This Book Cover Whispers Of The Future

I got this book today.  Hold on, doesn't it look like it belong to the Outsider?

But look, it was published decades ago.  It's the cover for The Dead Zone.  I really like it.  I got a paperback copy to reference as I listened to the book recently on audible.  (I like moving the book marker to see how much further I have to go.)

Watching The Dead Zone

I can't finish a Stephen King book and not watch the movie.  I just have to.  Maybe, I think, the book will come to life on screen and I'll re-live those wonderful scenes. 

This is, of course, a set up for failure.  In fact, movies I liked before reading the book, feel flat after reading the wonderfully textured novels by King.  People I feel like I know well, because I've spent time in their head via Mr. King, now seem pasty and cardboard. 

So, that brings me to The Dead Zone.  I read the novel in marathon race with my wife.  She read on Kindle, I listened on audible.  I beat her.  (Double speed, my friends.)  Now, let me tell you up front, I've seen the movie before.  I'd forgotten everything except key scenes, and the vague memory that I'd liked it a lot. 

The Dead Zone Is Real:

Can I ask right up front: Was there a shortage on extras when they were filming the Dead Zone?  We start at the Carnival.  A scene described as something out of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.  Skip the lucky streak at the game booth, and instead we watch Johnny and Sarah dip up and down on the roller-coaster.  But -- they're all alone.  Who gets to go to the County Fair and ride the roller-coaster all alone?  It wasn't closing time.  But watch, it's just them, bopping up and down and all around the track. 

Pretty soon, we are ushered in to the local hospital where Sarah comes looking for Johnny.  She bursts in to what could be a mansion, but it's the hospital.  "Where's the emergency room?" she asks, and is directed up large wooden stairs.  Stairs?  Hospital?  It doesn't look like a hospital.  Did they run out of white paint?  But it gets better.  Like the fair grounds, all is dead in the hospital. As in. . . no one is there!  Apparently it's a slow night in the E.R.  If there were budget cuts, I'm pretty sure they came out of the extras.  Because there are almost no background characters throughout the movie.

Instead of having a medical team seeing to him, Johnny has one sole doctor.  Because, you know, that would require more. . . extras.

Finally at the Stillson rally, where. . . . BOOM, there are people.  And the biggest political sign I've ever seen.  Ever.

Questions:

Do movies like this make you wonder some things?

1. Who cut Johnny's hair all those years he was in the coma?

2. Does the truck driver and the accident remind you of Pet Sematary?  As in, all that's missing is a kid running into the road as the accident happens.

3. How did his parents know when he would wake up?  They were right outside, waiting for him.

4. So Frank Dodd killed himself by jamming sissors up his mouth -- that was his best plan?  he's a cop with a service revolver.

5. Does everyone have a bowl haircut?

6. Did Johnny notice his jacket makes him look like a vampire?

7. Ah, paper bags -- anyone else miss those?

8. That's how we launch nukes?

9. Why is Johnny driving Ted Bundy's VW ?

What's Great:

Okay, enough silly moaning.  I still like the film.  And the movie is a fair representation of the novel.  The scenes are put together at almost the same pace as the book, without the early connections to Greg Stillson.  So there's not the same feeling of the two stories moving toward one another as there was in the book. 

I think the visions are far more intense in the movie than they were the book.  I also liked mama Dodd going after them.  Christopher Walken does a nice job showing the conflict inside of Johnny.

The Deadzone Election 1976

You don't need me to tell you the Dead Zone is amazing.  What you might need is a prodding to go back and read it.  Tight, compact, well written, suspenseful are all words that can describe the Dead Zone.  

I was drawn to the Dead Zone by Chad Clark's book, Tracing The Trails. Clark's book about King and his work was so good, it actually made me rethink some of the older books I hadn't touched yet.  In particular, Dead Zone and The Dark Half.  His reviews made me hungry for vintage King.

Now, let me tell you what a Stephen King collection really is --

It's a Time Machine.

There you have it.  That's it.  It's like taking a trip back to specific periods of time.  You don't get to take these trips alone, though.  Your traveling companions, in this case, will be a man cursed with an ability to see into people; and a deranged politician.  I like the books from the seventies because they have a unique feel to them.  Sometimes King takes us back to an era.  Books like 11/22/63 and Joyland both returned us to other eras.  So did IT.  And King was masterful.  But it's those old books themselves, written in the time they were set, that really makes me feel the era.  Because King innocently tells us what's going on all around him.  He doesn't have to try and remember what was happening; he's just describing the world he lives in.

