Stephen King demanded “The Long Walk” show kids getting shot

Stephen King is not known for being precious about his novels.

There are nearly as many film and television adaptations of the prolific author’s works as there are books, ranging from masterful turns by Stanley Kubrick to laughable takes on “The Dark Tower” and “The Lawnmower Man.” (The less said about King’s own movie adaptation, “Maximum Overdrive,” the better.) Still, when it came time to adapt “The Long Walk,” the 77-year-old had one big demand: we needed to see the teenage protagonists getting shot.

Written during the Vietnam War, “Walk” takes place in a dystopian future where 100 young men compete annually in an endurance competition. The walkers keep a grueling pace of 4 miles per hour and are trailed by soldiers. The soldiers shoot anyone who falls below the required pace three times. The last person standing wins. Speaking to The Times of London, King said he required the upcoming film adaptation to show blood, calling the bloodless violence of superhero movies “pornographic.”

“If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see … some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks, but you never see any blood,” he said. “And man, that’s wrong… I said, if you’re not going to show it, don’t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie.”

King also discussed his other dystopias, particularly “The Running Man.” Released in 1982 and set in 2025, it predicts a totalitarian America in which citizens are declared enemies of the state by a game show and forced to run from law enforcement and elite assassins. The frequent Trump critic compared his story to the current state of ICE raids and Donald Trump‘s crackdowns.

“If I wrote this in a book in 1965 … if it got published at all, it would be published as an allegory, like Animal Farm,” he said. “Nobody would have believed where we are today, with Gestapo agents in the street — they call themselves ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but they’re basically guys that are armed, they are wearing masks, they have huge amounts of money to spend, and they are everywhere.”