‘The Long Walk’ Confronts a World Desensitized to the Killing of Children

“I keep hoping that gets easier,” one character in The Long Walk says, shortly after witnessing the gruesome execution of a companion. Still visibly shaken, Cooper Hoffman’s character Ray Garraty replies: “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

A 2025 film adapted from the 1979 novel by Stephen King, The Long Walk depicts a dystopian near future where young boys from all over the United States voluntarily compete in a contest to walk at 3 mph continuously across hundreds of miles—with those who repeatedly fall below the pace being shot dead until there is one winner of glory and riches.

A movie in which nearly 50 young boys are killed onscreen would have been profoundly disturbing at any time since King conceived the story, but this week, I was particularly rattled. Sitting in the theater that evening, my head was still spinning from the graphic, up-close video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination appearing without warning on social media—along with the news of another horrific school shooting in Colorado, and heated, ugly finger-pointing about political violence spreading across the internet. There was so much violence in the air that one could almost grow numb to it. As every gunshot rang out through the theater speakers, I couldn’t decide whether the film’s timing was miraculously prescient or deeply disconcerting. It was probably both.

It’s fitting that The Long Walk was directed by Catching Fire and Mockingjay filmmaker Francis Lawrence, given that the 1979 novel helped pioneer the “televised life-or-death competition,” a young-adult trend that later blossomed in a fertile ecosystem that includes works like Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, and Squid Game. While King’s story offered early glimpses of what would eventually become genre hallmarks—impoverished youth grasping at elusive prosperity, authoritarian governments using violent spectacle as control—the book differs from these later works in surprising ways, and the film follows suit.

A particularly striking difference lies in the structure of the competition: Participants can’t attack each other, at least not without slowing down and being shot themselves. Because of this small detail, the common tropes of sabotage, backstabbing, and aggression are less prominent. While most stories within this genre center our most selfish and vicious impulses, The Long Walk emphasizes loyalty, camaraderie and goodwill, echoing the bonds of young friendship that run through much of King’s work, from It to Stand by Me. At times, the film’s fraternal solidarity even recalled Louis Sachar’s Holes.

Still, the dread and brutality of The Long Walk resound and unsettle. Several characters falter and are killed in tragically unlucky circumstances. Others reach their physical limits and accept death. Nobody in the brotherhood of boys—the “musketeers,” as one character dubs them—is safe. Almost all the deaths involve a bullet to the head, making for a graphic and upsetting experience.

Or at least, it should be, right?

You may have noticed a recent uptick in conversations about desensitization. Some argue over whether mass shooters themselves have been desensitized by video games. It would be nice if the problem were that simple. An issue this vast stems from a web of cultural, social, and psychological factors, headlined by the easy accessibility of guns in the U.S., but the media we consume certainly isn’t irrelevant either. Perhaps we’re all becoming desensitized.

In The Long Walk, the American public eagerly watches the competition—and its many executions—live on television. These television audiences are numb to the horrific slaughter of 49 boys because of the state assures them that it is happening for a higher purpose of perverse national unity. It’s an image chillingly similar to one that Kirk himself advocated in the years before his own terrible murder: that America should have more executions, that “death penalties should be public, should be quick, [and] should be televised.” Kirk even went so far as to say that children should be forced to watch these killings as “an initiation,” and joked that the broadcast could be sponsored by brands like Coca-Cola. It’s a dystopian vision, and one that became harrowingly realized in the likely millions of children and teens who have now watched the video of Kirk’s gruesome murder on social media, whether they were ready to be “initiated” or not.

Here in the real world, we haven’t reached the lows of shameless public executions or televised youth death matches, but we’re certainly heading in that direction. Far more than 49 children—well over 20,000—have been killed in the Gaza Strip since October 2023. U.S. tax dollars still fund this genocide and many American leaders defend it, even as livestreamed videos of this slaughter have circulated on our phones for nearly two years.

