Jeremy Herbert
For 1974 America, it’s no less than divine intervention – despite a letter confirming his death, young Andy Brooks has come back from Vietnam in one piece. There’s no time, now, to consider if that “mistake” means someone else’s boy lost enough flesh, blood, and brain to pass as their own to Mortuary Affairs. No, now is for making up lost time, for Rockwellian revenge. There’s nothing but cookouts, homemade lemonade, and dates at the drive-in now for good ol’ Andy Brooks.
Crowded around the dinner table, dad takes a break from micromanaging life back to the way it was to marvel, “They actually said that my son was dead.”
“I was,” says Andy, taking a small eternity to smile and let them in on his joke. Any faster and it’s a sinister wink directly at an audience that’s already seen the poster. As-is, it’s the uneasy armistice of a soul permanently dislodged from life as he knew it in ways he doesn’t yet understand. The rest of the scene is watched from another room, then finally from outside the house, through a window, where Andy loses his smile and nobody notices.
If you cut out the Tom Savini-assisted make-up from the third act, Bob Clark’s Deathdream works perfectly well as a sober drama about PTSD.
Which is likely why the distributors had such a hard time selling it. Screenwriter and make-up artist Alam Ormsby initially called it The Veteran. Intermediate titles ranged from the vague – The Night Walker – to the prophetic – The Night Andy Came Home – before settling on Dead of Night… for a while. The grindhouse-friendlier Deathdream maintains a comfortable lead on boutique Blu-rays and streaming services to this day.
But 50 years on, the film still wilts in the shadow of Clark’s four-month-younger horror masterpiece, Black Christmas, and it’s not hard to see why. In place of the latter’s cable-knit winter wonderland, Deathdream takes place in Anytown, USA, represented by a Brooksville, Florida, with all signs of tropical life uncannily pruned from frame. Forget glittering tinsel – even the cheeriest scenes in the Brooks house look like they were developed in egg wash. The POV shots are cruder, as if the camera is learning how to walk alongside its reanimated beholder. The characters are glorified types – mom, pop, the chatty mailman – none interesting enough on their own merits to earn tattoos or t-shirts.
In every way, Deathdream is simply more unpleasant than Black Christmas, and that’s down to the source material – W.W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” for the suburban set, seemingly whittled down to its final finger.
In one of the film’s most affecting frames, Christine Brooks rocks alone in the dark, praying to no God but her own maternal force of will and telling Andy he can’t be dead. Two glowing eyes shape out of the black, then cross-fade into headlights of the semi his zombie hitches into town. But as mom’s delusions deepen and pivot to protecting her killer kid, gruff patriarch Charlie angrily, then drunkenly reveals that he made the first wish a long time ago.
“Why is he so different? What did he do? Take a vow of celibacy or something?” It does not compute for the World War II veteran why his son is less like him than ever. “Well I went through it, too, but I didn’t come back like that.”
If his disappointment isn’t evidence enough, consider Christine’s rage: “I happen to love my son even if you don’t.”
The Andy that left was a gentle soul, the kind that younger neighbors lined up to demonstrate their karate moves for. The Andy that came back is a volatile, psychosexually frustrated addict literally carving his own headstone. When the family pooch growls at him a little too loudly, he chokes it to death with one hand. The first time he’s alone with his old sweetheart, he springs a sudden leak of pus and kills her in humiliation. And though his vice is blood, there’s no mistaking the way he shoots up and nods out just for a few more hours of passable human resemblance.
Although young New York stage actor Richard Backus landed the role of Andy because Bob Clark felt he “looked scary even when I was doing nothing,” beneath the psychopathic chill and mummified complexion, it’s always apparent nobody’s more afraid of Andy than Andy himself.
Just as often as terror (if not even more so), Clark shoots for tragedy. Forcibly observing Charlie and Christine, played by John Marley and Lynn Carlin in an overqualified reunion from John Cassavetes’s Faces, blame and scream and despair and catch each other only by mutual collapse is like watching a house burn down from ember to ash. For the thousands of other monkey paws before and since, good luck finding a single shot as raw as Marley sobbing into Carlin’s lap that he couldn’t give up their boy to the police as she numbly decides through her medicated haze that the whole family will just have to go on the lam.
Whatever you call it, Bob Clark’s serrated eulogy for insomniacs of the American Dream hasn’t lost much of its nightmarish power in the last half century. Because no matter which war is waging or whose futures are paying for it, Deathdream lays bare and grisly the invisible cost, asked and answered in two disconnected lines:
“I can’t believe a soldier would do a thing like that.”
“There are millions of soldiers, dad.”
“Deathdream” is streaming on Amazon Prime, Shudder, Tubi, Night Flight, and several other streaming services.
