Streamin’ King: ‘The Dead Zone’ Is A Showcase For Vintage Christopher Walken

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching 1983’s The Dead Zone, the first adaptation of the ’79 novel, which is currently streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime.

STREAMIN’ KING: THE DEAD ZONE

THE GIST: Endearing English teacher Johnny Smith crashes his car into an overturned milk tanker, going into a coma for five years, during which his beloved gets married and has a baby. He awakes with the most chapped lips in America and the ability to psychically sense people’s past, future, and possible future through touch, which he uses against a couple madmen.
PEDIGREE: Directed by David Cronenberg, his mainstream debut and first time not directing his own script, coming off Videodrome and heading next to his ’86 classic The Fly. Stars Christopher Walken a few years after winning his one Oscar, as a supporting actor in The Deer Hunter; followed Zone with a Bond villain role in A View to a Kill. Features Tom Skerritt (Picket Fences, also sheriff-ing) plus Martin Sheen designing Donald Trump’s campaign decades in advance. The screenwriter here is Jeffrey Boam (the Lethal Weapon saga, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), produced by Halloween co-writer/many-time John Carpenter collaborator Debra Hill.
WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? You’ve gotta watch this one sooner than later. The novel’s meditative dramatic spirit is intact, never warped into a horror story it isn’t, with a ton of wonderful character beats a more plot-crazed film wouldn’t trouble with. Walken brings Johnny and the “easy, crooked grin on his pleasant-rather-than-handsome face” to life as vividly and memorably as some of the all-time dramatic King performances—Morgan Freeman in Shawshank, Kathy Bates in Dolores Claiborne, Carla Gugino in Gerald’s Game—and there’s just really nothing here to upset fans except less backstory and less Sarah.
The Frank Dodd intro is an especially fun moment, lingering on his face for an extra beat in theory to imprint him on first-timers’ minds—but it’s such a nod to Constant Readers who know he’s the Strangler.
There’s a new benefit for Constant Readers watching The Dead Zone today, which is admiring/being terrified-as-hell at SK’s prescience re: the rise of a certain shit-talker who became president. He did not, however, predict Twitter, or that at age 71 he’d be using it to steadily lob grenades at IRL-Stillson.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Yes; it’s well-made stuff suffused with creativity from the moment the title slowly encroaches over the pastoral opening shots. If you’re new to the Stevieverse and seeking an infamous horror monument, this isn’t it, but those films can wait till you’ve savored this. It’s powerfully human, visually lovely, and nearly devoid of over-the-top movie-isms save for an overdramatic score. (Also it’s a standard-issue major Bechdel Test failure.) Johnny’s visions are marvelous—in less than 20 minutes we’re seeing an explosive WWII vignette with mounted soldiers and TANKS. A burning house boils a fishbowl until it bursts.

Watching all the shades of a deeply immersed Walken processing what’s happening to Johnny is a rare pleasure. From his poetry-reading intro onward, those legendarily idiosyncratic line deliveries are toned down, although it’s a blast when they do break through.

Bonuses: gore-hounds can enjoy a guy mashing his face onto some scissors, and you’ll finally be able to appreciate Twitter’s ever-replenishing Stillson/45 comparisons.

13 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. There’s a Dead Zone audiobook narrated by James Franco; evidently his Dr. Weizak voice is almost identical to his impression of The Room director Tommy Wiseau.
2. A Dead Zone TV show ran for six seasons on USA starting in 2003, 20 years after the film. The finale pulled the meta move of casting Tom Skerritt as Johnny’s dad. Sarah, a main character now married to the sheriff, was played by Nicole de Boer, who appeared on the King-inspired Haven—itself exec produced by a Zone series co-creator.
3. Saturday Night Live and a guest-hosting Walken did a parody sketch almost a decade later, 1992’s “Ed Glosser: Trivial Psychic.”
4. Johnny shows up in the second paragraph of Cujo, a book that opens, “Once upon a time, not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock.” It recounts Dodd’s murders, how “a good man named John Smith uncovered his name by a kind of magic,” and informs us the serial killer’s house gained a haunted reputation. The setup’s there to tie Dodd’s corruption to the rabies that destroys the Saint Bernard’s otherwise happy soul. The Cujo movie abandons all that.
5. After a fatal fire in the Zone novel, a woman shrieks at Johnny, “He made it happen! He set it on fire by his mind, just like in that book Carrie.” In The Dark Tower VII, a robot butler (yup) references Stillson and says he’s reading something “quite enjoyable. It’s called The Dead Zone, by Stephen King.”
6. Before finally making it to the fake presidency in 1999, Martin Sheen politicked again a month after Zone as the star of a JFK miniseries—then villainized Firestarter a few months down the road. (His son Emilio Estevez led Maximum Overdrive three years after that.) Other multi-Kingers: Tom Skerritt starred in 2006’s Desperation TV movie as writer Johnny Marinville, Nicholas Campbell (Dodd) played a cop again on Haven, and Brooke Adams (Sarah) led Sometimes They Come Back. Creepshow star Hal Holbrook was considered for Sheriff Bannerman.
7. Zone was the first book to visit SK’s fictional town of Castle Rock, but Cujo introduced it to moviegoers a few months before Cronenberg’s version. The Rock’s been revisited onscreen in works like Needful Things, The Dark Half, and Hulu’s eponymous anthology series, where a real estate agent tries putting potential homebuyers at ease by saying “a serial strangler”—Dodd—”died in my house and I sleep like a baby.” She also has psychic abilities that include a touch-sensitivity much like Johnny’s.

