7 Movies Like The Dead Zone (1983)

Staff & contributors

Chasing the feel of watching The Dead Zone ? Here are the movies we recommend you watch right after.

The shiver-inducing talents of Stephen King, David Cronenberg, and Christopher Walken meld to produce this supremely chilly supernatural thriller adaptation. Schoolteacher Johnny’s (Walken) perfect life is overturned when a horrific car accident puts him in a coma that robs him of five years of his life — and with them, his job and girlfriend Sarah (Brooke Adams), who moves on with someone else.For anyone familiar with Cronenberg’s films, the director’s involvement might lead you to expect results from this premise as idiosyncratic as Crash or Videodrome’s, but The Dead Zone takes a decidedly more mainstream path than those works. In the place of graphic body horror is more palatable — but no less affecting — emotional bleakness, as Johnny contends with losing Sarah and a reality-warping new ability: he now has the power to see into the future of anyone he touches. While being forewarned about house fires and nuclear war might be a blessing for those whose lives he saves, Johnny struggles with the emotional burden of being responsible for preventing these future tragedies. More than any of the chilling setpieces — a frantic hunt for a serial killer, the attempted assassination of a demagogue — it’s Johnny’s grappling with this gift-slash-curse that gives The Dead Zone its fierce intensity.

Directed by David Cronenberg, Eastern Promises is at times brutal—such is the famous Canadian director's trademark—and operates at a fever pitch of grim violence and revenge. Starring a tattooed, ruthless, and terrifying Viggo Mortensen as a very convincing Russian strong-arm gangster as well as Naomi Watts and Vincent Cassel, it features intense psychological drama and a gritty crime story. Midwife Anna (Watts) delivers the baby of a 14-year-old Russian prostitute, who dies while giving birth, and later learns that she was forced into prostitution by the Mafia. To keep this knowledge from seeping out, she gets entangled deeper into London's criminal underbelly, whose various factions and languages are aptly showcased by Cronenberg. Add to all this a smart script and Mortensen's daring performance and you have yourself an intense auteur thriller in signature Cronenberg style.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Aleksandar Mikic, Aleksander Mikic, Alice Henley, Armin Mueller-Stahl, David Papava, Donald Sumpter, Elisa Lasowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Josef Altin, Mina E. Mina, Naomi Watts, Raza Jaffrey, Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse, Sinead Cusack, Tamer Hassan, Tatiana Maslany, Tereza Srbová, Tony Cook, Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel

Director: David Cronenberg

Rating: R

Elisabeth Moss is in it. Calling The One I Love a romantic-comedy, looking it up, or trusting anyone else about it -- especially my review, will ruin this film for you. Just watch it. If one's penchant is typically opposed to titles with 'love' in them, then it's for you. Just hit 'play', or 'start', or whatever. The initial wtf-ness that attracted me to it is compelled further by excellent acting. And Elisabeth Moss is in it.

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Actor: Charlie McDowell, Elisabeth Moss, Jennifer Spriggs, Kiana Cason, Mark Duplass, Marlee Matlin, Mary Steenburgen, Mel Eslyn, Sean O'Malley, Ted Danson

Director: Charlie McDowell

Rating: R

Polytechnique directed by Denis Villeneuve, is a dramatization of the 1989 Montreal massacre of multiple female engineering students. This film focuses on a male student navigating the massacre for the majority of the film’s run time. The performances and minimal dialogue in this film certainly make this an unnerving film to watch. Littered with the screams of the actors portraying the engineering students, this could be mistaken as a gaudy horror film. However, this is far from a fictionalized horror.

This Villeneuve classic is undoubtedly one of the most emotionally brutal films of the 2000s, yet I appreciate the honesty of the storytelling. Polytechnique encourages its audience to ask itself if it truly understands the truth of misogyny. 

