Deathdream

by Bilge Ebiri

Bilge Ebiri is a filmmaker and writer living in New York. His reviews and features appear regularly in New York magazine, Time Out New York, and Minneapolis City Pages.

For a while, it looked as if Bob Clark's 1974 horror film Deathdream (aka Dead of Night) might have been lost to the ages, rarely mentioned or screened in horror retrospectives -- a victim perhaps of the fact that it never spawned any sequels or featured enough gruesome gore or scintillating skin. (That the director went on to blemish his career with tripe like Porky's or Baby Geniuses 2 probably didn't help, either.) With Blue Underground's DVD release, however, a new generation has a chance to see this unique, moody chiller. And they might be surprised to find that it's quite different from the slasher movie its florid cover art promises.

Somewhat strikingly for a film made in the early 1970s, the story begins during the Vietnam War. (It wasn't until later in the decade that American cinema began tackling the war.) Even more strikingly, it begins with the death of the protagonist: Young soldier Andy Brooks (Richard Backus) is shot dead during a jungle firefight. As he expires, the credits roll, and we hear his mother Christine (Lynn Carlin) praying for his life back home. After an initial report of his death, Andy surprises his family by showing up at home in the middle of the night. The family, needless to say, is elated, even though Andy seems a little…off.

Actually, he seems more than a little off. Andy seems downright psychotic, albeit in an eerily catatonic kind of way, spending most of his time sitting in a rocking chair, staring off into space. More alarmingly, his return home is accompanied by the mysterious, gruesome death of the truck driver who gave him a lift, and other bodies follow. Although his mom and his sister dutifully stick with him, it quickly becomes obvious that this Andy is a far cry from the bright-faced young man -- glimpsed in a couple of photographs -- who went off to war. Andy's transformation is never explained, however; the film is a very loose adaptation of W.W. Jacobs's classic 1902 short story "The Monkey's Paw," but the titular mystical talisman of that tale is absent here. In fact, there is little logic - even of the implausible, horror movie kind - in most of Deathdream. There is also precious little narrative tension. Not much suspense is to be had from wondering what Andy's going to do - he goes off the rails pretty swiftly. Indeed, a script doctor would probably have a field day rewriting half of this film, and maybe that's why its reputation has been relatively non-existent until now.

So, why does Deathdream work so well? Clark's film forsakes unpredictability and tension, instead opting for a subdued melancholy. Our horror at the supernatural is replaced by our horror at the sight of someone tormenting and threatening his loved ones, even as they remain faithful to him. In that sense, Deathdream plays out like the final act of a sad, and very American, tragedy: Hometown boy leaves small town; comes back from the dangerous, bloody world outside a changed man; and wreaks havoc on his unassuming, good-willed family and neighbors.

In fact, even though only the brief opening minutes take place in Vietnam, the war hangs like a mist over the whole film.

Somewhere between a zombie and a vampire, Andy has to inject his victims' blood in order to keep himself from shriveling up and wasting away. When he kills one of his victims, he indicates that this death is owed him. The implication is not only that Andy needs this blood, but that, after fighting and dying in a foreign land, he somehow deserves it. It's a chilling calculus: Rarely do we see a horror movie where the monster has an actual sense of entitlement. And almost never does that entitlement come from a soldier; this is a stunning narrative gambit to make in an American film made in the middle of a war.

In the end, despite these allegorical elements, Deathdream is still a horror movie. But it belongs more to that class of surreal, high-minded mood pieces such as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining or Roman Polanski's The Tenant than it does to slasher pics like Halloween or Friday the 13th. It might not bring in the teenagers, but long after the Freddy Kruegers of the world have departed, there is a good chance that Andy Brooks and Deathdream will still be there -- a stark, unsettling reminder of the darkness within the American soul.