First Look at Stephen King’s ‘The Long Walk’: The Dystopian Coming-of-Age Story He Considered Too “Merciless” to Film

The Long Walk has survived against the odds. It still resonates decades after the violent conflict that inspired it, and has now finally overcome the many failed efforts to adapt its bleak narrative for the screen. The story, about a group of young men in a dystopian future who embark on a life-or-death marathon with no set finish line, was the first novel Stephen King ever wrote. He was only 19 at the time, finishing it as a student at the University of Maine in 1967.

King started the novel when he was in high school and the body count of young American men killed in the Vietnam War was rapidly rising. In 1964, according to government archives, 216 American servicemembers were killed there, but by 1965, when his senior year started, that tally had skyrocketed to 1,928. King started college in 1966, when the number of troops killed more than tripled to 6,350. It doubled once more over to 11,363 the next year when he finished writing the book, with no end to the real-life bloodshed in sight. Looking back, King says he didn’t intend to write a political allegory, but his futuristic fantasy about a military leader known only as The Major who sends a veritable platoon of healthy young men to their deaths for sport had an obvious true-life parallel.

“You write from your times, so certainly, that was in my mind. But I never thought about it consciously,” King, now 77, tells Vanity Fair. “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.”

Almost 60 years later, the story is finally making its way to theaters on September 12—directed by Francis Lawrence, who has helmed all of the Hunger Games sequels and prequels. There are obvious similarities between The Long Walk and those films, based on Suzanne Collins’s YA kill-or-be-killed series. But Lawrence was drawn in by the prospect of telling an even more intense and harrowing story. “Anything that has a contest with death as the stakes and some sort of big prize if you win can be connected in some way,” Lawrence says. “But in The Hunger Games, everybody’s competing in a very different kind of way. There are alliances and you are trying to kill one another. Here, you’re not actually trying to kill one another. It’s a very different dynamic, in terms of relationships.”

The boys on The Long Walk are desperate to survive, but sometimes they help their fellow walkers. Each boy gets up to three warnings if they slow down or stop. The fourth warning is a bullet to the head.

The walk has no destination. It goes for hundreds of miles with no rest for any reason—and ends when only one participant is left standing. “You know that, slowly, these kids are going to be picked away one by one by one, which is not unlike pretty much any horror movie that you see,” Lawrence says.

The Long Walk is more a tragedy than a horror tale; the jump scares are punctuated by bursts of heartbreak. The young men’s decency emerges as they realize that stopping to help someone now may mean them reaching out a hand when they fall in turn. But the ugliness of some comes out too, as various characters taunt or torment each other—especially as they all near their breaking points.

The Long Walk has a large ensemble cast that’s steadily whittled down, but the action centers primarily on two guys: Ray Garraty (played by Licorice Pizza’s Cooper Hoffman), who may not be the more formidable of the walkers but is certainly the most big-hearted; and Peter McVries (Alien: Romulus’s David Jonsson), a fit, handsome, and charismatic front-runner with a philosophical side. While perpetually on the move, they develop the kind of foxhole friendships that often occur between two soldiers in war.

“To me, that’s what the whole thing is about. The whole thing is about the two of them bonding, and kind of falling in love in a weird way,” Lawrence says. “The conflict of what they’re there for and what they’ve been through in the past only brings them closer together. The sacrifices they make for one another, to me, is the whole movie.”

The Long Walk begins with Hoffman’s Garraty being dropped off at the starting line by his fretful mother (played by Judy Greer). She’s beside herself, but he’s resolved: They need this. The high-minded explanation for the walk is that it’s intended to inspire a wounded nation with its depiction of fearlessness and strength. It’s also meant to satisfy an angry population’s unabashed bloodlust, the same way gladiator combat did for ancient civilizations.

Twenty-two-year-old Hoffman couldn’t connect with The Long Walk as a representation of soldiers being pointlessly slaughtered for no good reason. But he found another way to relate to the story: resilience. “The Long Walk is a metaphor for life, in my eyes,” he says. “It’s a metaphor for any sort of hard thing you’re going through, whether it’s depression or anxiety or heartbreak or whatever. Sometimes in life, you want to stop walking, and that’s a really dark thought. But the second you acknowledge that and come to terms with it—and then keep going—that’s a really beautiful thing.”

