Bob Clark, the director who gave us unforgettable accounts of both sides of the Yuletide coin from mine to mint with Black Christmas (1974) and A Christmas Story (1983), was pledged to range. The best artists are. If you can describe what someone does in a stock phrase or slap on a one-size-fits-all genre label, their work won’t last, and nor should it.
Cast your mind to something like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s as Gothic horror as Gothic horror gets, right? But the novel is also a work of proto-modernism, a welter of sociological metaphors, a fin de siècle fictive travelogue, a cloudburst of excess, a study in Victorian restraint, a blend of homoeroticism, religiosity, urbanity, folk legend, cod philosophy, food prep, superstition, science, faith, empiricism, telepathy, gushy buddy-road-trip romp, and Manichaean saga. Only the multifaceted endure, and multifaceted artists who shift from work to work.
Take note, you who deal in the blandest, least-individualized catch-all-isms like “What’s your genre?” and claim to write upmarket romantasy, whatever the hell that means, which is to say, it means nothing. The thing being only and wholly itself is inseparable from any claim to art. In this regard, Clark’s finest films are efforts and extolments of indivisibility.
Among them is 1974’s Deathdream (aka Dead of Night), which itself is vampiric and likely to remain deathless in terms of its political relevance, unless dictator-types stop warring. People watch horror films in part because real life is so horrifying. Life will get you at some point or other. We’re never truly safe from that monster. Sometimes when we believe we’re most in the clear is exactly when we feel the monster’s breath on the back of our neck. And then there are those among us who only, or mostly, know the monster. Live with it. Which isn’t exactly Ernie rooming with Bert.
Deathdream is what we could call a living-situation film. An empty-nest tale in horrible reverse. It utilizes writer W.W. Jacobs’s old “Monkey’s Paw” premise from a 1902 short story, which Jacobs himself picked up along the line (though he repurposed it imaginatively). You know the gist: there’s this shriveled monkey’s paw that grants its possessor three wishes. The first wish leads to the fates exploiting a rhetorical loophole to technically give the wisher what they wished for while simultaneously blowing up their world; the second wish tries to fix this and makes everything worse; and then the third wish is to make it all stop, which doesn’t negate the tragic results. You don’t get a wiped slate here, kiddos.
Don’t fault Clark for utilizing this trope, as that would be akin to slagging off a jazz musician for improvising over the chords to “Cherokee.” The “solo” is what matters. In Deathdream, there isn’t an outright severed paw, but rather a parent’s blinding grief. A child is gone and his mother wants him restored to home and hearth and the bosom of her love. Dad Charles (John Marley), mom Christine (Lynn Carlin), and their daughter Joanne (Jane Daly) get a knock at their door and are told that son/brother Andy (Richard Backus) was killed in Vietnam, which we already know from the film’s opening scene. Christine can’t accept this. Her trauma undoes her reason. She tries to fight reality by wishing. This is a kind of monkey’s paw shorthand. The talisman isn’t required. Heartbreak does the work, as heartbreak so often does.
But it turns out Andy is making the journey home to his family, ready to start life again (sorta) while providing trenchant social commentary in the process. His reborn corpse feeds on blood. The vampire veteran. As he points out to a victim: he died for American citizens, so why shouldn’t they die in turn for him? Which is as solid an argument a vampire, who wished to continue on as a vampire, has ever had. How do you refute that?
You know how you can go to a concert and within the space of 10 bars you’re aware that the band is tight that night? That’s how Deathdream functions as a film. Everyone’s performance is locked down. Zero excess. Andy embodies the horrors of war-making—he’s postwar effluvia on two legs—and acts as a mirror. He neither delights in his vampirism nor laments it, the Bartleby (“I’d prefer not to”) variant of the undead, passive but nonetheless someone who sucks the mood out of a room, and more.
His mother’s love results in the terror lasting longer than it should. But can we blame a mother? People who kick up a fuss about gender will perhaps have a problem with the following statement, but it’s the man of the house—sorry—who undoes the monkey’s curse in these affairs by stopping the mother from mothering. He destroys himself in the process, regardless of whether he remains alive. We know people like this. We may, God help us, or someone, or something, be such a person.
Charles taps out of the whole “walking wounded” thing himself in what we’ll call expeditious fashion. Tough to watch. If you’re thinking about coming off your antidepressants, the day you sit down to watch Deathdream wouldn’t make for the ideal time to start going it alone again. Think of it as horror’s answer to The Best Years of Our Lives, which also has—rather remarkably—a worse outcome (and much higher body count) than W.W. Jacobs’s famed story. You can’t wish it out of existence, and you’re better off seeing it anyway. If it helps, you could fire up Clark’s Porky’s (1982) afterwards to stave off death dreams of your own. Besides, even granted wishes don’t come with guarantees. 🩸
is the author of eight books, including the story collection, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, a 33 1/3 volume on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro, and a book about 1951’s Scrooge as the ultimate horror film. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Cineaste, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and many other venues. He’s completing a book called And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. His website is colinfleminglit.com, where he maintains the Many Moments More journal, which, at 2.7 million words and counting as of autumn 2023, is the longest sustained work of literature in history.
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