Darabont taking The Long Walk & The Mist poster
Posted by Matt Holmes
Frank Darabont is obsessed with Stephen King and is once again planning to adapt one of his novels to the big screen. He has already directed King’s stories The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile and later this year his first venture into ‘true King horror’ with The Mist will be released.
His fourth adapted King novel is set to be The Long Walk which was written in 1979 under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman. The book is about a walk where the winner gets anything they want for life but the loser is punished by death. If you walk too slow on the walk you get a warning… four warnings and you are shot. Of course there are several characters on this walk and they all walk the line of being friends and enemies because of course, only one can survive.
It sounds a lot like Battle Royale and The Condemned, but under the writings of Stephen King… these characters will be fleshed out to the full and actually may end up being more like the paranoid characters of Lost than anything else. I’m really interested in this one but it’s not expected to be Darabont’s next film after he has completed The Mist. That honor goes to Fahrenheit 451, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s classic book.
At the Con, a poster for The Mist was also released which you can see below. The Mist is the most conventional King that Darabont is yet to handle, so it will be interesting to see what he does with it…
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I think it’s a great chance that Darabont will get the movie right, because he was the first and still only director to understand that a movie adaptation doesn’t have to be a completely different story from the source material. That’s why he gets it right and everyone else gets it wrong. He adpated The Green Mile almost word for word from the novellas/novel. Same with Shawshank Redemption. Since his formula worksi doubt he’ll be changing it. And for that we should all be grateful.
[...] the last man standing’ is so over-used these days. The Condemned, Battle Royale, an upcoming Frank Darabont movie based on the same concept from a Stephen King novel and now this [...]
[...] Potential Future Projects: The Long Walk [...]
Well I think it is a great concept, except if you read the book the majority of it takes place in Number 47 Raymond Garraty’s own head (he has vivid hallucinations and is constantly referring to his own childhood. Still I think it could be done effectively provided the director gave sufficient characters backdrops to each of the important walkers. and Its THREE warnings after the third you get a bullet. please edited that.
Hang on also (sorry) There are ONE HUNDRED WALKERS NINTEY-NINE have to die. that should also be added in that blurb above.
I was disappointed not to see Ray Garraty not show up as a gunslinger somewhere in the DT series. He certainly epitomized that central gunslinger quality of perseverance.
Now, why did SK make mention of a character with the same name in a later book, and a serial killer at that?
It makes me wonder: Could Ray Garraty actually have been the most heroic character in SK fiction? Did he know he had the potential within himself to harm others? Did he drive himself to death to avoid doing that harm? Did he pick a means to leave his Mother with a legacy of honor and riches rather than shame and unhappiness?
Probably not. But it’s fun to speculate on what really drove Ray Garraty to be that one in a hundred.