It’s an inspiring idea wrapped in a grim tale. The winner of the walk gets untold riches and the fulfillment of a single wish—anything they want. Those two prizes serve as a north star for the walkers as they head out on a country road, keeping a steady pace of four miles per hour until no one else is left. TV cameras attached to Army jeeps follow their every step. The march is led by The Major (Mark Hamill in dark-side mode), who repeatedly lauds the nobility of the boys even as he oversees their gruesome executions.

It’s ironic casting. In another age, when the book was first published, Hamill might have played any number of the young participants in The Long Walk. He stood as the epitome of the young hero’s journey in Star Wars, but it was his later work in Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi that made Lawrence think of him as The Major. ”His Luke Skywalker at that point had weariness. There was an authenticity to it that was grizzled and wary and real,” Lawrence says. “I asked for a meeting, and he and I had a Zoom, and I discovered that he had grown up traveling around in a military family. He was, like, ‘I know this guy.’”

Each young man in The Long Walk has his own personal reasons for participating in the deadly, endless journey, and the actors did too. Hoffman’s Garraty is grieving his lost father; he enters the race to get vengeance on leaders he despises, pursuing the wishes of his resistance-minded dad. The actor— son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman—says he could relate.

“The way I always had to think about it was, like, my relationship to my father or my relationship to my parents in general,” Hoffman says. “You kind of believe everything they tell you, and you kind of want to do what they want to. You want to be them, even if you don’t want to be them. Growing up, you start to realize that what they are is not you. To try to live your life for someone else, especially for someone else who isn’t there… There’s a nice scene in the movie where [McVries] is saying, ‘Anger only gets you so far.’ And it is true, because anger is a feeling based on grief.”

The Long Walk novel is often an entry point for young King fans because it’s a coming-of-age story. They may not be marched off to war, but they are following the orders and expectations of the adults in their lives. “Garraty believed wholeheartedly that his father was fighting for the exact right thing, and his father could do no wrong. And then, at one point, it switches,” Hoffman says. The character starts to think: “Okay, who am I in this? Even if I started out on this journey doing it for someone else, how am I going to finish it, doing it for me?”

Jonsson, who’s 31, brings a more hardened and mature presence to McVries. His experience sends him to a different epiphany than Garraty’s, even as they become as close as brothers.The walk makes McVries realize that it’s not enough to stand only for yourself. “It’s about acts of kindness and how they affect you,” Jonsson says. “You get that beautiful act of surrender, of putting you before me. That’s part of McVries’s journey with Garrity. How do you pass on the kindness that was given to you? Especially since McVries had a very hard life up until that point, which made him a bit tough.”

McVries has a lean physique, ripped arms, and an indefatigable presence, but the actor’s preparation for the role went beyond making sure he didn’t skip leg day. “Francis told me to read some William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience,” Jonsson says. “That really reminded me of their relationship, this kind of yin and yang of who we are to be human. What McVries lacks, Garrity has. What Garrity has, McVries lacks.”

Together, they might be unstoppable. But only one can win.

The Long Walk itself was all too often halted in its tracks over the years, both as a book and as an attempted movie. It was the first of five finished novels to be stashed in King’s desk, unwanted and largely unread, until he finally hit the jackpot with his first published book, Carrie, in 1974. “I was trying to impress a girl that I met, and I gave it to her chapter by chapter,” King says of The Long Walk. “She liked it, and that was cool.” But she didn’t fall for the book hard enough to swoon for him too. “I don’t think that I ever managed to get lucky, but I certainly tried,” he says.

He then submitted the book to a Random House contest for aspiring first-time novelists, hosted annually by the legendary editor Bennett Cerf—known for shepherding the works of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Dr. Seuss, among many others. “Wow, that takes me back,” King says. “But I was depressed to get a form letter back, and I just never sent it anywhere else. Just put it in a drawer.”

Several years after following Carrie with bestsellers like ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and The Stand, King considered resurrecting some of his better unpublished books. But his editors in those days worried that King was already too prolific. “Nobody wanted to publish too many books [by one author] at one time because they felt that it would be a drag on the market and people would be overwhelmed,” he says.

So The Long Walk finally hit bookstores in 1979. But it was published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, which King would use for five books. He planned to release Misery as a sixth under the fake name when the ruse was uncovered by a bookstore clerk in 1985. The King revelation turned each of the Bachman books into bestsellers, and The Running Man and Thinner were later adapted into movies.

