(Bob Clark, USA, 1974, 88 minutes)
Oh I flew through the sky
My convictions could not lie
For my country I would die
And I will see it soon
--New Order, "Love Vigilantes" (1985)
Hold tight
We're in for nasty weather
--Talking Heads, "Burning Down the House" (1983)
Deathdream was Bob Clark's second horror film and third film altogether.
His first, She-Man: A Story of Fixation, a 1966 micro-budget social problem picture about a trans woman attempting to live an authentic life, often gets left out of his filmography, because he found it embarrassing–it's currently available to stream on Mubi–and doesn't fit neatly into his career, even as that nearly 40-year career was characterized by some pretty big swings.
The now-offensively titled film–though sympathetic in execution–did nothing for his career, but Clark was undeterred. On the strength of his filmography up to 1983's A Christmas Story, after which things got dicey as he succumbed to Hollywooditis, he proved himself a born director.
On the basis of his filmography, Clark lived a rich life, and left one hell of a legacy behind. He had a bigger budget, $250,000, for Deathdream than he did for 1972's Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, $50,000, but it was still low enough that he relied on location shooting rather than sets (though based in Fort Lauderdale, he filmed in the more picture-perfect town of Brooksville). Nonetheless, there were key differences between the two, though I'll start with the title and the plot.
On screen, the film is titled Dead of Night, and throughout his 2004 commentary track on the 2024 Blue Underground Blu-ray, Clark refers to it by that title. It's an apt one, but a 1945 British horror anthology had already claimed it, so the distributor changed it for marketing purposes.
At various points, Deathdream was also known as Death Walk and Andy Comes Home. That sort of thing plagued many of the 1970s horror films I've covered of late, like 1973's Messiah of Evil and Hollywood 90028.
The film begins in earnest with an unseen soldier hitching a ride with a trucker, followed by an Army officer informing the Brooks family that their son and brother, Andy (the remarkable Richard Backus), was killed in action. In the prologue, Andy died–or appeared to die–so it's a mystery as to how he got to Florida so quickly, and why the Army reported him dead, though it's possible they misidentified the corpse. Stranger things have been known to happen, and that ambiguity will fuel the rest of the film.
For much of the score, Zittrer uses staccato bursts of violin that sound more like spiders skittering up a wall than the sustained, high-pitched sawing of Bernard Herrmann's Psycho score. Zittrer uses these bursts of violin to amp things up, just as he uses violin to express sadness and nostalgia for a different Andy, before the war, when everything was as it should be. As the film heats up, Zittrer segues from violins to what sounds like the thicker, metallic strings of a piano. It's even more unsettling.
A few hours later, they hear a noise, and head to the front door. The family dog Butch, too small to serve as a proper guard dog, is agitated. Dogs know. Either someone tried to break into their house–or they succeeded. It's too dark to see, and at first the family members can't hear a thing.
It's the first sign that the family doesn't see what they don't want to see. Something is wrong with Andy, and these people aren't stupid, but they're too grateful to accept the truth. God has answered their prayers.
Intentionally or otherwise, Deathdream isn't just an antiwar film, but a film that views Christianity with a critical eye. It isn't the same thing as taking an anti-Christian stance, but praying for someone to return after a reliable authority has informed you that they died is a pretty weird--downright delusional--thing to do. (I have no issue with prayer per se, but there's a difference between praying for something that could happen in the real world and praying for something that could only happen in a dream.)
Granted, the Army could have made a mistake, but in the grand scheme of things, that kind of thing didn't happen often, and mother and daughter never suggest misidentification as a possibility; they just start praying.
Andy's return confirms their faith, though Charles (John Marley, Oscar nominee for Love Story) is more skeptical. Even if you haven't watched the film yet, you can guess where all of this is going, and it's to Clark's credit that this 51-year-old film kept me riveted, because nothing plays out exactly as I would have predicted. Plus, I hadn't heard much about it beforehand.
If you've read this far, and you haven't seen Deathdream yet, you should probably stop reading, secure a copy, and come back afterward, though I don't intend to reveal all of its secrets.
If Andy was simply shell-shocked–not that post-traumatic stress disorder is a simple thing–or zonked out on opioids, which wasn't unusual among enlisted men during the Vietnam War, Deathdream might have been another social problem picture rather than a horror film. Instead, Ormsby's screenplay, written in a mere two weeks, suggests all of these things as possibilities with a refreshingly minor amount of exposition.
It's no surprise to find that Ormsby looked to W.W. Jacobs' 1902 short story "The Monkey's Paw" for inspiration. According to the fakir in the story-within-a-story, the lesson for those who use the shriveled talisman to make a wish is that "fate rules people's lives and those who try to change it will be sorry." Like Christine, the mother in "The Monkey's Paw" is just as addled by grief when she wishes for the son who died in an industrial accident 10 days ago to return to life, though there's no prayer involved.
