Getting several new Stephen King adaptations in a given year isn’t surprising to horror fans, but this year has an added dimension of intrigue for longtime Constant Readers. Two of the King films released in 2025 – The Long Walk and The Running Man – were originally released under a different name.
Beginning in 1977, King adopted the pen name Richard Bachman when his publishers advised him against releasing more than one novel a year under his given name. So, Bachman was born, and for a while, got to live his own fictional life separate from King. Bachman released five novels – Rage in 1977, The Long Walk in 1979, Roadwork in 1981, The Running Man in 1982, and Thinner in 1984 – without ever being linked to King. By 1985, the game was up after a bookstore clerk realized the two writers read similarly, then went to the Library of Congress to confirm his suspicions.
Since then, despite King’s outing as Bachman, Bachman himself has taken on a life of his own. Due to its connection to a school shooting, Rage is no longer in print, but the other Bachman books remain in circulation, and King even released a couple of additional stories under the pen name. The Regulators, a companion novel to King’s Desperation, landed in 1996, and Blaze, a 1970s-written book King released as a “found” novel from the now-deceased Bachman, arrived in 2007. Among King’s fans, Bachman has come to represent a repository for King’s pulpier novels, ones with a harder exploitation edge, usually driven by a high-concept premise. He’s got his own fanbase among King’s readers, and King himself even played “Richard Bachman” on Sons of Anarchy back in 2010. Now, despite years of lying dormant, Bachman’s legacy is getting a new chapter courtesy of a very unconventional project.