King mentions things that I think he wouldn't because a modern audience wouldn't know what he was talking about.  John Denver is playing on the radio. Remember him?  (I think the song was Country Roads.)  And my favorite not to another author came early in the book when King compared the carnival to Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury.  King once said that without Bradbury, there would be no Stephen King. 

In The Dead Zone, there is a wonderful scene in which Johnny Smith meets Jimmy Carter.  And he looks right in to Carters soul.  I loved it.  We forget that even politics of the late seventies were not as nice and clean as we remember them.  The smiling man from Georgia was a breath of fresh air after the corrupt Nixon years.  A man, some felt, who was just too good for Washington.  What I appreciated about the Dead Zone was King's ability to bring me back into the politics of that era, without a lot of heavy exposition.  

I also want to note that I appreciate King's flawed characters.  Johnny might be an all american nice guy, but he still makes decisions that leave me totally frustrated with him.  I don't want to give anything away, so no further comment, just that Johnny sometimes takes his own path.

Mick Garris Enters The Dead Zone

Do you like Mick Garris?  I love his work -- with the exception of one movie, Sleepwalkers.  Garris has been releasing a series of really fun commentaries called "Trailers From Hell."

I think Garris is dead on when he says:

"The lousy King movies are the ones that think it's just about the monster in the closet.  To me the good ones realize it's about the people who live in the house with the monsters in the closet.  King's appeal, like that of Charles Dickens in another era, is that he lives in the world of his audience.  He isn't telling a story, but living it with you. His people have a rich emotional core."

There's a lot of these at youtube.

How Many Really Good SK Horror Movies Are There ?

In announcing a screening of  The Dead Zone, Ken Hanke of Mountain Express asserts this:

Let’s be honest about it. There are only three film adaptations of Stephen King’s horror stories that seriously qualify as really good movies: Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and this film, David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone (1983). (There are quite a few other film adaptations that are entertaining enough, but…) And, yes, Cronenberg’s film is the least of the three.  (mountainx.com)

 Wait a minute. . . there's only three really good  horror movies from King's work?  I assume we are not counting Shawshank and the like as "horror."  Still, doesn't The Green Mile count as a horror flick?  Well, if the Dead Zone counts as a horror film, Green Mile certainly does!

Here are some of my favorite King horror films -- and there are more than three!  In fact, here's ten:

• Cujo
• The Shining
• IT
• The Mist
• Carrie
• Creepshow (1-2)
• Salem's Lot (1979)
• Misery
• The Dark Half
• 1408

That's 11 if you count Creepshow 1 and 2.  I liked 2 better than the first.  I also thought the 1979 Salem's Lot was flat out creepy!  And IT, though it is not consistent, has some scary moments.  The Dark Half is scary, especially in the beginning.  

1408 I have my own issues with.  They are genre issues mostly.  It seems that once in the room anything can happen -- thus the story has no framing or rules of its own.  If oceans  need to fall out of pictures, so be it.  Never mind oceans don't fall from pictures -- all reality is suspended without explanation.  That means the viewer is held hostage to anything the writer can think of.  Still, it's a scary flick!

My list didn't even include a few like Dreamcatcher and Maximum Overdrive.  I liked Maximum Overdrive a lot!  But, I'm not sure it would be listed as a "really good" horror movie.  

Here is the screening information for those of you in the Ashville NC area:

The Thursday Horror Picture Show will screen The Dead Zone Thursday, Jan. 10 at 8 p.m. in the Cinema Lounge of The Carolina Asheville and will be hosted by Xpress movie critics Ken Hanke and Justin Souther.

So tell me: What are you favorite Stephen King horror movies?   

Wilderness Of Error author interviews Stephen King

I am anxiously awaiting the publication of a book by Errol Morris.  The book is titled, "A Wilderness of Error, the trials of Jeffrey MacDonald."

As I poked around, learning more about Morris, I found he had  done an interview with Stephen King when King published 11.22.63.   (HERE)

Morris points out that King has his hero spy on Oswald in 11.22.63.  King responds, "The guy and his wife spoke Russian the whole time. That was the worst part of writing the book. I hope it’s not too boring."  Interesting, since that is about the point where I found myself wondering when the book would get moving again.

