Martin Sheen in The Dead Zone

Before we assess the villain, let’s begin with the hero—and “hero” is the correct appellation for Johnny Smith, most especially because where he begins in this story is so touchingly ordinary. Johnny is a humble grade-school English teacher with a nerdy haircut living in the mythical town of Castle Rock, Maine. He recites Poe from memory and speaks to his class in peculiar cadences, with emphases and pauses that seem always to allude to some obscure joke. Which is to say, he speaks like Christopher Walken, who has a singular way of puncturing line readings with disarming earnestness, delivering phrasings that would sound like affectation from any other actor. Johnny is in love with Sarah, embodied by Brooke Adams with the perfect balance of sweetness and desire. One day, Johnny surprises Sarah with an afternoon visit to a county fair. It’s there that he suffers a mysterious cerebral episode on the roller coaster: an augur of things to come.

When later that same day Johnny drops Sarah at home, she invites him in to spend the night, but he gently declines. Johnny plans to marry Sarah. “Some things are worth waiting for,” he tells her. He doesn’t know he’s going to wait half a decade. Minutes after leaving Sarah’s house, Johnny gets into a terrible collision on a dark, foggy road: he’s so wholesome that his car smashes into a truck full of milk. The accident throws Johnny into a coma, and when he finally wakes from it five years later, Sarah has long since given up hope, married another man, and had a child. The Dead Zone is, in its creepiness, its sparingly deployed but visceral moments of violence, and its overwhelming air of entropy, very much a horror movie. In its infusion of psychic phenomena into an otherwise realist scenario, it’s something of a science-fiction movie. But at this tragic juncture, we understand that the film is, above all, a heartbreaking adult melodrama: had he not been so virtuous that night, the accident would not have transpired, Johnny and Sarah would still be together, and Johnny may have evaded the strange fate that awaits him post-coma.

While convalescing, Johnny touches a nurse’s hand and is assailed by a vision of her house on fire. The nurse rushes home, and her house is indeed aflame, her young daughter narrowly rescued. Later, Johnny will touch a journalist’s hand and instantly gain knowledge of that journalist’s terrible private grief. He’ll touch the hand of his doctor, a Holocaust survivor, and instantly correct a presumption the doctor has held for 40 years. Johnny becomes a local sensation, blessed with a gift he regards as a curse: besides losing the love of his life, he’s also saddled with a weakened body, which seems to grow weaker with each new telepathic episode. Johnny’s like the titular character in Jorge Luis Borges’s Funes the Memorious, who’s thrown from a horse and is thereafter paralyzed, but gains the gift/curse of perfect memory, able to recall every detail that has ever crossed his perception. Both men emerge from mischance with debilitated bodies and fantastically enhanced minds, astonishing others while draining their lives of quotidian pleasures.

The source material for The Dead Zone is not, of course, Borges: part of what makes this film so special is that it’s the wildly unlikely pairing of Stephen King, a writer who never met a thing that goes bump in the night he didn’t like, and David Cronenberg, a filmmaker drawn to science fiction but without the slightest interest in the supernatural. Yet King’s novel prompted Cronenberg to adopt his most tonally focused storytelling style and embrace bold romantic gestures, while Cronenberg’s intelligence, economy, and fascination with the body infused the material with a gravitas exceedingly rare in King adaptations. The year 1983 saw the release of both Cronenberg’s most personal and, seemingly, most impersonal films, but while Videodrome synthesizes so many of the auteur’s most enduring thematic preoccupations, The Dead Zone exudes a heaviness and sense of fate that, 40 years on, has proven to be very Cronenbergian. (It’s also worth noting that post-coma Johnny assumes the wind-shocked hairstyle that will later become Cronenberg’s sartorial trademark.) The Dead Zone is a serious, eerily beautiful, ultimately very sad movie: just listen to its haunting, dread-laden score—Michael Kamen’s best—or consider its heart-wrenching ending, in which our hero, emboldened by a certainty only he possesses, opts for self-sacrifice as a means of preventing a potentially apocalyptic catastrophe only he can foresee. Which brings us to our villain.