Genre: Crime, Drama, History, Thriller

Actor: Adam Kosh, Alexandre St-Martin, Alexis Lefebvre, Cynthia Wu-Maheux, Dawn Ford, Emmanuelle Girard, Eugénie Beaudry, Ève Duranceau, Eve Gadouas, Evelyne Brochu, Francesca Barcenas, François-Xavier Dufour, Johanne-Marie Tremblay, Jonathan Dubsky, Josée Lacombe, Julien Maranda, Karine Vanasse, Larissa Corriveau, Lily Thibeault, Louise Proulx, Manon Lapointe, Marc Gourdeau, Marc-André Brisebois, Marie-Évelyne Baribeau, Martin Watier, Mathieu Ledoux, Maxim Gaudette, Mireille Brullemans, Natalie Hamel-Roy, Nathalie Girard, Pierre Leblanc, Pierre-Yves Cardinal, Robert Reynaert, Sébastien Huberdeau, Sophie Desmarais, Stéphane Julien, Valerie Cadieux

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Rating: Not Rated

Incorporating traditional animation, Surrealist art style, and scenes from Luis Buñuel’s own films, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles is a portrait of a brilliant yet eccentric artist who is stubborn in his ideals. The film is a series of dreams—visions from a life often disrupted by war and ideology—but is more structured and coherent than its inspirations, and striking in the commentary it makes on art. Within the film's story, Buñuel's character initially takes on a documentary project through a more dramatic and staged approach that separates him from his crew and his producer Acín. However, his nightmares stemming from childhood trauma eventually lead him to focus on the people he’s filming and advocating for. Historical yet surreal, highly political yet personal, this film is an apt celebration of a divisive artist.

Genre: Animation, Drama, History

Actor: Fermín Núñez, Fernando Ramos, Gabriel Latorre, Javier Balas, Jorge Usón, Pepa Gracia, Rachel Lascar, Salvador Simó

Director: Salvador Simó

Rating: PG-13

At times of great societal turmoil, sometimes stars are born, not just to entertain the masses but to challenge the way things are done. Amar Singh Chamkila is one such star, and his music captivated all of Punjab in part due to his brash lyrics. His assassination remains unsolved, but director and co-writer Imtiaz Ali takes the event, and uses it to frame his life– the ways Punjab remembered him after death, the ways Chamkila showed his light as well as the ways he was limited by studio oversight and state censorship. The film isn’t a perfect contemplation of artistic freedom, nor is it the most comprehensive take on the singer’s life, but Ali’s direction challenges the way we view the artist and acutely recognizes the way stardom reveals the society's conflicting desires.

Genre: Drama, Music

Actor: Anjum Batra, Anuraag Arora, Apindereep Singh, Diljit Dosanjh, Jasmeet Singh Bhatia, Kul Sidhu, Kumud Mishra, Mohit Chauhan, Nisha Bano, Parineeti Chopra, Sahiba Bali, Vipin Katyal

Director: Imtiaz Ali

Pan’s Labyrinth is often considered director Guillermo Del Toro’s best film, and rightfully so. But if you’re looking for a straight-up ghost story, this is the film that gets the job done. Everything about this film is sad and beautiful and unnerving, from the setting (an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War) to the atmospheric visuals.

Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Thriller

Actor: Adrian Lamana, Berta Ojea, Daniel Esparza, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi, Fernando Tielve, Francisco Maestre, Inigo Garces, Irene Visedo, Javier Bódalo, Jose Manuel Lorenzo, Juan Carlos Vellido, Junio Valverde, Marisa Paredes, Miguel Ortiz, Víctor Elías

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Rating: R

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the mix of ideas and aesthetics that gave us Her has roots in Japan. Borrowing from the country’s poeticism, attention to detail and just appreciation for beauty; Tony Takitani is Her’s quiet and delicate elder brother-film, and one of the best this genre has to give. After spending a solitary childhood, a Japanese kid with the American name Tony grows up to be a successful technical illustrator. Without the time for the outside world or any luck with it, Tony indulges in his work and by extension his loneliness until he suddenly falls a distinctive young woman. Tony Takitani is a slow film, which quickly becomes a memorable experience due to its profound study of loneliness.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Issei Ogata, Issey Ogata, Miho Fujima, Rie Miyazawa, Shinohara Takahumi

Director: Jun Ichikawa

Rating: Unrated