Here's something cool; King says that in a way 11.22.63 is a rethinking premise behind the The Dead Zone.  That is, if you know the future (or the past) and can change it -- then you should.  But in 11.22.63, we get a different answer from King . . . you should not!

This book is, in a way, like a photo negative of my novel “The Dead Zone.” In that book, Johnny Smith is the guy in the high place with the rifle who feels like he’s seen the future. He’s seen this guy, Greg Stillson, and he sees what he’s going to do when he becomes president, because he has this precognitive talent. And he feels like he has to kill him. At the last moment, fate intervenes. I got really uncomfortable with the idea of saying, “Well, under certain circumstances, assassination is a good thing.” And this book is a chance to do it the other way and to take the assassination back.

Morris also wrote a positive -- insightful -- review of the novel.  Morris offered all out relief that King did not worry about the machinery of Time Travel or swim through the depths of philosophy on the subject -- the author stuck to the story and allowed time travel to be little more than a vehicle to carry the story.

About the MacDonald case:

Morris is set to publish a true crime novel on the MacDonald murders.  The book Fatal Vision brought the case worldwide fame, though it was already on the media's radar long before!  And ever since I was a child I have found this one particular case interesting.  It really is a "did he do it?"

One thing that is so interesting about this murder is that the people who confessed are not the one's who are in jail.  People confess often to things they did not do, and the lady in question used a lot (LOT) of drugs.

A while back  there was an interesting book that rebutted Fatal Vision, titled Fatal Justice.  I thought it was well done.  However, there are so many things that leave the reader scratching their head at the end of any of the books about this case.  How could intruders enter the home and not awake the neighbors?  How many people were really in the house?  Why did MacDonald tell his father in law that he hunted down and killed one of the murderers?  Why were only weapons from within the home used? Why wasn't MacDonald more severely injured?  And then Fatal  Justice comes along and raises a whole new set of questions!  (Here is Ted Gunderson's interview with Helena Stoeckley, who claims to have been the woman in the floppy hat.)

I look forward to Morris' verdict, and hope he offers one!  According to the Atlantic, the books (as the title implies) argues for MacDonald's innocence.  The Atlantic's review of the book is HERE.

Morris' book, A Wilderness Of Error, is at Amazon HERE.

Dead Zone Inspires Horror Bookstore

 With Borders announcing its closing, it seemed there was only dark horizons ahead for brick and mortar book stores.  However, Andrew Tanielian has a wonderful article about "Eerie Books & Collectables" -- a bookstore focused on selling horror.  Pretty cool?  You bet!  The store opened in 2008 and is home to all things horror.  Of course, wimps are welcome, and believe it or not, you're kids are welcome! 
Owner Randy Ray says that he has had people all the way from Oklahoma travel to visit the Wylie, Texas store.

Ray's love for horror was inspired by Stephen King.  The article quotes Ray:

“I went to a flea market when I was 15 years old and bought a copy of the Dead Zone by Stephen King. At the time I was really interested in science fiction and fantasy. I didn’t have any interest in Stephen King or horror. The cover looked cool and it was 75 cents. And the Dead Zone turned out to be one of the best novels I ever read and I loved it and that got me interested in Stephen King which in turn got me interested in horror."

Like Stephen King, Ray was an English teacher for a short time.  But he didn't like it, and has found that owning a bookstore allows him to make a bigger contribution to literacy.


Here are a few cool things about the bookstore:

• A Stephen King book club that meets on the last Thursday of each month.  Ray explains, "we’re reading the Stephen King books in chronological order. So, we’re starting with Carrie and working our way up."
• A general horror book club meets on the first Thursday of each month.
• Around 6,000 books.
• a wide range of children’s books.  Yep, you read that right.  Watcha wanna bet they have a copy of Goosebumps, eh.

Check it out:
Eerie Books & Collectables
205 North Ballard Avenue
Wylie, TX
(972) 442-9393
http://www.eeriebooks.com/

Andrew Tanielian's full article is here:
http://www.nbcdfw.com/the-scene/shopping/Spooky-Book-Store-Home-to-Horror-125572213.html

Walken's best-reviewed flicks

San Francisco Chronicle has a neat article they did in collaboration with Rotten Tomatoes. "Christopher Walken's best-reviewed movies" ranks Walken's movies by their critical response.
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Walkin was awesome in the Dead Zone! In fact, I'm surprised Dead Zone didn't come in higher on the list. Ranking at 89%, the Chronicle The Dead Zone calls the 1983 movie "arguably the best Stephen King adaptation."
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/25/MVO01IHB5M.DTL

