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.
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.
Image/Sound
That iconic shot of the glistening, frozen inside of a stone bridge looks like it could actually cut you, should you touch it. In other scenes, the colors feel a tad washed out when they ought to blaze, though the fire vision in Johnny’s hospital bed isn’t among those, thankfully. I didn’t see the prior edition, so I can’t say whether it’s been improved, but this one looks and sounds more than adequate. Try the French track, for fun, to pretend the film is set in Quebec.
Extras
Once again, all due credit to filmmaker and author Laurent Bouzereau, who could probably do what he does here in his sleep, but most people don’t watch making-of featurettes for radical aesthetic experiences in their own right. Christopher Walken isn’t among those interviewed for these four featurettes (which, put together, total nearly 45 minutes), but David Cronenberg is. The Dead Zone was his first adaptation of someone else’s work, which he’s more or less done ever since. His insights are intriguing, but a commentary track would’ve been nice. All that’s additional in this “special collector’s edition” is the theatrical trailer. I guess anything would’ve been a step up from the previous release.
Overall
Stephen King’s name may be billed above the title, but The Dead Zone belongs firmly in the good company of the early auteurist “Masters of Horror” period of King adaptations.
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