According to Deadline, Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark director André Øvredal has signed on to direct The Long Walk, an adaptation of the old Stephen King/Richard Bachman book of the same name. We still don’t know for sure how good his Scary Stories to be, but he did make the critically acclaimed The Autopsy Of Jane Doe, so that seems like a good sign. As for The Long Walk, it takes place in a dystopian future where the government has instituted a super-fun marathon of sorts that involves 100 young men walking along the Maine-Canada border until only one remains. The winner gets whatever they want, and the losers get… publicly executed by a group of soldiers following the walkers in a truck. So maybe it’s not super-fun, but it is a dark and meaty premise for some psychological horror, especially as the boys involved get to know each other and then slowly go insane as they either walk and walk and walk or get executed.
As we previously reported, Truth screenwriter James Vanderbilt is handling the script for New Line.