The Dead Zone

Enter The Dead Zone – director David Cronenberg’s icy vision of fate and political paranoia, drawn from Stephen King’s eerily prophetic bestseller.

After a near-fatal accident leaves him in a coma for five years, mild-mannered schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) awakens to find that life has moved on without him. Worse, he’s cursed with a terrifying gift: the ability to glimpse fragments of a person’s past or future through touch – and the burden of knowing he might change their fate.

Plagued by visions of disaster and physically drained by his powers, Johnny struggles to reclaim normalcy until apocalyptic premonitions tied to a rising politician (Martin Sheen) draw him toward a chilling moral dilemma.

Christopher Walken’s haunted charisma finds its perfect vehicle in The Dead Zone, David Cronenberg’s coolly controlled adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling novel. Paring back Cronenberg’s usual body horror proclivities for something more quietly haunting, The Dead Zone stands as one of the director’s most accessible early achievements. Threading supernatural horror through the post-Watergate paranoia of American politics, the film endures as much for its horror as its own chilling prophecy: strongman populism curdling toward global catastrophe, as embodied by Martin Sheen’s delightfully slimy villain.