Trailer
Plot summary
Johnny Smith is a schoolteacher whose girlfriend is Sarah Bracknell. Driving home through stormy weather after declining her invitation to stay the night, he is in a car accident that leaves him in a coma. He wakes five years later under the care of the neurologist Dr. Sam Weizak and learns that Sarah is now a married mother. Contact with other people then shows him pieces of their lives; the hand of a nurse reveals her daughter trapped in a fire.
In these lists: The Best Horror Movies of the 1980s
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Dead Zone (1983)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Cronenberg received five different screenplay drafts for the project, including one written by Stephen King himself, which the director called "the worst one by far."
- Producer Dino De Laurentiis rejected Stephen King's own attempt to adapt his novel as "involved and convoluted," though director David Cronenberg said it was actually he who decided against using King's script, finding it "needlessly brutal."
- Paramount pulled the film from its planned premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival just three days beforehand, reportedly because the studio didn't want negative reviews circulating six weeks before its theatrical release.
- Cronenberg criticized the film's theatrical distribution, saying it could have been number one at the box office had the distribution been better. Paramount's head of marketing was arrested for embezzling money, and Cronenberg theorised that he might have taken money meant for the marketing of the film.
SPOILER
Before Christopher Walken was cast as Johnny Smith, Stephen King's own first choice for the role was Bill Murray; Cronenberg also wanted Nicholas Campbell as Johnny but ended up casting him as the killer instead, and wanted Hal Holbrook as Sheriff Bannerman, a choice De Laurentiis vetoed.SPOILER
Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam's first draft gave the film a different, softer ending in which Johnny survives and simply has a vision that the Castle Rock Killer is still alive and has escaped prison; Cronenberg rejected this as a cheap "trick ending" and had it rewritten.
