Andy Hageman
Two of the most highly anticipated fall films of 2025 are the upcoming adaptations of The Long Walk (directed by Francis Lawrence) and The Running Man (directed by Edgar Wright), both by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman. The Long Walk has sparked big buzz with some major changes from the novel, which I won’t spoil here for anyone still waiting to catch that on the big screen. With The Running Man still a month out, it’s a perfect time to return here to King’s original novel, which he wrote at age 19, and to put it in conversation with the first film adaptation from 1987.
The objective is to highlight key elements of King’s 1982 novel titled The Running Man, on their own terms and in conversation with Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 film adaptation, in advance of discussions over what Edgar Wright does with his November 7-opening adaptation. Increased familiarity with the source material sets up moviegoers to consider Wright’s new adaptation on its own merits, in cross-media relation to King’s written narrative, and in contextual triangulation with King’s book and the Schwarzenegger-starring 1980s adaptation. Of particular note are the depictions of future/dystopian American media landscapes, invocations of race and racism, underground environmental activist network, and the overall approach to resistance to totalitarianism through solidarity or individualism.
For anyone not yet familiar with any version of The Running Man, it is essentially the story of a man named Ben Richards who lives in a future US where reality television game shows exploit the increasing population of people in poverty with deadly outcomes to entertain and manipulate the broad public. Richards grasps the mechanics of injustice beyond the myths of laziness and self-bootstrap-lifting. He becomes a contestant on the game show called The Running Man, where he must survive the threat of professional hunters and incentives for the public to inform on him to help the hunters. Richards creates trouble for the authoritarian government and the Games Federation that serves it as a propaganda ministry. Let’s leave the specific endings open for you to discover on your own.
King set The Running Man in 2025. Readers get this information early in the novel, embedded in a description of the broken-down urban environment of Co-Op City: “Highrises, Developments, chain-link fences, parking lots empty except for stripped derelicts, obscenities scrawled on the pavement in soft chalk and now blurring with the rain…In the day it is a deserted gray silence which contains no movement but he cats and rats and fat white maggots trundling across the garbage. No smell but the decaying reek of this brave year of 2025” (8-9). To read a 1980s vision of our present gives us a glimpse of past anxieties projected into a futurism that we inhabit as the present from which we shape our own future fictions with today’s fears and hopes.
It’s fascinating that King paints the economically depressed city center as empty, a sharp contrast from the overcrowded urban milieus of Soylent Green (1973), for example. This choice sets up readers for the story that unfolds as Ben Richards becomes a catalyst for the solidarity that the totalitarian government and the Games Federation work so hard to prevent. The city’s emptiness reflects how all individuals are pitted against each other, from the job market to the panoply of game shows of which the televised program, The Running Man, is only one of many in the novel. Instead of masses in the streets who might appear just waiting to be unified in resistance if not outright rebellion, Co-Op City is populated by people who self-isolate in whatever private spaces they can scrape together rent for or secretly squat.
One Media Channel or Many
King painted the 2025 media landscape in an Orwellian mode. One state-colluding system delivers the single story manufactured by the totalitarian regime in charge of the country. Every public housing Development apartment is required to have a “Free-Vee” television screen/system installed, “but it was still legal to turn them off. The Compulsory Benefit Bill of 2021 had failed to get the required two-thirds majority by six votes” (1). Within our actually existing media landscape that is highly splintered and channelized, this idea of a single channel under authoritarian control can feel quaint. If revolution requires shutting down or taking control of just one broadcast, change appears possible. Think of how John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) ends, with the single station toppled and widespread awakening shown through montage.
Although King’s one-channel media vision does not precisely map onto our media experience in 2025, the functioning of the programs was deeply insightful. The game shows in the novel vilify the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised, and other groups marginalized within the American political economy. Even the poorest residents adopt the discriminatory narratives embedded in the Games Federation’s shows, despite these positions and the policies that they underwrite being directly against these same residents’ own economic interests.
