"The Long Walk" Trailer: Stephen King's Dystopian Horror Classic Comes to Life with Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson and Mark Hamill
In this haunting new Stephen King adaptation, a group of young walkers (Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson) faces a deadly contest in a military dictatorship, directed by Francis Lawrence.
One of the great skills of master horror storyteller Stephen King is his innate ability to take a simple everyday act and somehow turn it into a source of fear and terror. For instance, the act of walking or walking toward something. It seems innocuous enough, but for King, it becomes a prison of sheer horror, a continuous cycle of perpetual dread and panic.
When King wrote the dystopian horror novel The Long Walk, one of his earlier works published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, it began as a story idea during his college years at the University of Maine. It was something he scribbled in between classes, drawing on his own anxieties about the Vietnam War. Perhaps even tapping into his own fears of the draft and the unjust violence seen in protest marches of the time. Think: the Kent State massacre in 1970, where four unarmed college students were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard. It must have felt like America was slipping into a totalitarian regime. Oh, how times have changed... and perhaps in some ways, they’ve come full circle.
Over the decades since its original publication in 1979, the popularity of the book grew, spawning numerous attempts to bring it to the big screen. Even filmmaker Frank Darabont, known for The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist, once expressed interest in adapting the novel into a feature film as early as the 1990s. There was also a rumor that legendary horror filmmaker George A. Romero, who had previously worked with and since become friends with King, said he wanted to turn the book into a movie. Still, nothing came of it. Many King fans raised in the ‘80s and ‘90s, count us among them, always dreamed that a film adaptation would eventually come to fruition. But who would have thought it would take this long to see it finally realized?
After decades in the works, gestating in pre-production hell, King’s classic novel has finally completed its own long walk, with the film adaptation set to arrive later this year. This time, the film comes from acclaimed filmmaker Francis Lawrence, perhaps best known for his directing work on The Hunger Games franchise, including Catching Fire, Mockingjay: Part 1 and 2, and the recent The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Although, you can count us as fans of Lawrence’s cult comic book film adaptation Constantine, starring Keanu Reeves, despite its obvious discrepancies from the original comic.
The Long Walk features an ensemble led by Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza) as Raymond Garraty, David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus) as Peter McVries, Charlie Plummer (Spontaneous) as Gary Barkovitch, Garrett Wareing (Netflix’s Ransom Canyon) as Stebbins, and Ben Wang (Karate Kid: Legends) as Henry Olson, with Star Wars icon Mark Hamill as the Major.
Rounding out the cast are Judy Greer, Roman Griffin Davis, Tut Nyuot, Jordan Gonzalez, Joshua Odjick, and Izabella Raven.
The film invites a comparison to The Hunger Games (although Stephen King’s The Running Man might be a better fit), with its dystopian setting and a group of competitors forced into a life-or-death contest. In this case, the setting is an alternate history of America, circa the early 1970s (although the film could be an amalgam of different eras), where the U.S. government is now a military dictatorship. A group of college-age kids is forced to walk continuously without stopping, maintaining at least a 3-mile-per-hour pace. Any signs of slowing down or giving up result in them being shot and killed on the spot. Whoever is left standing wins the big prize, but by that point, simply making it through intact and unharmed might feel like the real victory.
Mark Hamill, who is no stranger to King-based films having just appeared in Mike Flanagan’s upcoming King adaptation The Life of Chuck, is taking on the role of the main baddie, The Major, an authoritarian military leader who barks orders and keeps the walkers in line as they suffer through the ordeal.
Coming off his breakout horror hit of last year, Strange Darling, filmmaker JT Mollner wrote the adapted screenplay, with Lawrence directing.
The Long Walk will be trekking through cinemas on September 12th.
Watch the film’s first official trailer, above. And check out the film’s official poster, below, which is very in the spirit of the book’s original paperback cover (check out the images below).
