As in Robert Sheckley’s ‘The Prize of Peril’ and Stephen King’s The Running Man, also filmed, the race of ‘The Racer’ is a caricature violent sport rather than a credible pastime of the future. Increasingly haunted by his victims but nagged by his bloodthirsty, avaricious mechanic – who wants the bonus which will come with a record-breaking score – Willie finally drives into a brick wall. Willie, the racer, is a contestant in a transcontinental race in which making good time is less important than accumulating pedestrian casualties along the route. That became ‘The Racer’ – I wrote it as a short story, a serious kind of piece.’įirst published in Escapade in 1956, ‘The Racer’ is a brief dystopia which adopts the narrative strategy of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Fahrenheit 451: the viewpoint character is a relatively privileged member of a society built around near-symbolic injustice who comes to question an evil everyone around him accepts. And the juxtaposition of watching the horror on the wife’s face and the excitement of the fans – this, after all, was what they really came to see – struck me enormously.
#Death race 2000 movie drivers#
‘There was an accident, and one of the drivers was killed. ‘I had been to the Indianapolis 500 somewhere around 1939, and I sat in the box with the wives of the drivers,’ said Danish-born writer Ib Melchior.
A piece on Paul Bartel’s film Death Race 2000, considered as an adaptation of Ib Melchior’s short story ‘The Racer’.
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