We’ve already ranked the best Stephen King adaptations, but one name that’s absent from that list is the horror maestro’s first-ever novel: The Long Walk.
There’s a very good, if hard-to-believe reason for that: no one has ever actually taken the trouble to adapt it. Zombie genre mavens George A. Romero and Frank Darabont have both been involved in potential treatments over the years, but nothing ever came to pass.
Such borderline negligence ended on the 12th of September, when The Long Walk arrived on our cinema screens. It’s a tale set in a dystopian future in which young American men enter an annual tournament to walk as far as they can. If their speed drops below three miles an hour, they risk execution, with the last one standing winning everything they could want.
Director Francis Lawrence has a history in this death game field, having marshalled all but the very first Hunger Games adaptation.
That got us to thinking about all of the movies and TV shows that concern themselves with deadly games. Rather than rank them according to our personal preference, we thought we’d examine the deadliness of each scenario.
Which of these fictional competitions is the least survivable? Let’s start with the easiest and worst, our way towards almost-certain death.
The Game
The Game’s paranoia-inducing central game seems truly nightmarish, especially in the hands of director David Fincher. But was Michael Douglas’s cold-hearted investment banker ever truly in danger? We won’t spoil the film’s ingenious premise or cathartic denouement any further (though come on people, it’s nearly 30 years old now).
Suffice to say, we would fancy our chances emerging from this particular game unscathed – perhaps even improved and invigorated.
The Hunt
In The Hunt, a group of supposedly liberal elites round up a bunch of assorted conspiracy theorists and wing nuts, and proceed to hunt them down in a range of gory ways.
How survivable this particular deadly game is really comes down to your own personal political persuasion and social media habits. Unless you’re on the extreme fringes of polite discourse, you’d probably be OK, but there’s little room for nuance in the deliberations. Such is the binary nature of The Hunt’s heavy-handed – but deliciously entertaining – brand of allegory.
Death Race 2000
How’s your driving? That seems to be the key consideration when calculating how survivable Dear Race 2000’s central game might be. Of course, you’ll also need to be willing to don a larger-than-life pro wrestling persona and, er, be comfortable with the killing of innocent bystanders.
But, hey, the chances of survival seem less than dire! As the name suggests, this schlocky 1975 movie concerns a trans-American road race in which its bloodthirsty participants gain points for mowing down pedestrians. Of course, if you’re not actually in the race, the calculation changes...
Rollerball
The hugely influential Rollerball takes the whole ‘death game’ premise more literally than most. It’s set in a near-future corporate-run dystopia (aren’t they all?) where a brutal mash-up of ice hockey, rollerskating, and American football placates the disaffected masses.
Despite the bleak setting, the titular sport seems relatively survivable – until the powers that be start to manipulate the rules to try and silence our stoic hero (played by James Caan). At this point, it’d probably be best if you just take up badminton.
The Purge
It’s not so much a game show at the heart of The Purge. No one is being entertained by its gruesome cull, beyond some of its less stable participants. But its premise lies adjacent to the other entries on this list. For one day a year, all crime in this dystopian take on the US is legal – cue the terrorising of various minority groups.
The sprawling, somewhat vague nature of these rules (and the potential for ‘victory’ by simply hiding in a thick bush) makes us relatively confident that we’d have a chance of surviving The Purge’s organised murder-fest.
Alice in Borderland
Several young people become stranded in a mysterious parallel Tokyo, forced to compete in deadly games in order to survive. The series’ complex card-based grading system would at least offer some tactical flexibility in how you approach the small matter of your survival.
Some of the flat-out unfair games featured in the series, however, serve to dent our enthusiasm – as does the fact that we don’t speak Japanese. Forming strong alliances with capable gamers appears to be a smart idea in Alice in Borderland’s warped world.
The Hunger Games
It might be a PG-13 take on the subject matter – and a fairly derivative one at that, regardless of what writer Suzanne Collins has to say – but there’s no denying the immense popularity of The Hunger Games series. A group of young people, culled from the 12 districts of a dystopian future nation, is forced to fight to the death in an annual game show (see, we told you). Again, it all seems highly unsurvivable, though the movies seem to play fast and loose with the whole ‘last person standing’ rule, so who knows?
The Running Man
Like The Long Walk, The Running Man is a cinematic adaptation of a classic Stephen King novel, all about a deadly futuristic game. It’s about to receive a new film treatment by Edgar Wright, but we’re including this earlier, looser adaptation from 1987.
Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Captain Ben Richards, who finds himself thrust into a sadistic game show, fighting for his life against a crew of garishly attired killers. We wouldn’t fancy our chances, but if we managed to hide behind a peak Arnie while he leads a violent revolution against the game’s creators, we might have a chance.
Battle Royale
Kinji Fukasaku’s seminal movie has had a massive influence on many of the more recent entries on this list, but Koushun Takami’s original novel counts The Long Walk as a major influence. You can see that to be the case in its story of a group of youths conscripted into a deadly game by a totalitarian state.
Rather than walking until they drop, though, these kids must use whatever tools they encounter on their island-prison to kill one another.
The random nature of the weapon assignments, plus the requirement for extreme violence, makes us very doubtful of our potential survival.
Squid Game
Here’s another game in which the odds really don’t seem so good. The childish pastimes at the heart of this smash hit South Korean series pack a deceptively grisly punch, all for the entertainment of a group of perverted plutocrats.
Squid Game’s cast of 456 contestants, all taken from the more desperate and wretched corners of society, are swiftly whittled down from the very first bullet-strewn game, until just a single winner is left to scoop up the winnings. Brutal stuff.
The Long Walk
In the movie that inspired this list, Cooper Hoffman’s Raymond Garraty and David Jonsson’s Peter McVries embark on an increasingly unfriendly walk-off against a bunch of other young men, with any infractions punished by Mark Hamill’s callous invigilator.
We haven’t seen the film yet, but if it’s at all faithful to Stephen King’s source material, we wouldn’t fancy our chances. Demanding that we disembowel, shoot, or run over our rivals is one thing, but asking us to walk a great distance? Just put us out of our misery now.
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