Presidents Day: King's Fictional President Tops List

Frank E. Lee at X102.3 has compiled a list of 5 Fictional Presidents. Number one on his listw as President Stillson from the Dead Zone, played by Martin Sheen.
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Lee writes: "One of our future leaders who, (spoiler alert!) never makes it past the primaries in this film adaptation of the Stephen King novel. We do get a glimpse of what his administration would have accomplished."
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I also liked his inclusion of Tom Beck from Deep Impact (Morgan Freeman). I watched that movie the other night, and still like it a lot. Freeman's portrayal of the president was awesome!
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Of course, it makes me wonder about a few ommissions in Lee's post. What about...
Harrison Ford, Air Force 1. So the plot is pretty hokey, but it's a lot of fun to see Mr. President take terrorist on in hand to hand combat.
Michael Douglas, American President. This movie gave a really good "inside the white house" feeling. It let the viewer in on the every day inner workings of the executive branch. The love story is pretty lame -- but the surroundings feel real.
Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy novels. I stopped reading Tom Clancy when he began spending a hundred pages to tell me how to build a necular bomb. George Lucas once said it gets annoying when a story teller wants to explain how everything works. Clancy sank into that pit, I think. However. . . Jack Ryan has always been a really cool character.
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http://wxrt.radio.com/2011/02/21/famous-fictional-presidents/#ixzz1Efzxp8l3

S.K. Presents The Seventies

Generally speaking, I hate the seventies. I'm a product of the seventies, so I like that part. I just can't stand most of it.

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Here's a list of terrible things from the 70's:

1. Politics: Nixon, Ford, Carter. Need I say more?

2. Colors. Brown and Yellow with nasty splashes of orange. Avocado green furniture and harvest gold appliances. (Just watch a lost episode of All In The Family.)

3. Movies. All of them. Except Star Wars and Carrie, okay?

4. Clothes. Polyester in particular, and bell bottoms. Butterfly collars. Oh, how about polyester leisure suits. My grandpa gave me one of those (in the 90's!) which I proudly disposed of. Ties were pretty bad, too. They looked like long ugly bibs.

5. Mobile homes. With license plates on the backs.

6. Shag carpet.

7. Sedans. I owned a 1979 Chrysler LeBaron. It was not a friendly car. And all of those things were boats! El Camino's were pretty nasty, too. Was it a car, or a truck?

8. Afros. I don't miss them, do you?

9. Disco.

10. Long side burns.

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There, aren't you glad to have that list? But I began to think about how Stephen King had given us the 70's. It wasn't that bad! In fact, if you had to offer something int he 70's, horror was definitely the way to go!

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In 1974 King gave us Carrie. It was not only a great first book, but a wonderful offering for the seventies. A girl with a wacko mom is harassed to the point of madness. Carrie's mama is afraid of the changing times. In fact, as the sexual revolution bloomed all around, Carrie's mama saw sex as sin (even in marriage). Of course, Carrie's mother is not the villain in the novel. She's part of what makes Carrie messed up, but Carrie's peers are the villains. Just a quick note on Carrie at this point; I'm not sure that girls gym classes still have open showers -- But I'm not doing an investigation!

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What about Salem's Lot? It was King's idea to bring vampires into the modern world; well, the modern world of 1975. Though maybe not immediately apparent to the reader, Salem's Lot has some political commentary. King told The Fright Report" (Oui Magazine, January 1980), " "I wrote 'Salem's Lot during the period when the Ervin committee was sitting. That was also the period when we first learned of the Ellsberg break-in, the White House tapes, the connection between Gordon Liddy and the CIA, the news of enemies' lists, and other fearful intelligence. During the spring, summer and fall of 1973, it seemed that the Federal Government had been involved in so much subterfuge and so many covert operations that, like the bodies of the faceless wetbacks that Juan Corona was convicted of slaughtering in California, the horror would never end ... Every novel is to some extent an indavertant psychological portrait of the novelist, and I think that the unspeakable obscenity in 'Salem's Lot has to do with my own disillusionment and consequent fear for the future. In a way, it is more closely related to Invasion of the Body Snatchers than it is to Dracula. The fear behind 'Salem's Lot seems to be that the Government has invaded everybody." (quoted from wikipedia)

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The Shining is a mix of horror and the psychological inner-workings of the family unit. But think about this, while many of us were watching Sesame Street and Mr. Rodgers, King was showing us what the family was really like. King's often gritty view of jack's unpinning gives us a view of what was really happening, but no one was talking about!