So God answered this family's prayers, but why would the Supreme Being choose the Brooks when thousands of other families had to suffer? No one questions it; they just do what they can to make Andy feel welcome.
Ormsby's screenplay, which is as minimalist as Zittrers's score, reveals almost nothing about the pre-war soldier, and nor should it, other than to suggest that Andy was a pleasant young man who liked to go to the drive-in on double dates with his girlfriend, Joanne (Jane Daly), and his sister and her boyfriend, Bob (Michael Mazes). A clean-cut, all-American kid.
Though Clark was working with renowned actors for the first time, most everyone else had worked on his previous effort, including Alan Ormsby, who wrote the Children screenplay, played the lead, and provided the makeup effects; Anya Ormsby, Jane Daly, and Jeff Gillen, who played members of the doomed theatrical troupe; and Jeff Zittrer, who would continue to collaborate with Clark after his move to Hollywood.
Two years later, Gillen would co-direct the Ed Gein-inspired Deranged with Ormsby, but remains best known for his turn as the surly department store Santa in A Christmas Story. (Though Clark co-produced Deranged, he refused an on-screen credit as he felt the film was too violent.)
Children wears its low budget as a badge of honor, though Clark didn't see it that way. It's equally efficient at 87 minutes (to Deathdream's 88), funnier, and once the zombies emerge, truly terrifying, though the film wouldn't exist without George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead, which Ormsby freely admits. The acting is decidedly not great, and Ormsby, who avoided leading roles in the aftermath, now finds his performance mortifying. (The first time I watched it, his fancy-pants "Alan" irritated the hell out of me; the second time, I found him amusing.)
I reviewed VCI's 50th anniversary edition in 2023, and listened to hours of Ormsby's thoughts about the film and his work in general. He was also involved with Deathdream's special features, and his clear-headed recollections are a joy, not least since he was integral to both films.
In Clark's Deathdream commentary, he laments the corners he had to cut while making his Florida films. Ormsby has complaints, too, but Clark was clearly more pained, though I suspect it made him a better director, because low budgets necessitate creative problem-solving, but if Clark took to Tinseltown like a duck to water, Ormsby did not, stating in his commentary, also from 2004, "I had more fun on all these movies, much more than anything I ever made in Hollywood." He and Clark would reunite for Porky's II: The Next Day in 1983. (On both tracks, they're accompanied by Dave Gregory of Blue Underground and Severin Films.)
Clark was particularly perturbed by Jack McGowan's cinematography for Children and Deathdream, and as soon as he was able to hire someone more experienced, like British-Canadian DP Reginald H. Morris, he leapt at the chance, and his next two films look fantastic--they would work together for the next 16 years--but if McGowan, who passed away in 1977, failed to live up to his expectations, his work serves the material just fine.
McGowan might not have been the right guy for Clark's subsequent films, but he's up to the task here, even as the director was hoping for fewer shadows on the walls, though even Clark admits that the spider web-like, banister-cast shadows in the Brooks' stairway look pretty cool.
Deathdream was filmed in central Florida, after all, where it can get more than a little hot and humid, and I like that the actors and their environs never look too buffed, polished, and brightly-lit. When the sun shines, the characters sweat; not a lot, but just enough.
As for Andy’s return, it precedes news about a brutally-slain trucker. The police have no rhyme, no reason–and no leads. The trucker was well liked, particularly by his friends at the diner where he stopped to pick up two coffees-to-go for him and his unseen soldier passenger. It's no spoiler to say that it was probably Andy, and when Charles hears the news, an expression plays across his face that's as plain as day: he's pretty sure his son did it, doesn't want to believe it, and tries to push the thought aside.
Knowing that John Marley and Lynn Carlin had played a married couple in Faces, Cassavetes' fourth feature, I decided to catch up with it, assuming that the film had served as a dress rehearsal for their matrimonial dynamic here. Not hardly. In fact, I'm rather amazed that Clark hired the two of them, not because they aren't good--they're great--but because the roles are so different. They spend most of Cassavetes' tense drama apart, so it's mostly Marley acting opposite a glamorous Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes' partner in life and work, who plays his call girl mistress, and Carlin acting opposite a jumped-up Seymour Cassel, who plays a playboy she and her sex-starved, middle-aged lady friends meet at a nightclub.
He had envisioned a high school football coach-type. Someone younger, bigger, and stronger, but Clark's risk pays off, because the 65-year-old Marley--who had already survived The Godfather's ghastly horse-head ordeal--does a lot of acting with his expressive face, just as he did in the Cassavetes' film, moving masterfully from suspicion to fear to heartbreak.