The Long Walk was repeatedly considered for the big screen, but each attempt fell apart. Night of the Living Dead’s George Romero gave it a try in the late ’80s; Frank Darabont, no stranger to King with his adaptations of The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist, began developing a version in the late 2000s. More recently in 2019, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark filmmaker André Øvredal was attached to direct. But each time, The Long Walk stumbled in the development process.

“I think maybe what held it back in those other adaptations is that merciless quality,” King says. “Somebody putting down the money for it must’ve been, like, ‘I don’t know…this is hard. This is a painful one.’”

What changed? He isn’t sure. But King is certainly on a hot streak these days. In a few weeks, he’ll publish Never Flinch, the latest installment in his Holly Gibney series of detective thrillers; he’s also finishing the third Talisman book now. Oz Perkins just scored a hit with The Monkey, based on King’s short story about a cursed toy; director Mike Flanagan (currently working on a new TV series based on Carrie) releases his take on King’s upbeat apocalypse tale The Life of Chuck on June 6, after winning the audience prize at the Toronto International Film Festival last year; Edgar Wright directs Glen Powell in a new version of The Running Man later this year; and MGM+ is putting the finishing touches on a TV series based on King’s 2019 novel The Institute, about a secret government facility to study children with otherworldly powers, with David E. Kelley writing and producing alongside director Jack Bender of Lost fame.

“What’s weird is that I’ve almost become a franchise, like Marvel or something,” King says. “I saw a poster the other day for The Long Walk: ‘based on the legendary Stephen King story’ or something like that. ‘Legendary,’ when it’s connected to a person, basically means old.”

It was never announced publicly, but Lawrence counts himself among the filmmakers who previously tried and failed to make The Long Walk.

“It crossed my desk in 2006, around the time I was making I Am Legend. The guy who wrote I Am Legend was one of the producers—Akiva Goldsman, who’s now a friend of mine. He gave me a copy. We were trying to find something to do together, and I totally fell in love with it. We went to get the rights, and I think it might have been Frank Darabont who had nabbed them right before we could. I fell in love with it, but we couldn’t do it.” Instead, Lawrence signed on to make all four follow-ups to The Hunger Games.

When the rights became available again in recent years, Strange Darling screenwriter J.T. Mollner penned the adaptation, and Lawrence signed on to produce in partnership with The Ring’s Roy Lee, whose previous King credits include the recent It movies and last year’s remake of ’Salem’s Lot. (King also joined as an executive producer.)

Lawrence is currently prepping another Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping. The Long Walk is considered the forefather of those stories, and the progenitor of everything from South Korea’s Squid Game and Japan’s 2000 kid-on-kid kill fest Battle Royale—as well as Mr. Beast’s Amazon series, Beast Games, in which contestants are rewarded for eliminating rivals, sometimes by symbolically murdering them.

King doesn’t feel he owns the notion of survival of the fittest, and speaks highly of The Hunger Games in particular. “I’d been influenced by 1984 and Lord of the Flies and a lot of novels,” he says. “I always thought that Suzanne Collins just had that idea and ran with it. As somebody who has worked in the horror and suspense genre, everything is related to everything else. It’s not like theft. It’s more like homage.”

Still, it was important for Lawrence not to approach The Long Walk like he’d been down this road before (so to speak.) “I thought the opposite. I’m, like, ‘I don’t want this to feel like The Hunger Games,” he says. This film has a scrappier, grittier feel. It seldom leaves the blacktop where the young men are walking. The audience sees only the passing countryside and gawking townsfolk that the contestants see. And the violence is much more explicit. “I’m really only interested in the emotional value of it. You want that impact,” Lawrence says—especially with the very first death, which we won’t spoil here. “He doesn’t seem like he’s going to be the first one to go,” the director teases.

Most movies are shot by jumping around through the script, but The Long Walk was shot in sequence from beginning to end. The worn-out quality you see in the actors was real, even though they got to stop and sleep each night before returning to the road. “My walk changed. My feet were hurting, my legs hurt. It had to look uncomfortable,” Hoffman says.

The cast also found themselves bonding just as the characters did. “It happened so naturally,” Jonsson says, recalling his first scenes with Hoffman when the pair meet as strangers before the walk. “It was like the first day at school.”

But the chronological shooting schedule was also bittersweet. “Once they die, you lose them,” Hoffman says. “I got pretty close with some of those boys, and I felt pretty sad when they left.”

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