And on our own soil, it increasingly feels like every report of a mass shooting is interrupted with news of another mass shooting, disproportionately killing children. And yet, many leaders refuse to take any pragmatic action beyond petty scapegoating and gesturing vaguely toward mental health while slashing access to care.

When The Long Walk was published in 1979, the sacrifice of American children to a brutal and futile machine of violence resonated in a culture still grappling with the terror and disillusionment of the Vietnam War draft. If the story maintains its resonance today, it is because we’ve found new ways to sacrifice youth before idols of nationalism, power, and greed. Nearly every act of public violence is available to stream in HD moments after it occurs, pushing us further into numbness. Functionally, how different is our reality from the dystopian stories of a public desensitized to televised death? And if that is indeed our reality, how can we re-sensitize our imaginations and our hearts?

The Long Walk finds hope in the notion of walking side by side. At the core of the film is the steadfast brotherhood between Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and Peter McVries (David Jonsson, a revelation). It’s a friendship so pure and sacrificial that it calls to mind Gordie and Chris in Stand by Me, or Andy and Red in The Shawshank Redemption. Through the boys’ refusal to view one another as competition or enemies, they resist the oppressive power of the game. By simply viewing themselves as fellow travelers walking toward an unknown fate, they help dissuade each other from losing their soul.

READ MORE: What Can Horror Teach Us About the Bible?

Walking is one of the Bible’s most repeated metaphors for encountering and knowing God. One of the earliest embodied descriptions of the divine in Genesis describes God “walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” Genesis 6:9 describes Noah as a man who “walked with God,” and the Israelites miraculously walked through the Red Sea before beginning their 40-year journey across the desert. Psalm 23 describes walking “through the valley of the shadow of death” without fear, and 2 Corinthians 5 says we “walk by faith, not by sight.” It’s no surprise, then, that Jesus spent the vast majority of his ministry walking from town to town—and beckoning others to drop everything and follow.

I’m not trying to make a drinking game out of the word “walk” in the Bible. I’m only pointing out that the very image of a “long walk”—the image on which the entirety of King’s story rests—is steeped in spiritual undertones. Some scenes of young men walking together through the wilderness echoes similar moments of Christ’s disciples in The Chosen. Walking prompts disparate people to find common ground on their shared journey, whether apostles, pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago, or contestants on a dystopian game show. And as the boys in The Long Walk continue their trek, they demonstrate one of the most delightful human habits: our impulse to make friends even with knowledge that the bond will be short-lived. Some of the most profound and beautiful moments in the film come in acts of self-sacrifice and communal support. The boys often coach one another to keep going despite the knowledge that their efforts will be futile for all but one of them. Well, at least momentarily futile; such kindness has an eternal quality that will blossom in resurrection.

For all their worry about deaths “getting easier” to witness as their journey continues, McVries and Garraty retain their hearts, their righteous rage, and their care for their brothers from beginning to end. By the time the group has dwindled, the boys have pledged to care for the widow of a deceased friend, to give a rosary to the grandmother of another, and despite their agreement to stop helping each other carry on, they cannot resist pulling the other back to their feet, even at their own expense.

The Long Walk is not for the faint of heart. Some of the film’s third-act depictions of vengeance and violence left me wrestling greatly—especially in light of the current moment and my nonviolent savior. Yet if the film offers any moral clarity, it is that re-sensitizing our imaginations requires wrestling with such realities alongside others. We cannot tune out death without sacrificing our hearts—but we also can’t tune in to such overwhelming evil alone. To rightly perceive the value of life, we need brothers and sisters beside us to help us see it and hold it.

Throughout The Long Walk, Jonsson’s McVries inspires Hoffman’s Garraty to keep going by encouraging him to focus on “making it to the next moment”—searching for beauty, presence, and relationship in the chaos, and resisting numbness by carrying it all together. This is a good spiritual practice for all of us.

The very image of a “long walk”—the image on which the entirety of King’s story rests—is steeped in spiritual undertones.