Backus, an Emmy-winning actor and writer, gets as much use out of his face, and he gives one of the best movie-monster performances I've ever seen. Critically, he never overplays his hand, and it's consistently unnerving. As in Black Christmas, Clark gets maximum mileage out of an old fashioned rocking chair, of all things, and there are few sights more chilling than Andy rocking in a dark room with the hint of a smile on his face. It's hard to blame Charles when he recoils from the spectacle.
Though I can't imagine anyone more perfect in the role, Clark originally cast the lesser known Greg Swanson. When he realized Swanson wasn't working, he switched him with Backus, but retained the prologue. It was a kindness to keep him in the film–and a money-saving measure, as well–but it confused me the first time I watched it, because I noticed that postwar Andy looked like a completely different person. The Blue Underground release features an interview with Swanson, in addition to a screen test, and he's not bad, but Clark definitely made the right choice.
At other times, he disappears for nocturnal misadventures, one particularly nerve-jangling episode involving As the World Turns mainstay Henderson Forsythe as the family doctor.
When Andy smiles, it's either an enigmatic expression that could mean something–or nothing–or a mirthless embodiment of malevolence. Much like Willard Huyk and Gloria Katz's screenplay for Messiah of Evil with its red-eyed, white-faced townsfolk, Ormsby never explains what's going on, and it's for the best. This freed him and Clark from adhering to the rigid vampire rules established by Bram Stoker in his definitive 1897 text.
Unlike Dracula, Andy doesn't find sunlight disempowering (though he prefers the dark), he doesn't have canine incisors, and he doesn't munch on necks--like Romero's Martin, he prefers knives and needles--but he requires a certain substance to keep going, and you can probably guess exactly what it is. When deprived, he starts to desiccate, slowly at first before picking up speed as he becomes increasingly dehydrated.
Though Ormsby never indicates what might be going through Andy's head, he appears to be focused on survival above all else. He's a shark; always looking forward, never back. If his immediate family isn't in imminent danger, everyone else–including Charles's beloved Butch–is fair game.
The 26-year-old Savini was, according to Ormsby, a nerdy guy who would completely transform his appearance in the years to come by working out, growing that famed goatee, and, supposedly, going under the knife.
Like the screenwriter, who experimented with horror-movie makeup in his youth, Savini was obsessed from an early age, and he had arranged to work on Night of the Living Dead before getting drafted, so Deathdream marked the start of his career, and it led to everything that came next, since he would go on to work with Ormsby on Deranged before reuniting with Romero in 1978 for Martin--which has a lot in common with Deathdream--and Dawn of the Dead. The rest is history, but I wouldn't have predicted that an assistant would go on to become the most famous person involved with the film, though Ormsby remembers soap star Forsythe as the participant who had the town of Brooksville most excited.
Later, Andy's eyes change from hazel to blueish-white–the result of painful scleral contact lenses that could only be worn for brief periods of time–and the entire outer layer of his body begins to deteriorate and, um, ooze, so Andy starts to wear a zip-up turtleneck, dark glasses, and giallo-esque black leather gloves, which adds unintentional humor to the scenario, because he now looks like a member of the Velvet Underground.
If Deathdream, for me, comes down to the relationship between father and son, because Backus and Marley give the most searing performances, Clark reserves the climactic sequence for mother and son.
Even by the end, though, Andy still has a trace of humanity left. He knows what he needs to do, and as much as his mother doesn't want to let him go, she's there for him as he makes his second exit, and her final words, and the way Carlin delivers them, say as much about her family as they do about the thousands of other families during the Vietnam War who were also mourning their sons. It's the one time she admits that the Brooks were blessed–chosen, as it were–to get exactly what they asked for.
Alan Ormsby's moving finale, as beautifully directed by Bob Clark, echoes what Bertolt Brecht wrote about that reanimated soldier so very long ago.
But the moon won't stay there the whole day through
For the sun won't pause for breath
The solder did what he'd been taught to do:
He died a hero's death.
Deathdream is out now on a 4K UHD + Blu-ray via Blue Underground.
Images from the IMDb (Richard Backus and Greg Swanson), Rotten Tomatoes (Bob Clark), Cool Ass Cinema (title card and Backus with John Marley and Lynn Carlin), Amazon ("Monkey's Paw" cover), Abe Books (Bury the Dead cover), Dangerous Minds (Olivia Hussey in Black Christmas), The Criterion Collection (Carlin and Marley in Faces), Tubi (Marley), Boston Hassle (Backus), and Red Bubble (Deathdream poster).
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