Stephen King has thought a lot about death. Regardless of whether the 78-year-old author dwells much on his eventual date with oblivion, he’s returned again and again to the larger matter of mortality. The Shining? Ghosts galore. The Stand? A postapocalyptic epic. Pet Sematary? Name a more bleakly morbid bestseller. Even when King strays from horror, his mind doesn’t stray far from the grave. “Get busy living or get busy dying,” goes a line from one of his warmest, fuzziest tales—a beloved jailhouse yarn later adapted into the ultimate TNT staple, The Shawshank Redemption.
There’s a lot of death in The Running Man, the latest umpteenth cinematic adaptation of a King story. Sprinting into theaters this past weekend, it's based on the novel of the same name, a kind of proto–Hunger Games originally published under King's retired Richard Bachman pseudonym and previously adapted into an excessive, very 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. The new version, directed by Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, Hot Fuzz), sticks closer to the blueprint of the source material, following a game show contestant (Glen Powell) as he’s hunted across a dystopian America, earning cash for every day he survives the trained killers on his tail. Death, this brash action-satire concludes, is good business. That's a scathing insight, if a tad ironic coming from King. Again, hasn’t the guy spent half a century cashing in on the fear and allure of death?
The Running Man rounds out a prolific year for movies inspired by his writing. (Not to mention a television show, HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry.) It's no less than the fourth King story to make it to theaters in 2025—the most ever in a single year, striking for even one of the most frequently adapted novelists of the modern era. And what an eclectic bumper crop! If one wanted to make the case for King as more than just a merchant of monsters, they'd do well to highlight not only the rush of The Running Man but also the twisted dark comedy of The Monkey, the twinkly life lessons of The Life of Chuck, and the grimly methodical allegory of The Long Walk. None fit the profile of mere airport thrills, the kind for which King is superficially known. Taken together, they speak to his versatility as a storyteller—a by-product, perhaps, of the sheer volume of work he's churned out since the 1970s.
What all four movies have in common is that obsession with what King describes, in The Long Walk, as “the edge of nothing.” Death may be his most common theme (it asserts itself often in the canon of any master of horror), but this unlikely quartet of like-minded releases goes further than the geek show of bodies dropping. Each film is, in its own way, about how we grapple, philosophically, with the burden of death’s certainty. Each is about death as an albatross.
By coincidence, The Running Man opened this weekend against Keeper, the latest creep show from writer-director Oz Perkins. He, too, has had a busy year. This is his second film of 2025, arriving just a few months after his own take on a King deep cut, the grotesque slapstick contraption The Monkey. On paper, “The Monkey” is the most traditionally spooky of the four stories that inspired this year's batch of King-centric movies. Published in 1980, the short story certainly one of his scariest: a brief but sprawling chiller about a father who, like so many of the writer’s protagonists, is confronted by the trauma of his past—in this case, the trail of corpses left by a cursed plaything, the toy monkey that causes a freak accident every time it suddenly clangs together its cymbals.
While the rest of the recent King adaptations were reverently faithful, The Monkey isn’t. Perkins keeps the premise, but twists it into an outrageous splatter comedy about how cruelly and senselessly life can end. The opening scene, featuring Adam Scott, a flamethrower, and a disembowelment, sets a deranged tone far afield of the source story’s hushed dread (and, for that matter, the pinprick unease of Perkins’s past work, especially last year’s Longlegs). It’s as though the monkey itself, which King in the novel granted a mocking, imagined voice—“Jang-jang-jang-jang, who’s dead this time?”—penned the film’s screenplay. Every few minutes, we get a gory punch line: a woman blown to smithereens after jumping into an electrified swimming pool; a slack-jawed yokel dispassionately chugging a beer as his neighbor is eaten by his lawnmower. The Monkey pushes the gallows humor of Final Destination into outright farce. The joke is at the expense of the karmically powerless and screwed, a.k.a. everyone.
But the monstrous glibness of the film’s Rube Goldbergian kill scenes masks its stealth sincerity. As Perkins was quick to remind entertainment reporters, he lost his mother in the 9/11 attacks—the defining American horror story of the 21st century. That real-life tragedy reverberates through the bitter familial tensions of The Monkey and its story (courtesy of Perkins, not King) of twin brothers grappling with the sudden, freak death of their mother. By the end, it’s clear that the movie’s demented laughter is a kind of medicine: Death is so random and horrible, Perkins reasons, that all you can really do is chuckle. That, and stop worrying so much about it.
The Monkey ends with a literal pale horseman, but also with a father and son resolving to go dancing, in honor of a woman who shuffled off her mortal coil too soon. This curiously heartfelt final note is but one unlikely parallel to the spring’s other Neon-distributed King adaptation, The Life of Chuck, which is basically the drippy, feel-good inverse of Perkins’s movie: It treats the same basic wisdom—namely, that you gotta live life to the fullest, because who knows when your number is up—with a whimsical rather than a crooked grin. This is chicken soup for the soul, not a sardonic knee to the groin.
