Lawrence points out how important it was to stay true to the spirit of a novel that is often labelled as King’s most pessimistic, with its grim violence and chilling despair perhaps explaining why its journey to the screen has been so (aptly) arduous. First George A Romero and then Frank Darabont owned the rights to the book but failed to get it over the finish line, despite having previous with King in the form of Creepshow and The Dark Half, in Romero’s case, and The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Mist, in Darabont’s. Lawrence succeeded where they failed, and did so without sanitising the harrowing story to make it more palatable for mainstream audiences. “You need to feel the miles and the time [passing], and feel the degradation – emotionally, psychologically, physically,” he insists. “I wasn’t going to dilute that and make the studio feel super-comfy with it.”
“There’s something relentlessly pessimistic about the nature of the story – lots of young people being killed,” agrees freelance film programmer and writer Michael Blyth, who was a senior programmer at the British Film Institute when it mounted a month-long retrospective of King’s films back in 2015. “But at the same time, there’s a lot of kindness in there. The boys don’t turn on each other. They’re quite supportive. There’s something about friendship and brotherhood that’s very present in the book.”
Simon Brown concurs. An independent scholar and member of the horror studies research group at Northumbria University who has taught on King, he is the author of Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television. “The Long Walk is so bleak and miserable,” he chuckles. “The only other King book that approaches this level of bleakness is Pet Sematary, which is a dialogue on death. But King is not a pessimist. He believes in the power of common decency, and most of his books end with whatever the monster is being defeated. The Long Walk is evidently a template for what would become a Stephen King book: you take a bunch of characters, put them into a situation, and see what they do. You can see that in The Stand, Under the Dome, The Mist… His books aren’t about the monsters, they’re about the people who meet the monsters. Here, it’s not about the walk, it’s about the people on the walk. And they’re all ordinary people.”
The birth (and death) of Richard Bachman
The Long Walk was the second of five novels that King released under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman between 1977 and 1984. The bestselling author invented a nom de plume to “turn the heat down a little bit”, as his debut novel, Carrie, had been quickly followed onto shelves by bestsellers Salem’s Lot, The Shining and The Stand. His publishers, Doubleday and Company, Inc, liked to trumpet that there were “over 40 million King books in print”, but King found himself wondering if his success was down to talent, his celebrity or just plain luck. It was a question that he felt the Bachman experiment might answer. “It is depressing to think it was all – or even mostly – an accident,” he wrote in his introduction to The Bachman Books, a compendium published in 1985. “So maybe you try to find out if you could do it again. Or in my case, if Bachman could do it again.”
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