Movie Review – The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone (1983)
Written by Jeffrey Boam
Directed by David Cronenberg

By 1983, Stephen King already had much of his work adapted for film and television. This year alone, there were three Hollywood movies: The Dead Zone, Cujo, and Christine, with more coming as the decade progressed. The Dead Zone is typical of King in that our protagonist is experiencing extrasensory perception, as many King main characters do. This ability to perceive things beyond average human senses opens him up to horrors, but now how you might expect. Where other King stories allow this breach of the barrier between life & death to create ghoulish supernatural monsters, the evil in The Dead Zone are the privileged. No zombies or ghosts here, just powerful, wealthy white men who don’t care what happens to everyone else.

Schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) begins having debilitating headaches while on a date with his girlfriend Sarah (Brooke Addams). That night Johnny has an accident while driving home and slips into a coma. When he wakes up, he believes only a handful of days have passed when it has been five years. Sarah has moved on, gotten married, and had a child. Johnny is happy for her but brokenhearted over the life they could have had together. However, something else has changed: Johnny’s ability to glimpse a person’s future by making physical contact with them. Touching a nurse’s hand allows him to see that her daughter will be harmed by an accidental house fire, and this foreknowledge saves the little girl’s life. 

With the help of neurologist Dr. Sam Weizak (Herbert Lom), Johnny deals with his newfound celebrity as a psychic. Some don’t believe it, but others do, including Sheriff Bannerman (Tom Skerrit), who is hunting down a serial killer in Castle Rock. Johnny also gets hired as a tutor, his primary profession based on his teaching background, and sees his student’s demise, which leads to him desperately arguing with the boy’s father to change his course of action. Looming in the background is Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen), a charismatic politician gaining traction in an upcoming Senate election. What Johnny sees when he shakes Stillson’s hand convinces him to do something he could never have imagined.

The Dead Zone came in the wake of director David Cronenberg’s previous horror/science fiction hits Scanners and Videodrome, the latter of which was released the same year as this film. It’s evident from the start that Cronenberg does far better directing his own work and is not constrained by big studios, Paramount Pictures, in this instance. Because this is a King adaptation, there was more potential box office to be made, so we see much less of the filmmaker’s trademark body horror. Cronenberg initially turned down The Dead Zone because the script he was given did not meet his expectations. More drafts were written before Cronenberg agreed to sign on, but the script is the most prominent problem with The Dead Zone.

The film’s structure feels like an outline for a television series with things happening episodically. Episode one establishes Johnny’s past, the tragic events, and their outcome. Episode two, or maybe more, is about his assistance in hunting down the serial killer in Castle Rock. Then you get a multi-episode arc about Johnny’s relationship with his student and the lead-up to the events with Stillson. Because of that, I kept feeling like the film was just starting, and then suddenly, it was over. Unlike other King-based films, there is never that momentum that we are moving through a singular story. It was able to have episodic moments, but they felt tied to a central plot. In The Dead Zone, Johnny isn’t as active as a protagonist as I expected, often just reacting or being passive. It’s only in the final sequence that we really see Johnny do something other than share a vision.

What is so strange about The Dead Zone is how commercial it is for a Cronenberg film. Just a few years ago, I saw the movies I previously mentioned, as well as The Fly, for the first time, and they have such a different tone than this one. These other films have a growing sense of dread and center around a person’s hold on sanity and connection to their body being broken down. You could have done this with Johnny in The Dead Zone, but his visions never seem to be a problem, just a benefit. I did appreciate the bleakness that made it feel right at home in the middle of Reagan-era America. Stillson is a genuinely scary figure, yet we don’t get enough time with him to really show how twisted an individual he is. This plot is fighting with the serial killer story for the middle of the film, and they never really find a way to mesh.

That muddy plot, combined with a lack of the elements that make a movie feel Cronenberg-ian, disappointed me. The acting was also weirdly stiff and felt like something other than the filmmaker. The performers may appear cheesy in his Canadian work, but there’s still a sense of personality. The Dead Zone’s characters, save Walken’s Johnny, are all pretty boring and uninteresting. The serial killer in Castle Rock doesn’t even get developed as an actual character, and I was interested in exploring his fascination with scissors and his connection with his mother. I am guessing King’s novel goes deeper, but definitely not here. My ultimate analysis is that the movie is rushing through plot points that probably got more room to breathe in the book. This means watching The Dead Zone felt almost like a highlight reel with little development inbetween.