Review: The Dead Zone

Don’t let the fact that visible breath and frosty misery take priority over exploding heads and fetus-licking snow you.

The Dead Zone
Photo: Paramount Pictures

David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone is one of the Canadian auteur’s most emotionally warm films, even at the same time as its devastating sense of topographical isolation remains at absolute zero. It’s the feeling of a headache on a cloudy Saturday afternoon, and it stands shoulder to shoulder with all of the other masterpieces in the first round of Stephen King film adaptations—a line stretching from Brian De Palma’s Carrie to John Carpenter’s Christine—back when the author let real directors tackle his work and not campfire storytellers like Frank Darabont.

As much as the film is a transitional work for Cronenberg, so is the 1979 book for King. It came off the heels of The Stand and Night Shift, and it was the first fully successful piece of legitimate literature in his career. Salem’s Lot showcases admirable geographic organization, and The Shining has miraculously black moments of terror, but neither demonstrate a maturity of theme that would reward multiple readings.

The Dead Zone’s biggest misstep is King giving his protagonist the cipherous moniker of Johnny Smith, which is considerably lower on the rung of obnoxious creative conceits—or, at least, an easier one to ignore—than a hotel ghost party serving phantom cocktails to a recalcitrant alcoholic. The novel’s central whatzit, Johnny’s psychometric gift/curse, is subtly paralleled with his misspent life, and opened up a brief period in King’s work where horror of the extraordinary mingled with the more mundane horrors in a genuinely provocative manner.

Advertisement

The protagonist’s (and King’s) stripes as a tragic hero are earned because, in spite of the fact that he can see everything from every other time period in clear detail, he can’t attend to his own personal narrative. The four-and-a-half years he spends shut off to the world are excruciating, but his eventual awakening doesn’t particularly present much of an optimistic alternative. The titular “dead zone” refers to the part of his psychic visions that Johnny can’t quite see, and he later surmises that it’s the part that he can thereby change. Actually, the real “dead zone” is Johnny’s own life, which he can neither see accurately nor change.

Cronenberg’s ruthlessly linear adaptation stresses this miserable situation by, for starters, excising everything from the novel that smacked even faintly of sensationalistic occultism. Gone, for instance, is the novel’s iconic “Wheel of Fortune” interlude. Instead of letting Johnny (Christopher Walken) have his moment in local fame and fortune, Cronenberg stages the man’s carnival date with his girlfriend, Sarah (Brooke Adams), with about as much love blooming as there was in Carnival of Souls’s Saltair. The date, such that it is, ends when Johnny gets ill on an otherwise empty roller-coaster. They depart from the ride before the barker asks, “Did you have a good ride?” and Sarah pulls a stone-faced Johnny from their car and the two depart from the fair looking about as vivacious as Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman.

The film, taking a cue from King’s predominately serious novel, could be encapsulated in that moment. From its opening scenes of love deferred to its desolate final shot—also prefiguring Cronenberg’s later adaptation of The Fly—the film is lonely, reserved, and stripped totally of the kind of hocus-pocus showmanship one has come to expect of psychic melodrama.

Advertisement
Score: 
 Cast: Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom, Anthony Zerbe, Colleen Dewhurst, Martin Sheen, Nicholas Campbell, Sean Sullivan, Jackie Burroughs  Director: David Cronenberg  Screenwriter: Jeffrey Boam  Distributor: Paramount Pictures  Running Time: 103 min  Rating: R  Year: 1983  Buy: Video, Soundtrack, Book

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.