Let’s All Go to the Lobby to Get Ourselves Some Meat! – THE DEAD ZONE (1983)

A dark, icy evening in late 1983 was the perfect time for such a cold and calculating film.

Sure, JAWS was my first horror experience in the theater, but I was a toddler and fell asleep. (I did this two years later at STAR WARS, too!) By default, THE DEAD ZONE gets the honor for my first moviegoing experience to see a horror film. 

There was little triplex cinema on the main drag in Johnstown, PA in the early 1980s. I remember it being wonderfully creepy and barren in the winter months after the adjacent department store had closed for the day. Even all those years ago, the place had already seemed forgotten, existing in the margins of reality just like most all the best movie memories. 

My dad, who never seemed interested in horror films, was suddenly jazzed to see the latest adaptation of a Stephen King bestseller. The previous novel-to-screen offering from King, CUJO, had mauled its way to a modest $20 million payday a few months earlier, but THE DEAD ZONE was a whole other breed–an outlier in King’s oeuvre even back then, serving as a quiet accompaniment to the likes of the horror meister’s amped-up classics such as “The Shining” and “Carrie”. 

I had just recently gotten interested in horror films, and so the name David Cronenberg had flashed before me a few times in magazines and such, mostly in conjunction with his earlier film, the prescient and criminally underrated VIDEODROME (1983). So, as my dad’s Fiat slid down the hill to the parking lot fronting that shadowy, unassuming theater, I didn’t really know much about what to expect. 

Teacher Johnny Smith (played by Christopher Walken at his most Christopher Walken-like perfection) is the victim of a snowy car crash, awakening from a five-year coma only to have the blessing/curse of second sight. It’s not bad enough his girlfriend has moved on without him as he lay comatose in that hospital bed, but now, with the touch of his hand, he’s able to divinate a person’s future, and sometimes these visions are downright horrifying. The worst is when he shakes the hand of up-and-coming politician Greg Stillson (the always-intense Martin Sheen). Images of the future president Stillson ordering a nuclear strike shakes Smith to his core, until he decides the only way to avert this terrible fate is to assassinate him.

This is a thinking man’s terror, rife with moral dilemmas and political intrigues that are just as relevant now as when King first proposed them in 1979. I could say that THE DEAD ZONE is a horror film for people who don’t like horror films, but the same could be said for the film’s director, David Cronenberg. For a filmmaker who rose to fame by almost single-handedly establishing the ‘body horror’ subgenre that has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, this is a curiously astute work for folks who would typically shy away from Cronenberg’s aggressively grotesque style. 

Well…except for that scissors scene. Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.

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