King’s Orwellian version of media emphasizes the repressive actions of the government to explain the paradox of people vehemently acting against the interests of themselves and the masses of people living similarly to themselves. That’s not surprising as King’s fiction frequently assumes the good in people and looks for how they might harness that internal goodness to disrupt or destroy the social structures that try to deny and eliminate good will towards the self and others. It will be interesting to see how Wright represents the broad media landscape in the new film.
Underground Ecology Activists
One of the most pivotal events in Ben Richards’ contestanthood of The Running Man occurs in Boston, when two young Black men take him into their home and ultimately help him escape the hunters, which puts their own lives on the line. The younger brother, Stacey, brings his older brother, Bradley, to the alley where Richards has resurfaced from underground infrastructure after he escaped from the surrounded Y.M.C.A. building. Bradley’s moral compass inspires him to aid Richards.
It is the underground network of ecological researchers and activists who enable him to deliver effective aid in getting Richards out of Boston and into hiding while continuing to submit the daily video cassette recordings the contest must mail to the Games Federation.
The novel provides substantial exposition to explain who Bradley is, how and why he works on ecological science and technology, and what it means for him to risk everything to help Richards. Like Richards, Bradley’s family includes a very ill child–in this case, a five year old girl with lung cancer. So, their ethical decisions are tied to familial love and duty. In trying to educate himself on his sister’s cancer, Bradley discovered that the government is covering up dire ecological pollution, particularly particulates in the air. To learn more, he illegally obtained a library access card to get his hands on data, science, and the technical information needed to invent his own ultra-low–cost nasal air filters. While on this learning journey, Bradley got connected with an underground network of geographically distributed people like him who measure local air pollution and other ecological metrics. They collaborate in secret, often through code-written letters, on health and safety inventions such as a DIY nasal air filter that can be affordable and accessible by all.
In short, King’s narrative paints the totalitarian government as denying ecological perils and strictly policing access to data collection and dissemination. This regime works to turn its people against science and to disrupt aspiring scientists from being able to study and experiment, much less communicate findings. It is a poignantly familiar manipulation of ecology and science more broadly.
On the one hand, this featured element of the novel points to King as an important figure in writing environmental speculative fiction. On the other hand, this ecological focus holds strong potential for a contemporary adaptation. And even if Wright doesn’t leverage this part of the original novel, savvy spectators can triangulate it into conversation with Wright’s version to analyze what the new film uncovers about how we engage and elide the challenges of this moment.
Killian
The 1987 film casting of Richard Dawson as Killian, the master of the Games Federation, was a stroke of genius equal to, if not surpassing, the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards.
In that moment, Dawson was the epitome of a game show host who made his fans lose their minds with love for him, even as he hovered at the edge of smarminess. Plus, much of the audience then also knew him from the tv series Hogan’s Heroes, where he was part of the resistance to Nazi fascist totalitarianism. As such, it was a short circuit to see him on the side of totalitarianism, yet his charisma was still working its magic.
What that casting choice modified, however, is the strong race element of Killian in King’s novel. When Richards first meets him while auditioning for The Running Man, King’s narrator shares, “The man behind the desk was of middle height and very black. So black, in fact, that for a moment Richards was struck with unreality. He might have stepped out of a minstrel show” (63).
This passage shows King using a literary flourish to great effect. While the narrator clearly assigns the sense of unreality to Richards, the next sentence floats. Is it Richards who is thinking of a minstrel show? Is it the narrator’s consciousness? Is it a suggestion that the reader would think this if we’re seeing through Richards’ eyes? By putting this statement in what’s called free indirect style, King creates ambiguity around the most problematic association. The result is that the structures of racism tied to American entertainment history ensnare everyone, not just the unenlightened, uneducated, or unempathetic.
On the other end of the novel, there is a payoff. Richards has been shot several times and is bleeding out while also spilling his intestines as he takes control of an airplane in flight. Killian is talking to him from high atop the Games Federation tower. Killian is sacrificing other employees to offer Richards the role of top hunter on The Running Man.
