Blu-ray Review: David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone Joins the Shout! Factory

This Blu-ray makes a fine case for the film being a highpoint in the careers of David Cronenberg, Stephen King, and Christopher Walken.

The Dead ZoneDavid 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

Image/Sound

As close to flawless as is likely possible. Pulled from the film’s original negative, this 4K scan boasts a full, natural range of color and, all too frequently, delivers the insistently wintry imagery with bone-chilling detail. The transfer’s warm colors pop in such a manner that only serves to underline the film’s overall icy mise-en-scène, where the format’s jet-black shadows contrast sharply against the unforgiving Canadian snow. The tunnel set piece, you’d swear, was set in Dante’s frozen ninth circle of hell, superseded in its absolute-zero bluster only by the vacancy in Christopher Walken’s gray-green eyes. There’s a tasteful, well-mounted 5.1 surround remix to go along with the 2.0 stereo, but I rather preferred siding with the flatter original mix. Its more muted overall tones form a better match with the material.

Extras

For a single-disc release, Shout! has pulled out the stops. There are no fewer than three separate commentary tracks—four if you count the isolated music score track with select commentary from film music historian Daniel Schweiger, who illustrates how Michael Kamen’s score influenced the evolution of David Cronenberg’s frequent collaborator Howard Shore. The only participant on the commentary tracks who actually had a hand in the making of the film is cinematographer Mark Irwin, who notes what a chore it is to film against snow and, hence, how devoted Cronenberg and he were to the film’s overall look—so much so that at one point they filmed in what was allegedly the “coldest night in Toronto in 100 years.” And it shows.

Otherwise, the tracks are mostly fronted by authors and film historians, including the pairing of Dr. Steve Haberman and Constantine Nasr, and Michael Gingold holding down a track of his own. They’ve all done their research, into the novel and its place at a key moment in Stephen King’s career trajectory, into the efforts to get it on the screen (including the fact that no less than Stanley Donen was attached to it early on), and how King and Cronenberg forged a uniquely jaundiced take on Norman Rockwell Americana.

Advertisement

The quartet of featurettes produced about a decade and a half ago by filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau are ported over from Paramount’s 2006 DVD release, which is a great relief. Walken isn’t among those who were interviewed for them (which, put together, total nearly 45 minutes), but Cronenberg was. The Dead Zone was his first adaptation of someone else’s work, and his insights on the adjustment are intriguing. Thankfully, Shout! also saw fit to produce a pair of new featurettes to slot alongside the Bouzereau content, touching base with some of the crew members who didn’t get their own commentary track, and ceding the floor to actor Brooke Adams, who gets an updated solo featurette to herself.

Overall

This comprehensive Blu-ray makes a damned good case for The Dead Zone being a highpoint in the careers of David Cronenberg, Stephen King, and Christopher Walken.

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: Shout! Factory  Running Time: 103 min  Rating: R  Year: 1983  Release Date: July 27, 2021  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.