King-o-Ween: The Dead Zone (1983)
David Cronenberg delivers one of the best Stephen King adaptations.
The Dead Zone doesn’t get talked about in the same revered tones as some other Stephen King adaptations. It lacks the nightmarish vibe of The Shining, the ghoulish iconography of It, and the awards pedigree of Misery or The Shawshank Redemption. It’s a respected adaptation, to be sure, but tends to get lost in the conversation.
I’d had The Dead Zone on my list of potential titles to cover for King-O-Ween, but I initially dismissed it. I bought the paperback last year during a Barnes and Noble spending spree, and it’s been taunting me on a bookshelf for months; I figured I’d read it before seeing the movie. But after talking about Christopher Walken’s haunting performance in The Deer Hunter for a recent We’re Watching Here episode, my co-host, Perry, convinced me to spend some time with Johnny Smith.
And I’m glad he did, because David Cronenberg’s adaptation might be one of the best movies based on a Stephen King novel.
Second Sight
Johnny Smith (Walken) is a Maine English teacher, content with teaching “The Raven” to his students and slowly entering into a relationship with Sarah (Brooke Adams). Driving home from a date, he’s in a horrific accident and wakes up from a coma five years later. Not only does Johnny have to learn to walk again and accept the fact that Sarah has moved on, but he’s also plagued by nightmarish psychic visions.
The temptation for many King adaptations is to embrace the high concept and lean into it, but Cronenberg and Walken keep the focus on Johnny, using the psychic visions and a series of episodic encounters as punctuation, not the overall point. This is a story not about a man who uses his powers to solve crimes or save the world — although those elements come into play — but a story about a man whose life has suffered a tragic interruption and has to deal with broken dreams, all while being burdened with this new “gift.”
Walken is phenomenal; this performance stands right alongside his best work. In the early scenes, he reminds you of the joy and vibrancy he showed in the early scenes of The Deer Hunter. There’s giddiness as Johnny and Sarah return from their date; he’s invested in teaching English to the kids. Throughout the film, as he becomes more embroiled in the darker corners his powers bring him to, there are moments where a warm smile crosses his face while tutoring a child or in the relationship between Johnny and his father, and you can see that old self briefly shine through.
But throughout, Walken plays Johnny as haunted. Like many people, before I ever saw The Dead Zone, I was familiar with Walken’s SNL sketch “Ed Glosser, Trivial Psychic,” and I assumed his work here would be similar to that. But while Johnny jolts when receiving his visions, the work is more subdued. He’s trance-like when he receives his looks into the future, his voice a droning monotone as if Johnny’s channeling something from behind his consciousness. There’s weariness, sorrow and terror that Walken conveys without overplaying it; and then a sad resignation in the movie’s final moments as he realizes what end these powers have brought him to.
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Efficient thrills
The paperback of The Dead Zone that continues to mock me isn’t King’s lengthiest work, but at more than 400 pages, it’s also not one of his quicker reads. The film covers a lot of ground. There’s the accident and the aftermath, there’s a detour where Johnny helps police catch a serial killer, and then there’s the final passages involving sinister congressional candidate Stillson (Martin Sheen).
This is a story that would seem to take up more than two hours of runtime or be better suited for a miniseries (and, indeed, The Dead Zone was also famously adapted as a long-running USA television show). And yet Cronenberg navigates all of this in just over 100 minutes. It’s a remarkably efficient movie, and it never feels rushed.
The key is that Cronenberg uses each of the major movements from King’s novel not as plot points but as ways to further Johnny’s acceptance of his gift. During the first act, he’s focused on getting his life back together and sitting in the wreckage of his lost dreams. When Johnny decides to help the Castle Rock police, he’s beginning to accept that maybe this curse can be of use to others and tries to balance it with some return to normalcy. In the final act, he accepts that there may be one ultimate good he can do with these visions, even if it costs him everything.
But Cronenberg and Walken never lose sight of the emotional toll. Each move forward to acceptance is paralleled with shifts in Johnny and Sarah’s relationship. The clearer it becomes that they will never be together, the more Johnny accepts that he has a new path for his life, one that is darker than he could have imagined.
The horror of The Dead Zone
The Dead Zone is one of the less supernaturally overt King adaptations, closer to science fiction. And even the sci-fi aspects are underplayed in favor of emotional drama, which makes the horror elements more impactful.
Cronenberg is, of course, no stranger to grotesque imagery and horror. But with The Dead Zone, he doesn’t lean into the body horror of his other films (his next film, The Fly, would go whole hog with that). Rather, it’s the surreal imagery and suddenness of Johnny’s visions and the everyday horror of them that gets under the skin. There’s a tactile terror to the famous imagery of Johnny viewing a child’s room engulfed in flames (the boiling aquarium water is a nice touch) and a brief vision of hockey players plunging through ice is eerie. It’s not that the visions are over-the-top and grotesque; it’s the emotional terror of Johnny knowing the future and trying desperately to change it that packs a punch.
In its third act, the story plays around with one of the most famous tropes of knowing the future: would you kill baby Hitler? Johnny has a premonition of Stillson in office bringing about nuclear war (Martin Sheen is fantastic in the way he sells evil — and possibly predicts Trumpism — in just a few short scenes). In the end, Johnny decides to kill Stillson to avert catastrophe. And while the scenes of the would-be president forcing nuclear holocaust onto the world are chilling, it’s the culmination of all the film’s emotion and horror that lend to its dark ending without ever putting too fine a point on it.
From our perspective, we know that Johnny is a hero. He has a vision of the end of the world, and Cronenberg shows us this vision so that we are on his side. We understand why he shows up with the rifle and attempts to kill Stillson (who survives but loses his political career because he chose to use Sarah’s baby as a human shield). We get a brief moment of Johnny and Sarah together as Johnny breathes his last after being shot by Stillson’s bodyguards. It’s a sad moment, but ostensibly a happy-ish ending. The crisis is averted, the world is safe and Johnny can have peace.
But I imagine this doesn’t give Johnny a great legacy. The rest of the world doesn’t have the benefit of his visions. To everyone else, it looks like he was a man upset about losing his fiancée, so he tracked her down and decided to kill the candidate she was stumping for. He looks like a madman, not a hero. That’s likely his legacy. And it’s the horror underlying his sacrifice; it’s why I think the one false note in the movie is Sarah saying “I love you” to Johnny before he dies (which was apparently dubbed in later so the movie wouldn’t end on such a downer note). The sacrifice would carry more weight if Sarah also thought Johnny had become unhinged. But because Walken has done such a great job creating a three-dimensional, likable character, I can’t ding the film too much for that.
I don’t know if King’s novel goes into more depth about the fallout of Johnny’s actions. I like that the film ends abruptly after that scene, leaving us to sit with its weight. I look forward to eventually picking the book up and seeing how Johnny’s story there compares to the film. In the meantime, I’m happy this is the film I decided to close this series off with. It’s one a strong film from Cronenberg and one of the better King adaptations.