The Long Walk has some pretty violent scenes, but the one death that’s likely to stick with you isn’t the bloodiest. Some spoilery thoughts. Warning! Huge, major, gigantic SPOILERS follow for The Long Walk! The Long Walk, Francis Lawrence’s big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name, is now in cinemas. If ... The Long Walk | The most harrowing death in the movie isn’t the most graphic
The Long Walk has some pretty violent scenes, but the one death that’s likely to stick with you isn’t the bloodiest. Some spoilery thoughts.
Warning! Huge, major, gigantic SPOILERS follow for The Long Walk!
The Long Walk, Francis Lawrence’s big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name, is now in cinemas. If you’ve seen it, there’s a high chance you’ve avoided walking since you saw the film. After all, a group of young men having to walk for hundreds of miles, with guns to their head essentially, until only one remains does make your peaceful evening walk suddenly seem a little dangerous.
From the start, The Long Walk doesn’t shy away from showing great injury detail. As the boys walk, one after another they die in gruesome, violent ways as made evident by the film’s logline and trailers. If their pace drops below four miles per hour, they die by a bullet to their brain. If they stop walking altogether, they die. If they step off the road, they die.
It doesn’t matter if you break your leg, you have to keep walking, as one of the Walkers quickly discovers. You can’t even stop for normal bodily functions, you’ll just have to keep walking and… well, you can imagine.
Many of the deaths are enough to leave your jaw on the floor. The level of brutality on show here is surprising for such a mainstream film, but hats off to Lawrence for going as far as he can.
From here on out, we’ll dive into the specific deaths of some of the Walkers, so if you’d rather stay unspoiled, you might want to stop reading here. Do come back though, when you’ve seen the film!
The Long Walk certainly gives you a lot of scenes to consider for the most shocking. The first boy to die is Curley, who tried to lie about his age to the other boys in an effort to appear tougher. The lie is in vain, because the others immediately notice how young he looks with his small stature and the uncertainty in his voice.
Curley eventually succumbs to a cramp in his leg, the kind that doesn’t pass in minutes, but renders you unable to move with unbearable pain shooting through your body.
“It isn’t fair!” he screams repeatedly as the soldier closest to him clicks off the safety and aims the gun at his head. I don’t have to describe what a teenager’s head looks like after being shot at close range, but the result is harrowing.
Somehow, Curley’s death isn’t even the worst one. Many of the boys get shot in the head, one poor bugger gets run over with a tank and somehow still doesn’t die until he, too, gets shot in the head.
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But even with all the violent deaths, broken legs and blood splatters, the worst death in the film is the one we don’t even see. We do hear it, though.
“Hank Olson’s the name. Walking is my game,” Ben Wang’s character introduces himself. He’s small in build, but seems keen and enthusiastic, even though the boys are up against almost certain death.
Like most of the boys, Hank struggles as the miles go by. He manages to outlast most walkers, but quickly becomes completely unresponsive, walking like a zombie.
Eventually it becomes clear that Hank won’t make it much further, but he won’t go down without a fight.
Hank rushes the soldiers behind him and steals a gun, opening fire. At first it seems like the boys might have a chance of fighting back, but before the rest of the Walkers even realise what’s happening, Hank is overpowered by the other soldiers. He is ultimately shot in the stomach, blood gushing out, but he’s still very much alive. In the book, King describes Hank’s intestines falling out of his body as the poor boy keeps walking still, only succumbing to his fate later on. .
“I did it wrong!” comes Hank’s desperate final screams as the rest of the boys have to keep walking forward, leaving their friend behind as he is left to bleed out alone in the dark. Rather than see Hank’s final moments, we watch as the boys struggle to come to terms with what’s happening and their own helplessness. There’s no time to grieve during the contest, so they have to simply swallow the tears and keep going.
Hank’s death, even alongside the more graphic ones, feels almost cruel. Lawrence rarely turns the camera away from the constant death, but only hearing Hank’s screams as he dies is somehow far worse and harrowing. It’s the one moment in the film that felt heavier and harder to process, lingering at the back of this writer’s mind long after the lights came up.
We later learn that Hank actually had a wife, the only Walker to have one. The boys all promise to do something nice for her if they win, to honour their friendship. While the bond between the Walkers is one of the story’s carrying forces, this show of loyalty and kindness stands out.
The Long Walk’s setting in a dystopian America under military regime doesn’t feel a million miles away from our own world, making it feel timely and terrifying on a different level. But if the Walkers are able to do something nice for each other while quite literally walking to death, maybe we could also be a little nicer to each other.
The Long Walk is now in cinemas.
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