Richards gets under Killian’s skin at last when he calls him a “House [N-word].” The slur has a twist to it. Richards refers specifically to the social structures instituted by slavery-sustained plantations. The role of House [N-word] on the plantation is the traitor who takes profit from and pleasure in the suffering of fellow enslaved people while never being considered a member of the white people he served–just think of Samuel L. Jackson’s Stephen character in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012). The novel draws a line of continuity between its imagined 2025 and race-grounded slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries in the US.
With King’s history or racism and Glaser’s dialectic of totalitarian-reality-game-show-host and World War II-anti-Nazi as a fascinating duo, we can be very curious how Wright’s casting will produce yet a third meaning and feeling.
The Hunters
The hunters in the 1987 film, dubbed “Stalkers” in this adaptation, have lasted as some of its most iconic images. Buzzsaw with his chainsaws, Subzero with his hockey gear, Dynamo the totally absurd opera-meets-electricity villain, Fireball (played by the inimitable Jim Brown), and Captain Freedom (Jesse Ventura) come across as analogs to the World Wrestling Federation villains of the 1980s.
Like their models The Iron Sheik, Million Dollar Man–Ted Debiase, and The Bolsheviks, the Stalkers of the film adaptation were proxies of geopolitics and political economic class antagonism. They were over-the-top hostile opponents to Schwarzenegger’s Richards, and they ended up as fodder for classic ’80s one-liner quips as Schwarzenegger dispatched them.
King’s novel, by contrast, only identifies one hunter. This antagonist, McCone, gets relatively little play, appearing late in the novel and only threatening Richards briefly before hearing to his face that Killian and the Games Federation want to replace him with Richards. The persistent threat to Richards’ staying alive in the game is the large portion of the public who gleefully and greedily want to cash in on providing tips to the Games Federation so that Richards can be terminated.
Their greed is logical, whether it is the people living in urban squalor or the gated-community wealthy who want to buy stronger security to keep the others at bay. Their glee is more complicated, though. King dials into a weird sadism that comes bundled with totalitarian ideologies of hate and fear–the twisted pleasure of watching immigrants and BIPOC folks harassed or detained by military-grade law enforcement officers, of watching people who differ from you being incarcerated or deported to heinous prisons. King’s novel connects the dots between endorsement of a totalitarian regime and mainstream culture and this sadistic flavor of entertainment.
For King to cast the people who threaten Richards as the same people who are capable of changing their minds and helping him gives the novel a very different flavor from Glaser’s WrestleMania approach. Both narrative versions work great, but King’s is just more focused on planting hope within the general populace once the lies and corruption of the totalitarian regime and their media are exposed. Maybe that feels quaint today or maybe that feels like a hope worth doubling down on. In any case, let’s look at the new version and see what the 2025 vision of 2025 hunters unveils to us about ourselves.
Solidarity
Stephen King’s The Running Man is the tale of an impoverished American with a strong work ethic and a desire for dignity who is running, not away from responsibilities, but straight into solidarity. Ben Richards decides to trust people, and they in turn decide to assist him, though with varying degrees of initial willingness and acceptance of risk. Solidarity crosses lines of race, gender, class, and age. The novel takes readers into the prospect of goodness in almost everyone. And a big part of that goodness is the flexibility of mind to think critically instead of adhering stubbornly to opinions and beliefs that neither align with actually existing social conditions nor serve any good beyond the enhanced power and wealth of the authoritarian regime and the small population who profit with them.
Glaser’s film displaces King’s solidarity to emphasize revolutionary individualism. On a surface reading, the film appears anti-authoritarian, and it no doubt is trying to convey that position. In its deeper texture, however, the film celebrates the cult of personality and the myth of sheer will power as the way to break free from oppressive structures. It’s a different core vision from King’s.
With these two approaches already in the world, it’s exciting to speculate on whether Wright will lean towards one of them or perhaps deliver a third option. There’s still time to reread the novel (it’s short and an absolute page-turner) and to rewatch the 1980s adaptation before the new film drops in November so you can prepare to savor and analyze the new The Running Man in its complex context.
