Stephen King Demanded ‘The Long Walk’ Show Teens Getting Shot

As The Long Walk makes the trek from the page to the screen, Stephen King recently revealed the one condition he had for adapting his 1979 novel.

The author explained that the characters in the book are “the same sort of kids that are pulled into the war machine” of Vietnam, noting that he required screenwriter JT Mollner and director Francis Lawrence to show teens getting shot in their film.

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

In The Long Walk, premiering Sept. 12 in theaters, a group of 100 young men enter an annual walking contest in dystopian America, in which the losers are executed and only one person survives.

As Lionsgate screened the first 20 minutes of the movie at Comic-Con, Mollner said he “wanted to keep the DNA and themes that Stephen King baked into his original novel.”

“Even though he was writing about specific things at the time, I feel that relevance is generational and wanted to make sure we had that. The beauty, love and the story of friendship along with the brutality of hopelessness and terror,” added Mollner. “We wanted to go all the way. I knew that Stephen King wanted us to go all the way. I knew Lionsgate wanted us to go all the way. If this book got into the wrong hands, studio or filmmakers. It could’ve been neutered. So, I’m very grateful we were able to keep the teeth that the book has.”