Stephen King’s Dystopias Return To Reign In 2025 |
From The Running Man to The Long Walk, a wave of new adaptations turns King’s old nightmares into mirrors for modern capitalism. Harriet Earle and Alex Fitch write.
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IT HAS BEEN A MAJOR YEAR for Stephen King films. Four of his stories have hit cinemas in 2025: The Monkey, The Life of Chuck, The Long Walk and The Running Man. And two more have graced the small screen – The Institute and the Pennywise origin series IT: Welcome to Derry.
Indeed, there was a moment in British cinemas earlier in the year, where you could watch The Life of Chuck and have the film preceded by trailers for the other three cinematic adaptations, making King’s work feel ubiquitous right now.
King originally wrote both The Long Walk and The Running Man under his pseudonym Richard Bachman – a name he used to try out dark stories that leaned more towards speculative fiction. In his 1982 novella, The Running Man, Ben Richards (Glen Powell) takes part in a reality show that will earn him $1 billion (£750 million), provided he survives 30 days. No one ever has, but Richards’ daughter is gravely ill, and his wife has turned to sex work to earn money to try to pay for her treatment.
Apt for its current adaptation, the novella takes place in an alternate 2025 and speaks of a future we recognise from other dystopias. A previous adaptation was released in 1987, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. But as critics noted at the time, fidelity to the source material ended with the title. The 80s version was a glitzy action romp complete with gold spandex, but the book is far darker. In our current era of reality television and grasping fame, it has new things to say. Your pop culture fix awaits on OTTplay, for only Rs 149 per month. Grab this limited-time offer now! |
The new adaptation arrives against a backdrop of similar stories, such as the massively popular Netflix drama, Squid Game (2021-2025) and the Hunger Games franchise (2012-present). There have also been similar reality TV shows such as Squid Game: The Challenge (2023-2025), Take the Money and Run (2011), and Hunted (2015-present).
The Running Man ties into a popular survival sub-genre that can be traced back to films such as The Most Dangerous Game (1936). Literary theorist Terry Thompson describes these films as having not only a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” quality, but also “an exotic setting, stereotypical characters, melodramatic acting, and a preposterous plotline”. The Bachman books
There are seven books by King’s alter ego, Richard Bachman. King reportedly came up with the pseudonym because the publishing industry at the time had an unspoken rule about releasing one book per year. He also had a desire to test his fame and see whether books under a different name would sell as well.
In general, the Bachman books are bleaker than King’s other works. Rage, first published in 1977, concerns a violent and disaffected young man who commits a school shooting in response to his expulsion. Following a rash of similar shootings and, more importantly, copies of Rage being found among a perpetrator’s belongings, King asked his publisher to withdraw it from print.
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The third Bachman Book is The Long Walk. It was published in 1978, and adapted into a film this year by Francis Lawrence, who has directed all of the Hunger Games sequels and prequels. Published in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, the novella follows an annual event where young men compete in a harrowing contest – a walk that lasts until only one remains. Anyone who stops walking is killed.
It’s dystopian, violent, televised pseudo-entertainment, which contestants see as the only way to guarantee a decent quality of life. This feels like a heavy-handed metaphor for the late 1970s, when readers were exposed to the nightly televised horrors of the war in Vietnam.
Moreover, it speaks to the current political moment, where exploiting oneself for entertainment purposes is seen as a viable (if not desirable) career choice and while huge numbers of people are barely subsisting. King was likely influenced by the 1969 adaptation of Horace McCoy’s novel They Shoot Horses Don’t They? about a lethal dancing competition to be won by the last woman standing.
It remains to be seen if Edgar Wright’s version of The Running Man will hold close to the original, dark novel or whether some glimmers of Arnie’s spandex will creep in – the trailer suggests it’s closer to the former. |
The publication of The Running Man and The Long Walk was contemporaneous with the birth of predatory Capitalism, in which company profits are maximised by any means permissible within a society’s ethical norms, leading to Reaganomics in the 1980s.
This, combined with post-Vietnam atrocities taking place in the US itself, created the environment for King’s books. He combines satire and science fiction to criticise capitalism – showing TV shows where people compete for money even at the cost of humiliation or violence, and societies where people will kill innocents simply because they are told to.
In the present day, with troops in the US occupying cities due to Trumped-up myths about civil disobedience, and game shows inspired by dystopian fiction where contestants are allegedly getting “hypothermia and nerve damage”, these scenarios seem very relevant again. There have been 57 adaptations of King’s work over the past 40 years, so he’s obviously a reasonable guarantee of healthy profits. And, IT: Welcome to Derry even seems to suggest the birth of a King Cinematic Universe, with a character from The Shining also appearing in the series. Psst...IT: Welcome to Derry is currently streaming on JioHotstar, now available with your OTTplay Premium subscription. Watch here. |
While The Running Man and The Long Walk are game-show dystopias, this year’s other two King films mix cursed prophecy (predictions of inevitable character deaths to come) and visions of the apocalypse. Squint, and you could make a connection with the terrors facing humanity in general, such as climate change and the resurrection of potential nuclear conflict. However, The Monkey treats the apocalypse as black comedy, and The Life of Chuck’s world-ending vision (spoiler alert) turns out to be the sleeping fantasy of a dying man, in a film otherwise about the goodness and charm of mankind.
So, in a year that is the second most populous for King’s works on screen (only exceeded in 2017), there’s still something notable about his work. These adaptations hold a mirror up to society’s problems and treat them with horror and disdain. And since a number of these films show resistance to malevolent forces, perhaps they still offer hope for the future. Harriet Earle is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Alex Fitch is a Lecturer and PhD Candidate in Comics and Architecture at the University of Brighton. This essay originally appeared on The Conversation and has been republished here under the Creative Commons License. |
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