While 2025 has allowed the schmaltzy side of Stephen King to dance its way across the big screen, embodied by Tom Hiddleston in Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck, the more appropriate film adaptations for our current climate come from stories so dark that King didn’t even publish them under his real name. Before being used for Thinner, The Regulators, and Blaze, “Richard Bachman” was a pseudonym King adopted for four misanthropic novels, two of which have become deeply relevant feature films this year and two of which would feel awfully relevant if they had been adapted over the last few months. As alienated young men find themselves corrupted by a society marching ever-forward towards death, The Long Walk sets audiences on a long road to nowhere. As media corruption, income inequality, and the cost of medical care soar in the U.S., The Running Man reboots the world’s deadliest game show. These are cynical, anxious stories for cynical, anxious times. Now, we all finally feel bad enough to watch them.
Late host of The Kingcast Scott Wampler described Richard Bachman as Stephen King in sunglasses and a leather jacket, the edgy bad boy King’s teenage self thought he could be. “Dark-toned, despairing even when he is laughing (despairing most when he’s laughing, in fact), Richard Bachman isn’t a fellow I’d want to be all the time,” King wrote in “The Importance Of Being Bachman,” his intro essay to the 1996 reissue of The Bachman Books. The original works attributed to him—The Long Walk, The Running Man, Rage, and Roadwork—came directly from King’s young, pissed-off id. In his words, they grew from “a Bachman state of mind: low rage, sexual frustration, crazy good humor, and simmering despair.”
This year, a year of being careful what we post on social media lest masked government agents kick down our doors, we’re all in a Bachman state of mind. That headspace engulfs you in black-hole negativity, but also nurtures the irrepressible urge to fight back against its potent pull. There might not be a happy ending waiting in the final chapter of that rebellion, but perhaps there’ll be some catharsis in the mere rejection of what’s in front of us.
That rejection is what unites The Bachman Books. The first and most notorious of those, the high-school-shooter thriller Rage, was written when King was himself a senior in high school. Though violent and unfortunately influential enough that King pulled the book from print (this is one King story that will never be adapted in America), his story is less about expressing a juvenile ennui through easily accessible guns, and more about the limited options available to young Americans when overwhelmed by the forces conspiring against them. Aside from the shock-value shooting, it’s a gab session between disaffected teens. It’s about feeling railroaded, being without options, and seizing what autonomy you can. This is what made the doomed young men sign up for The Long Walk, the national contest where you either win the top prize for walking the longest or die trying. It’s what made the broke-as-a-joke Ben Richards sign up to appear on murderous game show The Running Man, risking his life to pay for his daughter’s health care. And it’s what drove the small-scale terrorism of Roadwork‘s mad-as-hell Barton George Dawes, who would rather rig his house with explosives than suffer one more dehumanizing indignity.
These books were all written before 1974’s Carrie, King’s first published novel. They were responses to Vietnam, to Richard Nixon, to the failures of the counterculture, to the looming dominance of the conservatives in the 1980s. It’s a half-decade’s worth of fear and disappointment stuffed into the fictional bodies of a few desperate men. These minor, fatalistic acts of personal pushback are more than a little preachy. They were all written by a kid—hell, The Running Man was written by a kid in just 72 hours. And yet, there’s an honest rage coursing through them, even if they were written by a young guy “callow enough to believe in oversimple motivations (many of them painfully Freudian) and unhappy endings.”
When the original Running Man movie came out in 1987, it undid that honesty in part by turning its contestant into a jacked cop rather than a scrawny father pinching pennies. The story was adapted in an era with a far different worldview than it was created in; it was the late ’80s, of course Arnold Schwarzenegger would play a personally wronged action hero out for bloody revenge against an overreaching government. That Edgar Wright’s upcoming adaptation is sticking closer to source—though probably not including “the Richard Bachman version of a happy ending” that is its 9/11-like finale—is a sign that the cultural climate has shifted back towards the vicious alienation King was feeling at the time. In 2025, the year of Richard Bachman, a dark and despairing and angry year, a year when The Running Man can be more Luigi Mangione than Ethan Hunt, pop culture has shown itself ready to rage against The Man, rather than root for him.
