As The Long Walk makes the trek from the page to the screen, Stephen King recently revealed the one condition he had for adapting his 1979 novel.

The author explained that the characters in the book are “the same sort of kids that are pulled into the war machine” of Vietnam, noting that he required screenwriter JT Mollner and director Francis Lawrence to show teens getting shot in their film.

“If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see … some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks but you never see any blood. And man, that’s wrong. It’s almost, like, pornographic,” King told The Times of London . “I said, if you’re not going to show it, don’t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie.”

In The Long Walk , premiering Sept. 12 in theaters, a group of 10

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