Defining Heroic Codes of Survival: the Dead Zone, the Shawshank Redemption, the Green Mile

Abstract

Most filmgoers tend to perceive The Dead Zone, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Green Mile as aberrations in the Hollywood film canon of work produced from Stephen King’s fiction. I am beyond being surprised whenever strangers, upon hearing me link these films with King’s name, comment in shocked disbelief, “Stephen King wrote those stories?” Such confusion is understandable, as David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone is more a tragic love story than it is a tale of terror, while Shawshank and The Green Mile, both directed by Frank Darabont, are essentially prison narratives. None of these films can be said to be typical of the horror genre, although all certainly contain sufficient elements of terror and graphic violence. And while The Dead Zone and The Green Mile rely heavily on supernatural occurrences, which are totally absent in Shawshank, their inclusion bear a greater affinity with religious, mystical, and folkloric phenomena than with the abject monsters of horror. All this notwithstanding, each of these films revolves around similar protagonists who occupy the respective centers of each narrative and serve to hold the