10 Stephen King Fan Theories That Make Appalling Sense
4. The Dead Zone Predicted Donald Trump’s Political Rise
Since Donald Trump’s announcement of
his intention to run for president through to his meteoric rise in popularity
to his eventual election as POTUS, many an article has pondered the various
movies that supposedly predicted America’s current fate – Citizen Kane, Bob
Roberts and Idiocracy included.
But none were quite so prescient as Stephen King’s 1979 novel The Dead Zone and David Cronenberg’s 1983 adaptation of it. At the heart of the book and film is Johnny Smith, a man who awakens from a five-year long coma to find he’s acquired psychic abilities that are triggered when he makes physical contact with someone.
He’s plagued with many horrifying visions thanks to his new condition, but the most horrifying occurs when he touches the hand of salesman turned politician Gregg Stillson at a political rally and has a vision of him becoming president and instigating a global nuclear war.
Stillson’s quite a familiar character to anyone up to speed with American politics. He has an overinflated sense of his own greatness and is vociferously anti-establishment, he’s ridiculed by both politicians and the media during his campaigns and appeals to an everyman populace tired of the status quo.
Sound like anyone in particular? A certain orange-faced president currently engaged in a nuclear standoff with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, perhaps?
King’s Dead Zone has a sort of happy ending at least. After his vision, Johnny vows to assassinate Stillson and upon misfiring his first shot, the public witnesses Stillson grab a nearby child to use as a human bullet shield thus destroying any future political career he might have had and the subsequent nuclear war he would incite. Johnny gets fatally injured, but at least the world doesn’t get vaporised into oblivion.
Us, however? We’ll have to wait and see.