Writer-director Mike Flanagan, who’s apparently decided to devote himself entirely to tackling “unadaptable” King stories (he also made movies out of Gerald’s Game and the divisive Shining sequel Doctor Sleep), preserves the structural ambition of the novella, which is obscure by the standards of one of the world’s most popular writers. The Life of Chuck is a three-part metaphysical fable that begins with the steady demise of the literal universe before rewinding backward to a half-inspiring, impromptu hoedown between strangers, then a schmaltzy coming-of-age drama in miniature. Yes, this is King in “whoa, dude” stoned philosopher mode, imparting his profound thoughts instead of trying to scare the shit out of the reader/viewer.
The film peaks with its opening chapter, an oddly chillaxed vision of the apocalypse that taps into the very 2025 feeling that everything is coming apart. Matthew Lillard shows up for a couple minutes to deliver a casually profound monologue, likening the surreal serenity of existence’s final days to the last stage of a grief cycle. It’s the concept of acceptance writ large: an entire world collectively coming to terms with its impermanence, its impending ending.
But just as The Monkey hides its sentimentality behind a lot of grisly irreverence, so does The Life of Chuck treat its Charlie Kaufmanesque conceptualism as a roundabout path to a rather ordinary, life-affirming message. In a strange way, it’s the same arc as Perkins’s film: Reverse the chronological flow of events and this becomes another story of a child shaken by parental loss and enriched by the eventual realization that you have to live every day like it’s your last, because it could be.
Death haunts every step of The Long Walk, too. It is at once the simplest and the most emotionally resonant of the year’s adventures in Kingology. The novel was the first the author completed, published after Carrie but written before it. Like The Running Man, it initially hit bookstores with the name Bachman on its spine. It is a spiritual cousin to that later vision of avoiding death by means of competition: Here, too, is a financially desperate volunteer for a contest that’s basically a suicide mission, risking almost certain doom in a bid for a better life. But in The Long Walk, there are no TV cameras, no colorfully costumed adversaries. There is only an endless stretch of open road, traversed by a mass of delusionally hopeful boys and young men, walking until they can’t anymore, a bullet with all but one of their names on it.
Because of when it was written, The Long Walk has often been read as a Vietnam allegory—a metaphorical story of youth pointlessly wasted, of lives tragically claimed by a quagmire. The movie echoes that popular interpretation in its vaguely 1970s portrait of a hopeless tomorrow, while functioning more generally (and topically) as a story about the desperate measures of the American way, especially under the boot heel of an openly fascistic government looking to pit people against one another. But beyond its political relevance, the Long Walk becomes another sobering symbol for King: What is life but a grueling trek toward the most foregone of conclusions? The characters are all trapped in a literal and metaphorical death march; every step is freighted with the knowledge that it could be their last.
On the page, The Long Walk is ripe with fatalistic reflections. Right from the start of his writing career, King was ready to meditate on what he’d later describe, in Christine, as the grown-up business of “learning how to die.” Without a direct pathway into its main character’s thoughts, the movie version of The Long Walk loses some of that waxing. (It blessedly does not make like The Life of Chuck and convert pages upon pages of prose into Nick Offerman voice-over.) But some reasonably sharp dialogue and a game young ensemble keep the grim power of King’s scenario legible. We don’t need to hear everything happening inside the head of Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) to absorb the gravity of his predicament, or of a story that mimics the merciless culling of time’s passage. You keep going until you can’t anymore. That’s the harsh truth of life.
In their vastly different ways, The Monkey and The Life of Chuck both implore the audience to stop and smell the roses along the way. The true nightmare of The Long Walk lies in a version of life where there is no stopping, where you have to keep moving or you’ll die. In that sense, it’s not just about the way a fear of death can throw a shadow over everything, but also about how capitalism turns life into a hamster wheel. It says that when survival becomes everything (when you’re stuck forever at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), you become the walking dead.
The Running Man, the last stop on our yearlong trudge through Kingville, floats a similar sentiment without seeming to linger on it the way The Long Walk does. Powell’s eponymous, unlucky celebrity quarry doesn’t have the time to ask what this life’s for—not with various assassins and enterprising civilians out to cut that life dramatically short. Likewise, Wright tears through his plot—reproduced from the book with much more fidelity than the Arnold take was—at the breakneck speed of reality TV produced for the shortest of attention spans. The film wears its thoughts on Thanatos lightly; this is a death match thriller more interested in the insanity of American life under a game-show president in the era of Mr. Beast.
Of course, death is an everyday reality in a country and a world that makes life so cheap. The Running Man is a cynical crowd-pleaser for a year pungent with the stench of death—a present day stained by massacres in the West Bank, ongoing carnage in Eastern Europe, and untold suffering inflicted by law enforcement officers right here at home. You could argue that Wright doesn’t push the topicality quite far enough, that this material begs for a crazed Paul Verhoevenian lack of subtlety to truly unlock its potential as a quintessentially modern nightmare. But all that The Running Man could but doesn’t explicitly probe is connected to the target the film puts in its crosshairs: In 2025, everyone is grist for the oligarchic machine, expendable to the whims and appetites of the monied few.
Live while you can, half these movies preach. The other half ask how much you can live under such conditions. Watching all four felt like eavesdropping on a conversation King has had with himself, translated through multiple layers of creative interpretation, echoing across the multiple decades that the author has been turning our anxieties into compulsively readable beach reads. Death is Stephen King’s business, the topic that keeps the lights on for our populist poet laureate of graveyard page-turners. And business boomed in 2025.