I haven’t read Stephen King’s The Dead Zone yet, but it’s on my list. That’s why I was a little reluctant to watch the movie. It was free on Amazon Prime, however, and I reasoned to myself that I’d seen The Shining and Carrie before reading the books. Indeed, my earliest introduction to Stephen King was through movies. (Well, I did read one of his short stories in high school, but the novel side of things came later.) When the opening credits revealed it was directed by David Cronenberg I wondered what I was in for. I didn’t know the story, but I hadn’t heard of this as a Cronenberg body horror spectacle either. It was quite cold outside and I was nodding off, so why not.
The thing is, it’s not always listed as horror. That’s a faulty genre designation, as is sci-fi. There’s one futuristic scene in the movie and it lasts for just over a minute. Does that make it sci-fi? Also, I realized, it deals with clairvoyance and for similar reasons the X-Files are also listed as science fiction. Paranormal, it seems, is permanently ruled out of the realm of possibility by assigning it an improbable genre. Well, back to the zone. I figure the title will be better explained by King, but there is a brief scene explaining what a dead zone is. The story follows Johnny Smith, a schoolteacher who becomes clairvoyant, although it manifests itself only after a car accident and a coma. The main purpose of this, at least through the movie lens, is to prevent a Trump-like populist from being elected president. That is the horror part, I guess. And it’s becoming clear to me that writers were warning about these things since the seventies.
Unlike many of my weekend movies, I’d actually heard of The Dead Zone before. There are some horror tropes present. It begins with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and has a few other horror references tossed in. Still, it’s a very human story. The movie probes the difficulties of a life with special abilities. Johnny never gets over the woman he was going to marry before his coma, and he feels for those whose futures he sees. The movie is fairly slowly paced and it drops a few threads, again, likely found in the novel. In the book or movie debate I generally go for book first, but that often leads to disappointment on the silver screen. Maybe this was the right order to go this time around. Once I read the novel I guess I’ll know. Or at least have an opinion.