing a novel about a totalitarian near-future USA. The teenager dreamed of becoming a bestselling author, and this tale of a death-or-glory contest was his first step on the road and set the direction of travel. Six decades later, the landscape’s very different. The poor boy from Maine grew up to be one of the world’s most popular writers, while his depiction of a fascistic, trigger-happy American heartland doesn’t look quite so far-fetched any more. The kid’s dreams all came true. Unfortunately, some of his nightmares did, too.
The backstory to The Long Walk could almost be a Stephen King tale itself, although this might require the author to be literally haunted by his old college manuscript, as opposed to simply cashing the cheque as the book is made over as a Hollywood motion picture. It’s actually the third King adaptation we’ve seen this year, arriving just after Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey and Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, and a month ahead of Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, but it stands on its own merits and is well worth checking out.
Francis Lawrence’s dystopian thriller is a lean and hungry affair, thrown against a backdrop of distressed Americana (foreclosed houses; boarded-up shops). Cooper (son of Philip Seymour) Hoffman gives a fine performance as stoic Ray Garraty, who squabbles and bonds with his fellow contestants during a forced march cross-country. The plot’s a rites-of-passage ramble gone horribly wrong; it’s Stand by Me (1986) by way of the battery farm. The contest is rigged and the cruelty is the point. First prize is your heart’s desire. Second prize, you’re fired. I liked The Monkey as well, but The Long Walk has the edge.
It seems that we’re regularly reminded that the Marvel Comics Universe is the industry’s dominant force, a Hollywood monopoly, practically the only game in town. And yet judged on the sheer number of credits, Stephen King has the MCU licked. He’s the world’s most adapted living author, streets ahead of Nicholas Sparks and John Grisham, with an official tally of around 70 screen treatments that swells to over 100 when you throw in all the sequels, student shorts and the occasional foreign-language remake. And where Marvel pictures are an identifiable brand, King flicks run the gamut; they’re all over the shop. Some are dreams and some are nightmares. And as is the way with good horror stories, it’s the nightmares that tend to be a lot more entertaining.
What do we call this big, sprawling rival to the MCU? Kingstown, maybe, because it feels more like a city than a cosmos: a jumble of different neighbourhoods, built up piecemeal over time. The historic old town is composed of Carrie (1976), Salem’s Lot (1979) and The Shining (1980). Stand by Me, Misery (1990) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994) make up the posh central postcodes, while the respectable outer suburbs are home to films such as Hearts in Atlantis (2001) and It (2017), The Green Mile (1999) and Doctor Sleep (2019). As a whistle-stop tour, it covers the main sights. But it conveniently bypasses the dodgy Eighties and Nineties estates – and it is here that one finds the likes of Graveyard Shift (1990), Firestarter (1984), Cat’s Eye (1985) and The Mangler (1995). These properties might be tawdry, disreputable and sometimes downright hazardous. Many have already been condemned and forgotten. All the same, they remain as much a part of Kingstown as its comfortable, solid showhomes.
Possibly, like The Long Walk, they help reconnect the man to his roots. During his first flush of success, King was dismissed by critics as a peddler of cheap trash. He craved some respect and the creative control that came with it. The author was embarrassed by the low-rent Eighties adaptations of his books. But famously he also disliked Stanley Kubrick’s brilliantly glacial treatment of The Shining (he called it “a big beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it”). So as his influence grew, he began to gravitate towards directors who could be trusted to preserve his vision and handle his work with care.
King’s policing paid off with Stand by Me and Shawshank – both of which are terrific – but it went too far and turned too cautious, which explains those featureless outer suburbs. Lisey’s Story (King’s own favourite of his novels) was laboriously refitted as a leaden, overstretched miniseries. The Stand (his actual best book) failed to spark and catch fire in its dogged TV incarnation. Even The Life of Chuck – a sentimental awards-bait fairytale about the end of the world – sticks so faithfully to the original 2020 novella that it might as well be on a leash. Films need room to breathe, evolve and find their own range, and this precision-tooled drama never allows itself to. The Life of Chuck is Mike Flanagan’s third King adaptation, following Gerald’s Game (2017) and Doctor Sleep, and suggests that the director might have grown too close to his source.
I’m not sure that reverence and fidelity work for any great author, let alone King, whose novels give the impression of having been written at breakneck speed. They’re loose-boned and vital, jarring and raw, a clash of full-body-heave horror with smalltown folksy pathos, which is to say that they’re tales to be played with, not memorialised and enshrined. The Shawshank Redemption, of course, remains a copper-bottomed movie classic. But I have a sneaking affection for some of those garish Eighties adaptations. Cujo (1983), John Carpenter’s Christine (1983) and Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary (1989) carry a crude, rude energy that the later films tend to lack. They’re closer to the spirit – if not the letter – of the books that inspired them.
Maybe that’s why I enjoyed The Long Walk so much. It is vivid and stylish, professionally made and impeccably well-acted. But it’s essentially a bleak, brutal B-movie, unadorned and ungentrified. It’s as if the filmmakers have somehow managed to sidestep the lauded, influential 77-year-old author and collaborated instead with the punk kid he once was. They’ve given us an old yarn that feels young and a much-needed throwback to the man’s rascally past. Most teenage tales should be buried; the world is better off without them. But the rare ones are uncrushable, unkillable, and simply won’t be shut up. And to quote another King story, sometimes they come back.
‘The Long Walk’ is in cinemas
