Bad Dreams

In the discussion of the ’80s being the golden age of horror, Bad Dreams is far too often left out of the conversation. Granted, the film has its competition—coming from 1988, no less—but Andrew Fleming’s debut feature deserves deeper consideration. While Roger Ebert kind of hilariously wrote it off as just “another of those foul teenage vomitoriums in which the only message is that the world is evil and brutal,” its VHS was in heavy rotation for the teenage me, and the movie has held up on periodic revisits over the years. Like pretty much every genre film produced by Gale Anne Hurd—who in the same decade was also responsible for The Terminator, Aliens, Alien Nation, and The Abyss—the action is lean and mean and the pace lightning-fast.

That Bad Dreams has remained undervalued is perhaps also due to its oft-cited similarities to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, released a year earlier, but apart from sharing its psych-ward setting—common contained cinematic terrain—the stalking of patients by a charred ghost-man, and the appealing presence of actress Jennifer Rubin, there’s not much else to connect them. From the ’70s detail of the opening and flashback cult scenes to its venture into thrilling slasher territory, Bad Dreams stands on its own. Rubin’s Cynthia is the survivor of a mass suicide, who as a child saw the peace-seeking members of Unity Fields doused in gasoline and lit aflame—a smaller-scale Jonestown, killing 30—and wakes from a coma 13 years later, with little recollection of the past. Details creep back in, and she starts being terrorized by visions of the cult leader, Harris (Richard Lynch)—a chilling sight with his white, longish hair and scarred face. And when patients start mysteriously dying, seemingly at their own hands, with Cynthia always suspiciously within close range, she insists that it’s Harris—even as the motivations of Dr. Berrisford (Harris Yulin), the psychiatrist in charge, increasingly reveal themselves as questionable. In addition to Lynch and Yulin, both having some fun, there’s solid supporting work from likable goofball Dean Cameron and a super-hunky Bruce Abbott as the doctor who leads the borderline-personality-disorder group sessions and kind of takes Cynthia under his wing.

Fleming, who also co-wrote the script, is perhaps best known for 1996’s teen-witch outing The Craft, which has grown quite the cult following, but it’s Bad Dreams that leaves a deeper impression—the repellent image of Lynch especially. His creepy-ass cult leader—as if there’s any other kind—gives rise to a villain worthy of a franchise. 🩸