It marked some kind of milestone when the lights went out and an audible gasp spread across thousands of people. For the first time in San Diego Comic-Con history, new exclusive footage shared with the excited and hopeful in Hall H was being obscured. The screen literally went dark. This was not done to hide some juicy plot details from Comic-Conners either. After all, the scene they were watching is based on a book sequence Stephen King published nearly 50 years ago. Nor was this meant to conceal unfinished special effects—SDCC fans pride themselves on getting to observe works in progress.No, the sequence in question was very much finished, and could even still be heard as a young boy played by Roman Griffin Davis (the sweet lad from Jojo Rabbit) was dragged from the center of the road and brutally executed during the early minutes of The Long Walk. And when some of the cast and filmmakers behind this long-awaited adaptation of King’s story stopped by our studio, they seemed sheepishly proud of that reaction, both from Comic-Con officials and the audience they attempted to protect.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});“Hall H was quite the event for us,” says Garett Wareing, the actor who portrays one of the young men who sign up to “walk” in Stephen King’s tale of dystopia and wasted youth. “Comic-Con deemed the scene too intense to show in its full entirety. So they censored some of the footage, and it was quite exciting to watch the fan reactions and to hear their reactions to what we’re seeing now.”They heard gasps, they heard startled whispers, and there was assuredly that tittering of anxiety which rushes through a crowd when something instinctively unnatural is occurring. But it also fulfills a promise that despite this movie being directed by Francis Lawrence, the filmmaker who made the last several Hunger Games pictures, The Long Walk’s vision of children being fed to the proverbial grinder in the name of competition and civic pride is a different animal.Screenwriter J.T. Mollner, who previously wrote Strange Darling, is considerate about the Hall H-breaking reaction their film had, as well as what it says about the larger impact of the movie they made.“When I was a kid and I was 12 or 13, and I couldn’t get in a movie because I heard the movie was too rough for people my age, it made me want to see it immediately,” Mollner says. “So the beauty of this movie, and the way Francis handled it, is the brutality, the intensity, the terror. It’s all shown honestly. It would be obscene to not show it honestly, but it never feels gratuitous. And I think that’s a fine line and a great balance, and Francis went all the way.”Indeed, Mollner acknowledges that while Lawrence worked on every Hunger Games film between 2013’s Catching Fire and next year’s upcoming Sunrise on the Reaping, The Long Walk was something else (and a movie that Lawrence previously told us he wanted to make even before there was a Hunger Games). The screenwriter does not think he could adapt Suzanne Collins authentically, and yet when Lawrence and producer Roy Lee came to him to write The Long Walk, it seemed like an eerily good fit.“My first Stephen King book is Carrie. I was seven years old and I made it through the whole book,” Mollner recalls. “I found it in a used bookstore… and I got sent to the principal’s office because I had that book on my desk in the second grade. From that point on, I was a constant reader. I revere Stephen King. I religiously read his new book that usually comes out once a year, right around his birthday and mine, which is in September. And The Long Walk is just one of the books I read at some point. I think I was in my late teens or early 20s, and it had a profound effect on me.”The story of The Long Walk is a simple and grim one: a hundred young boys volunteer to be “Long Walkers,” young men who are televised as they walk for as long as they can across the great state of Maine and into New Hampshire. No one gets any further though, because the moment one walks beneath three miles per hour (or four in the book), he gets a warning. After the third warning, he gets a bullet.A paterfamilias to The Hunger Games, Squid Game, Battle Royale, and a slew of other imitators and descendants, King’s original story is nightmarish for its simplicity. There’s no real strategy per se, nor even conscription. Young kids sign up for this by choice—and, perhaps, because the lone winner will be granted wealth and whatever their “heart desires.”“I think [it’s like] the general sentiment of ‘sure, anybody in life can be a billionaire, but all of us can’t,’” Mollner laughs. “But there is especially a promise and an optimism and a feeling of immortality when you’re a teenager that makes you believe you can be the one person who can do this. As you get older and you become an adult, you start looking at odds like that, and you’re like, ‘Am I really going to be the one person out of this hundred or these 50?’ But I believe, especially at the age of these characters in their late teens, that they’d all have that optimism that makes them believe they can be the ones to get it.”For the actors playing these characters, it also is striking due to the sense of camaraderie their characters form. Unlike most of the contestants in Hunger Games or even King’s own later work in The Running Man, these young people build deep connections and affections for one another, even helping direct competitors survive what is essentially a Bataan Death March when it likely weakens their own chances for survival.“It captures the real feeling of just wanting to belong and seeking friendship in the most adverse conditions,” says Tut Nyuot, who plays the soulful Art Baker in the film. “It’s literally walk or die, we’re looking for friends and trying to form relationships, building relationships, and obviously playing the part of Baker who mentions such a beautiful line as ‘I just want to walk and make some friends.’”The actor adds, “If you look at life, at some point we’re all going to kick the bucket… if anything that motivates you to go out and do more because we know at some point it’s going to end. That journey is essentially life compacted into those few days, and I think that’s beautiful.”It also imitated the actors’ own experiences, with Wareing and Nyuot reflecting on their own real friendship blossoming while shooting the movie in Canada.“At the end of the day, five or 10 years from now, I’m not going to be sitting down remembering this movie. What I’m going to remember is the time that I shared with you, and the time I got to share with these boys,” Wareing says. He then grabs Nyout who joins in a nostalgic laugh. “I taught this man how to swim! I saw the first time this man went underwater. To get to share that life moment with him was one of the coolest moments of my life.”It speaks to the warmth of humanity that can bubble beneath even one of King’s bleakest stories—as well as how a novel that King wrote during his own deep disaffection as a teenager staring down the Vietnam War draft can be translated for a modern, universal sensibility.“It was really easy,” Mollner says about translating King’s parable about Vietnam to today. “The allegory and the metaphor, and everything that’s in the book about life and society and the promise of what’s possible in our society, they’re themes there that are generational. They don’t go away. Unfortunately these things, whether it’s the Vietnam War or something else, will always be present… there are other issues that people are feeling: the idea of authoritarianism; people not being able to afford things; AI; there are so many things happening right now that people can read whatever they want into it.”It’s the story of life and finding beauty in it, no matter how dark (or censored) things become.The Long Walk opens on Sept. 12, 2025.The post The Long Walk Cast Reacts to Being ‘Too Tense’ for SDCC appeared first on Den of Geek.