10 Recent Horror Movies That Had No Right To Be This Good

9. The Long Walk

There wasn't any reason to expect too much from The Long Walk. This Stephen King novel had long been considered unfilmable, since the whole thing is just people walking, and the marketing made it look like it'd probably be just another dystopian death game movie in the mould of The Hunger Games - not bad, but probably nothing stand-out either. This was hammered home by the fact that Francis Lawrence, who has directed all but one of the Hunger Games movies, was helming this one.

Once again, we were dead wrong about this, as The Long Walk was one of the most powerful and disturbing movies of 2025. It features award-worthy performances from an exceptional cast, and it boasts a smart screenplay that does manage to wring compelling, heart-rending emotional drama out of a story that could've fallen flat on-screen. 

The Long Walk does have a major factual inaccuracy at its heart - there is no way anyone, even a professional athlete, could continuously walk for several days and hundreds of miles like the characters in the film do - and yet, it is such a persuasive, affecting picture that most are likely to forget that. 

It's one of the bleakest mainstream movies in a while, and most won't want to see it again, which is a testament to just how well-done The Long Walk was.