Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 13, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Perhaps because it doesn’t contain the kind of extreme horror elements for which its two creators are best known in many circles, The Dead Zone doesn’t always come up when the highlights of David Cronenberg and Stephen King’s filmographies are discussed. Yet while the movie got somewhat lost in the flood of early-‘80s King films, it stands among the very best in the long, long list of filmizations of the author’s work, and also represents a key turning point in Cronenberg’s career. In the wake of Dead Ringers, Crash, A History of Violence et al., it’s easy to forget that once upon a time, the director’s most noted contribution to cinema was Scanners’ exploding head—and that even when that image caught Newsweek’s attention, the resulting article decried his perceived inability “to write and direct convincing dialogue.” With his subsequent, ahead-of-its-time Videodrome barely noticed by critics or audiences in early 1983, The Dead Zone, which opened that fall, provided a crucial stepping stone for Cronenberg, showcasing a remarkable gift for eliciting both performance and suspense, which would lead him to his breakthrough with The Fly.
That 1986 remake is justifiably celebrated as one of Cronenberg’s triumphs, but I think The Dead Zone is an even better movie—a richer and more wide-ranging emotional experience in addition to an exemplary example of adaptation/compression. Jeffrey Boam’s superb screenplay distills King’s lengthy book (a standout on his résumé as well and, as noted on Paramount’s new DVD, his first New York Times #1 Best Seller) down to its emotional and narrative essence. It follows schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken in another career-best effort) as he falls into a coma following a car accident and wakes up five years later with the ability to psychically link to a person’s past, present or future just by touching them. With his beloved girlfriend Sarah (a radiant Brooke Adams) lost to the arms of another man, Johnny’s life becomes a series of increasingly frightening visions, and the film charts his journey from helpless witness to his realization that he has the ability to alter events to come, and his inescapable destiny to save no less than humanity via his intervention in the campaign of megalomaniacal politician Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen).
The Dead Zone is a heartbreaking romance wrapped in a moving tragedy inside a gripping suspense thriller, garnished with moments of pure, unadulterated horror. If Cronenberg needed a showcase back then for the wide range of his dramatic gifts, he sure got it with this material, and he’s assisted by a perfect cast (also including Herbert Lom as Johnny’s wise and sympathetic doctor and Tom Skerritt as a sheriff seeking Johnny’s help with a murder case) and a standout team of craftspeople. Mark Irwin’s photography complements Johnny’s lonely saga with a visual bleakness that is nonetheless great to look at, Michael Kamen contributes perfectly mournful music (room for one more career-best plaudit?) and the sound team creates a wonderfully tactile audioscape, from the crunching of snow underfoot in the key gazebo scene to the crumpling of a rubber raincoat as a fetishistic serial killer puts it on.
All of this receives a fine showcase in the transfer on Paramount’s new DVD (coming October 3), which appears to be the same 16×9-enhanced 1.85:1 image with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio that appeared on the studio’s previous disc. Everything looks and sounds great, with the colors naturalistic as they should be and that expressive sound and music very well-conveyed. Given the quality of the film and its presentation, and the new release’s appellation as a “Special Collector’s Edition,” one can only then wonder—why isn’t this the standout package it could’ve and should’ve been?
Beyond the theatrical trailer, the sole extra here is a four-part documentary, totaling about 40 minutes, that explores “Memories of The Dead Zone,” “The Look of The Dead Zone,” “Visions and Horror from The Dead Zone” and “The Politics of The Dead Zone.” The first deals with how the project came together and offers some interesting anecdotes, such as Cronenberg revealing that five different Dead Zone scripts had been prepared, from which he chose Boam’s, and Adams recalling how childhood friend “Ronnie” Walken helped her land the Sarah role. In the second, Irwin chimes in to help relate how he and the director expressed the characters and their psyches visually, and we learn that that gazebo was specially built for the film in a small town which at first resisted it, but has since made it part of its history. “Visions” offers cool behind-the-scenes photos of the movie’s goriest moment and a bedroom set that was actually set on fire, plus a few pics of a filmed but deleted prologue. And “Politics” includes vintage comments by Sheen about his ruthless role, which Cronenberg insists is not as over-the-top as some might believe.
There’s good stuff here—enough to leave a fan of the movie wondering why there isn’t more (especially given that the featurettes’ creator, Laurent Bouzereau, has been responsible for a number of epic and excellent DVD documentaries in the past). Certainly there was a stumbling block in the fact that Boam, Kamen and producer Debra Hill have all passed away in the last half-decade (adding even more of a sense of loss, Cronenberg notes, to reflecting on a movie in which that emotion is a central theme). But the director has contributed superb commentaries to a large number of his films old and new in recent years, and it’s hard to figure why he didn’t do the same here. If he couldn’t be corralled for it, why not secure the track by British horror experts Stephen Jones and Kim Newman used on Sanctuary’s UK Zone disc—or, barring that, recording a new chat by a couple of Stateside Cronenberg and King experts…like, say, Douglas E. Winter, who makes several talking-head appearances in the doc?
That Brit disc also includes a booklet which reproduces pages of Boam’s script containing that unused prologue; if footage of that material couldn’t be found, their printed source would’ve been nice to see. And where the heck is King himself? Probably only those directly involved with this disc—or people possessing Johnny’s psychic gifts—will ever know for sure. Just for the movie, this DVD belongs on every genre fan’s shelf, but it’s a shame that the film goes unaccompanied by a supplemental collection truly worthy of it.
