Grief-stricken suburban parents refuse to accept the news that their son Andy has been killed in Vietnam, but when he returns home soon after, something may be horribly wrong.
The Night Andy Came Home, Night Walk, The Veteran, Whispers, Deathdream, The Night Walker, Sonho de Morte, 데드 오브 나잇, 데드 오브 나이트, 데스드림, Death Dream, La morte dietro la porta, Crimen en la noche, Nacht des Terrors, Le Mort-vivant, Soif de sang, Κυνηγητό θανάτου, Halálos álom, Смертельный сон, Mannen är farlig, 夜之死
USAPG
France12
France
USA
The Monkeys Paw.
Bleak, PTSD infused disintegrating family nightmare filled with a ton of allegory as well as the varying effects of grief and how people deal with it. A decaying vampire/zombie shell of what once was... returning, but never the same, resulting in ravaged domestic ideology—the night Andy came home.
Between this and Black Christmas I’m convinced Bob Clark and crew were the bleak cinematic wrecking ball of 1974. That last act is something special—terrifying, emotional, and ending in the only logical setting a movie like this could end.
Heavy stuff and a bit ahead of its time if you ask me.
It's Vietnam and drugs and generation gaps and The Monkey's Paw and gender roles and zombies and as many early '70s metaphors as one movie can hold without collapsing under its own weight and it's fantastic.
For real, a Bob Clark double-bill of this and A Christmas Story could teach you a whole hell of a lot about America.
"I can't believe a soldier would do a thing like that."
The Night He—the violent impulses of imperialism—Came Home. Incredibly sad ending; has got to suck to really truly love your murderous, zombie son.
73
Deathdream. Such a potent examination of the familial unit post-Vietnam. What lingers is how fractured and broken everyone is, unable to come to terms with the emotional and physical fallout of the war, so much so that Andy is hardly a catalyst, but a manifestation of their worst fears, and their unacknowledged realities. Bob Clark directs this in the same vein as Black Christmas - simple set-ups and scares plain as day - but it leads to a more sorrowful endpoint.
80/100
Wrote a Scenic Routes column on this, though it doesn't address the scene I originally thought I'd tackle (which turns out to be too fragmented for that purpose, intercut with parallel action). In truth, it's the conceptual audacity that astounds, not so much the individual acts of violence or even the overall creepiness...though the soundscape, with its non-diegetic hissing and whispering, rivals what Lynch would later achieve via industrial thrum. In certain off-kilter respects, this may be the most essential Vietnam movie—not as great as Apocalypse Now, to be sure, but far more agonizingly pointed than, say, Coming Home. And it's just relentlessly sadistic, going out of its way to humanize characters it intends to brutally dispose of shortly…
Please remember that the American invasion of Vietnam--following French occupation--was an act of imperialist war that was a vile genocidal attempt at conquest in the name of suppressing the rights of the Vietnamese to self-determination. You can argue all you want that the draft somehow mitigated the level of culpability of American soldiers, but the My Lai Massacre wasn't an act done under coercion. PTSD in returning soldiers and certainly the lack of support or medical care for them after they stopped being weapons of the empire is an aspect of the capitalist treatment of non-bourgeois people as disposable. The familiar tropes used in this film--a returning soldier struggling to re-enter society, a mother's love pulling a soldier home, a…
An excellent PTSD-drama-cum-supernatural-horror flick directed by Bob Clark. Deathdream is grim and has a strong post-Vietnam anti-war sentiment to it. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead is an obvious influence. It contains solid early fx work by make-up effects God, Tom Savini.
I am glad Michelle introduced me to this awesome movie.
#SlasherSaturday
Pretty cool slasher exploring some veteran PTSD. It opens kind of like Jacob’s Ladder, which had me thinking it might end the same way, too. A veteran, Andy (Richard Backus), comes home from the war a changed man, empty inside, like a tin man perhaps, and goes out at night to refill the void. Backus gives off major Anthony Perkins vibes with his performance (or maybe it was his look). Not a huge kill count, but this kills were solid and fairly bloody. There’s a moment where a scream from the victim (I can’t remember which now) was modulated and use as the score for the next few minutes. Pretty chilling sh🤩. I would definitely steal that move if I was…
'Deathdream' (also known as 'Dead of Night') packs the anger, grief, and confusion of an entire era into one 88-minute film. And it does so without the weight of self-importance that so many of our modern, more prestigious, and socially minded horror productions tend to bear. As Travis Crawford succinctly puts it, what makes 'Deathdream' and other classic 1970s horror films so effective is that the earlier productions “deftly handled themes of great importance, but in a way that only serves to give their work more emotional resonance and power.”
The ghost of Vietnam stalks through every frame of 'Deathdream,' but it's a great film because Clark and his collaborators put the drama and the characters first. Even with the…
