8 Awesome 80’s Thrillers That Still Hold Up Today

4. The Dead Zone (1983)

Dead Zone Christopher Walken Director: David Cronenberg Cast: Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Martin Sheen, Tom Skerritt The Dead Zone It is among the better screen adaptations of Stephen King€™s work. It deals with the paranormal, has a serial killer, and plenty of unsettling moments without delving into a spectacularly unbelievable climax, something King manages to do in his books on occasion. Director Cronenberg has always been attracted to material that€™s dark and a little offbeat (read: strange), but The Dead Zone is among his more tame and mainstream directorial efforts. He€™s got Walken in the lead role, so how could he go wrong? Movie characters with second sight are often heroes, solving crimes and shining a light into the murkiness of subconscious reality. But in The Dead Zone, the gift is a burden to Walken. He experiences visions when me makes physical contact with another person. He solves a murder case, but is put into a coma after a serious car accident. Time has passed. He has lost his life and his love. So he retreats into solitude, making ends meet my tutoring students. Martin Sheen plays a senator running for President. When Walken meets him and shakes his hand he receives a dark vision of this man, and does not want to get involved. In the end his character is faced with a moral dilemma often illustrated by the classic hypothetical question: knowing what you know, if you could go back in time to Austria in the 1930s, would you murder the art student named Adolf Hitler? Tightly written and directed, with a solid cast, The Dead Zone is one of those films that remains compelling even today.
Contributor
Contributor

Not to be confused with the captain of the Enterprise, James Kirk is a writer and film buff who lives in South Carolina.