Classic Movie Review : The Dead Zone (1983)
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Film adaptations of Stephen King novels don’t have a great historical track record. Highly dependent on their author’s intricate and nuanced storytelling style to elicit their trademark sense of dread, they can rarely be compressed in a two hours format. I don’t know if David Cronenberg’s adaptation of The Dead Zone was successful or not, but it kind of works anyway after thirty-six something years. Because it’s one of these films too weird to replicate even if you even tried.
The Dead Zone tells the story of the tragically named Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken), a dorky English teacher who gets injured in a brutal car accident. He falls into coma for 5 long years and wakes up on the other ends with a strange gift: being able to see someone’s past, present and future. Not exactly struggling with his new ability, Johnny decides to become a superhero and use it to help people even if seeing the future is pretty fucking creepy sometimes.
The weirdest superhero movie ever
I’ve said it in the aforementioned paragraph: this is basically a superhero movie without funny looking costumes. It adresses the question: what do you do when you have power over fate? Not only Christopher Walken’s character doesn’t bother one second with this question, but I love that no one in the movie does. Everybody firmly believes it’s fucking awesome, including Walken’s doctor who doesn’t even consider that his patient might be suffering from a head trauma condition. My dude’s like: no, you definitely see shit.
In that sense, by virtue of being granted a form of transcendent empathy (Walken literally invades other people unspoken memories/tragic futures), the protagonist decides unequivocally to use it in a moral way. The Dead Zone is a moral movie like only eighties films are capable of being. It has a very binary way of seeing people. They’re either innocent or criminal and their only judge can be Johnny Smith. After all, he has to constantly lives through horrible shit along with potential victims and perps too.
There’s a great, pure Cronenberg-ian scene when Johnny gets his first vision in the hospital and sees the nurse's daughter panic inside of her burning house. Smith is literally lying in the little girl’s bed, drenched in sweat. It’s incongruous, grotestque and terrifying from both points of view. Smith just came back to the world of the living and he’s suddenly lying inside a burning house? I love that it is filmed with very atmosphere too. The lights are on. The fish bowl is boiling. It is both normal and nightmarish at once.
Changing the world through politics
One thing that is unlike superhero movies: Johnny Smith changes lives, but he doesn’t exactly change the world. He is given the task to change the world at the end, but only by changing an important man’s life. The only way he’ll change the world is by altering the course of politics. If you think Stephen King locking horns with Donald Trump on Twitter was new, don’t kid yourself. He was freaking out about Ronald Reagan and conservative politics before you were born. Way before Fox New existed too.
I like how it was rendered by David Cronenberg’s movie. Well-known for his fearless gory aesthetic, the Canadian director wasn’t scared express horror through mundane things in The Dead Zone by confronting his protagonist with cold, uncaring visions of death. It’s not dark or alien-looking. It’s just a corrupted version of the character’s mundane reality going astray while he’s helplessly looking. The Dead Zone is a story that happens within the confines of a probably reality, which makes it efficient.
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I have a weak spot for crummy, borderline forgotten old movies. There’s an entire aesthetic that has been lost because CGI can arguably “do it better”. An entire relationship to reality was lost and that relationship was super important to The Dead Zone. It’s a movie about staying in reality and defending it even if you have weird, freaky powers that transcend it. This movie could only have worked in the early eighties, I’m convinced. It has technical limitations that prevent it from being too tacky.