8. Johnny drives a Beetle; so does John “Jack” Torrance in Kubrick’s The Shining, and yes there’s a conspiracy about it. Another cute Shining thing is the moment it seems like we’ve got a third straight King flick with a child named Danny (Cujo, before this). “Denny,” Sarah corrects Johnny.
9. In the novel’s prologue, Stillson is peddling $1.69 Bibles “sure to hold together for at least 10 months” and, more successfully, a book called American the TruthWay: The Communist-Jewish Conspiracy Against Our United States. Within five pages he’s (truly tramautizingly) tortured and kicked a farm dog to death (shades of Cujo yet again) and abused a woman in a hayloft.

10. Three months into Donald Trump’s presidency, Uncle Stevie published a Guardian article saying he “had written about such men before.” Stillson, he recalled, “is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins. He is laughed at when he runs for the House of Representatives (part of his platform is a promise to rocket America’s trash into outer space), but he wins again.” All that’s left is for Stillson “to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”

    Then King segued into a 4,000-word transcript of him interviewing fictional Trump voters he plucked “from the scores of make-believe people always bouncing around in my head (sometimes their chatter is enough to drive me bugshit).”

11. Novel-Johnny’s vision from touching Stillson is more jumbled, with the only early clear image being “the screams of the dying, the smell of the dead. And a single tiger padding through miles of twisted metal, fused glass, and scorched earth.” At the end he divulges that “in the short, bloody course of this war, it’s not going to be just two or three nations throwing warheads, but maybe as many as twenty—plus terrorist groups.” Touching Stillson at the climax, he doesn’t get the film’s specific vision, but what he sees is captured beautifully: “Everything had changed. He began to cry a little. Touching Stillson this time had been like touching a blank. Dead battery. Fallen tree. Empty house. Bare bookshelves. Wine bottles ready for candles.”

12. 1983 yielded three SK adaptations in four months: August’s Cujo, which made $21.1 million, October’s The Dead Zone ($20.8 million), and Christine in December, earning a freakishly similar $21 million.
13. Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis went on to produce Firestarter, Cat’s Eye, Silver Bullet, King’s trainwreck directorial debut Maximum Overdrive (an on-set accident got them jointly sued for $18 million), and Sometimes They Come Back.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Pretty well-liked in its day (and more so after its day). The New York Times‘ Janet Maslin called it “a sad, sympathetic and unsettling movie, quietly forceful but in no way geared to the cheap scream.” Cinefantastique proclaimed “in almost every way and on many levels, The Dead Zone is a glowing success.” Roger Ebert reasoned that “like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, it tells its story so strongly through the lives of sympathetic, believable people that we not only forgive the gimmicks, we accept them. … No other King novel has been better filmed (certainly not the recent, dreadful Cujo).” Time Out said Walken gave “one of his most sympathetic and controlled performances”—and, prophetically, that “you can’t help feeling it’s a movie in search of a TV series.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR THE DEAD ZONE (1979): King’s fifth novel and eighth book overall, counting two pseudonymous Richard Bachman novels; The Long Walk arrived one month prior. Preceded in ’78 by The Stand and the debut short story collection Night Shift, succeeded in 1980 by Firestarter.
Zach Dionne recommends The Dead Zone to scaredy-cat readers ready to try a King book.

Where to stream The Dead Zone