Deathdream

Bob Clark – 1974 – Canada

Also marketed as Dead of Night and sometimes known by the title preferred by its makers, Night Walk, this is a very effective and thought-provoking low-budget film patterned on the oft-used premise of W.W. Jacobs’ short story The Monkey’s Paw.  It’s part of a loose trilogy of shockers by director Bob Clark, coming in between his Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1973) and Black Christmas (1974); all of which have earned respectable cult followings.  Mr. and Mrs. Brooks (John Marley and Lynn Carlin) are notified by the Army that their son Andy (Richard Backus) has been killed in Vietnam.  Soon thereafter, though, he returns home anyway, much to the confused relief of his family.  But he’s pallid and withdrawn, which everyone naturally attributes to post traumatic stress.  Time only makes him worse, and soon he is not only violent but actually starting to rot.  What makes Deathdream resonant is how it taps into the serious issues that were really going on at the time; especially the problem of young men returning home from the war and indeed seeming like different people, tormented, hollow, very much in a state resembling a living death.  Generational concerns are also a factor; the father is a WWII veteran and he and friends his age are reflexively repulsed by the boy’s apparent weakness and lack of manly resilience.  The make-up effects are by screenwriter Alan Ormsby and a young Tom Savini on his first film.