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The work that would crown King was his 1978 offering of The Stand. Reread the early chapters of The Stand and notice how much social commentary is there. The original is definitely dated! I like it that King writes about the time he's in. He gives us literary time capsules.

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In 1979 King gave us The Dead Zone. This is a great novel for the 70's, since it gives us a truly evil politician who must be done away with. There can be little doubt that Nixon's crimes were on Kings mind as he penned the novel. As much as Under The Dome was a commentary on the political situation America found herself in (from King's point of view) in the Bush/Chaney administration, The Dead Zone was commentary on the political situation. Under The Dome is about a group of people who are manipulated. The Dead Zone shows us one wildly crazy politician out of control. King's versions of Nixon verses Bush.

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Also in 1979, King gave us The Long Walk. This is once again mirrors the social/political mood of the country as it shows a dark future. Both this and Running man make me think of George Orwell's 1984. (Written -not published- in 1948. . . get it?)

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King acts as mirror to the times. For the 70's, it was a very dark mirror. He's said before that he enjoyed taking society apart in The Stand. And the America of the 1970's really did need Stephen King's knife taken to it.

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By the way, when you read the original version of The Stand, notice how hollow it feels. It has that same empty feeling that the 70's had. I know, King had to chop it up, and I'm sure that added to the strange feeling.

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What kind of a picture of the 1970's did King give us?

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He showed us politicians out of control. Gary Hoppenstan writes in The Gothic World Of Stephen King, "the fiction of Stephen King has special relevance to his readers by reflecting the emptiness of post-water gate 70's --"

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More than just the politician starting to lose it, King dared to rip society itself apart in The Stand. Can you read between the lines here? "Something is really wrong with our world! It would be okay if all fell apart. Then we could confront the evil in a more direct manner."

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The real horror that King digs up is the individual. Depressed, often drunk, pressured by conformist -- the characters in King novels are perfect pictures of the people we found in the 1970's. He gives us ordinary guys pushed to the edge, about to lose it. (Road work) In this sense King acts as a prophet. More than one Bachman book explores this theme. Isn't' that the theme of: Carrie, Rage and The Shining?

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We can say that King's view of society during the 70's was bleak. He pulled consistently fro the underdog, though in many cases it didn't come out all that good for them in the end. Danny Torrance made it out of the 70's alive, but he had to step over the bodies of Carrie White and Johnny Smith.

The Stephen King Collection

One of my favorite purchaces this summer was the Stpehen King Collection. It is a set of four DVD's. For the price, this a great set. Two of the films are collectors editions, meaning that they have special stuff on the DVD.
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Favorite Movie in the set: Pet Sematary. This ia great movie! Fantastically dark --it is an unapologitica horror film. Don't you hate to watch a horror film that feels like it really needs to be a morality tale, or give us something good. This is just a straight forward dark story.
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The DVD includes a commentary by Mary Lambert, who would later direct Pet Sematary 2. Her commetnary is interesting and she remains enthusiastic about the project.
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Also included are: "tephen King Territory" , "The Characters" and "Filming the Horror." These three are realy just one documentary, behind the scenes stuff, that have been broken up for easier access. (Or to make it look like there's ore special features)
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Actually, I bought the entire set for this one movie. (It cost the same on Amazon at the time).
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The Dead Zone is also a collectors edition. Special features include: Memories from the Dead Zone, The Look of the Dead Zone, Visions and HOrror from the Dead Zone, the Politics o the Dead Zone and the theatrical trailer.
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Graveyard Shift is the clunker in the set. A real dud in my opinion. This movie, unlike the short story in Night Shift, is not at all scary. It does not have intereting characters. Come on, another story about a drifter -- one more David Banner. Most of all, the movie isn't intersting. Honestly, rats getting bigger and bigger fails to be interesting because size isn't what makes a rat scary. I know, the same idea was present in the original story, but it was scarier on paper. A thousand rats are scary -- one big rat, not so much.
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Silver Bullet surprised me. I liked this movie a lot! It's not scary, but who can expect the adaptation of a calander to be scary? But it is good story telling. The chracters are interesting and I was surprised by how good the special effects were. At times the movie is touching, if not a little bit sappy.