A relaxed podcast episode about Dream Demon (1988) starring Kathleen Wilhoite and Jemma Redgrave. Here I deconstruct the dream I had after re-watching Dream Demon and look closely at the nightmares the two main characters suffer through. You can watch the video or scroll down to read the transcript. Oh, and I changed the name of my channel from The Movie Hotline to Erin Strolls Through Films. Enjoy!

I was trying to think about what I was going to say about the 1988 film Dream Demon and I fell asleep, and I dreamed that I was sitting in a coffee bar next to Leonard Nimoy and he told me that he liked my YouTube channel. Now, if that’s not a clearer message from my subconscious to keep going with this channel because I like the channel—everyone in your dream is you—but also, what a perfect way to start this analysis. I watched this movie for the first time in about 15 years and then I had an interesting dream.

Now, Dream Demon—you’ve been lied to by the back of the videotape box and by the synopsis. Now, the synopsis is that this young woman named Diana, played by Jemma Redgrave, is having dreams that start killing people in real life. The truth is that you never know what’s happening in this movie; it’s dreams within dreams within dreams. You never know for sure when you’re in a dream. It starts with a dream and then it ends with one of those horror movie endings that they tack on after you think that everything is solved, so you don’t know what’s real. But what’s for sure is that Diana’s dreams are about her upcoming wedding to a man named Oliver, who is a war hero, and the paparazzi are hounding her because he’s famous and she’s rich.

These dreams that she’s having are very clearly fear of sex, fear of intimacy. There is blood on the wedding dress, there’s a crack in the wall with blood coming out of it, and there’s a worm crawling out of the broken eye of a disturbing-looking doll that she finds in her house. Speaking of her house, it’s a big old house that her dad bought her as a wedding present, and just when the paparazzi have harassed her at her front door, an American shows up and kicks one of them in the balls. In the real world, I think they were trying to market this movie in the States, so they put the very likable, tough chick Kathleen Wilhoite as Jenny, the American who used to live in the house. But in America, and especially in LA where Jenny’s character has been living, we don’t have this idea that the press are just trying to do their job. We are shown in a lot of media that British people have to coexist with the press who are exploitative and are also just doing their job, and that’s mentioned a few times by the journalists and by Diana herself.

Jenny and Diana run into the house and it comes out that Jenny used to live in the house, but she doesn’t remember it—that her parents died there. Then she starts becoming part of Diana’s dreams and Diana starts becoming part of her dreams, and the journalists disappear and come back as demons in the dreams. They are Timothy Spall, who’s great in everything but has an unusual look, and Jimmy Nail, who also has an unusual look and is great in everything that I’ve seen him in. I see Timothy Spall all the time, and Timothy Spall is really grotesque in the dreams and wasn’t a nice person when they met him in real life. But Jimmy Nail, they did him dirty; all they did was just put like a Jimmy Nail mask over the top of his face. I get it, they only had so much of a budget.

There’s a psychiatrist who may have been both women’s psychiatrist, we don’t know. There’s no rules in this movie, and it has nothing to do with A Nightmare on Elm Street other than that there’s dreams. But when everything comes out, Diana’s dreams are obvious and it’s telling her not to marry this man—that she’s been saving herself for the right man, and she pushes back against the idea that that’s laughable because most of us don’t do that in the 20th, 21st century, but if you want to, that’s your thing. This was just the wrong man.

Jenny’s dreams are a manifestation of guilt about how her dad died. He was doing some kind of bizarre art project that involved making a sculpture using her as an unwilling model for the sculpture. I’m thinking maybe that’s just a metaphor for something worse that was going on there, but that’s not stated. It’s explicitly stated that he was forcing her as a child to model for this sculpture. But the terrible irony is at the end of the film—which may or may not be real—you can see that sculpture on top of his grave, that he basically died trying to get made. We don’t know who put it there, if it’s been there her whole life when she didn’t remember living in England and was living in America, or if she just put it there as an FU at the end, I don’t know.

I will say the worst part about this movie is a casting choice. There was a woman named Annabelle Lanyon who plays a ghostly little girl that they see around the house. I don’t think she’s a small person, and I think maybe 5’1″ from what I looked up, but she is playing a child, or the memory of a child, who’s young enough to be playing with dolls. But she, at the time, was older than Gemma Redgrave or Kathleen Wilhoite. At the time of the filming of the movie, she was in her late 20s and looked like she was in her late 20s. She didn’t look bad, but she didn’t look like a little girl that would be playing with dolls. So it’s a choice, and it may have been a choice to make it very uncanny valley, or it may have just been: “We need an adult in this part, we’re not going to subject a child to what’s going on in these scenes of abuse.” Who knows, that’s the only complaint that I have about the movie.

I remember that I bought this on a videotape for the sole reason that the back of the box said that it was compared to A Nightmare on Elm Street—and not because I thought it would be like A Nightmare on Elm Street. This was about 15 years ago that I bought the tape. I’ve been collecting videotapes since 1995, and now I’ve amassed such a collection I’m more interested in selling them on eBay than I am in collecting them. But 15 years ago, you could just go buy any old obscure videotape for 25 cents in a secondhand store, and that’s what I did because the back of the box said that this is for A Nightmare on Elm Street fans. I thought, “Well, I’ll take that Pepsi challenge,” and it’s got nothing to do with A Nightmare on Elm Street other than dreams.

It’s funny to me to look at those boxes and how they used to market. I think we were naming movies that were mismarketed as being A Nightmare on Elm Street clones last night, and one of them was Sleepaway Camp II. There was that movie… oh, I can’t remember the name of it where Linnea Quigley pushed a lipstick into her boob. Something about demons that was marketed like, “You’ve met Freddy, now meet Angela” or whatever. There was a movie about David Naughton living on a haunted train car that was like, “You’ve met Freddy, now meet the…” I can’t remember the name of any movies today! So I bought this movie just because I knew that it had funny mismarketing, and I ended up liking it a lot. I like it better than some of the A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels—I’m looking at number two and number six here. But if it had anything to do with any of the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies, it would be the most like part four, because it has the dreams within the dreams and the people waking up and they’re still dreaming.

I took out my VHS copy and I realized that I had not bought a real copy; I had bought a screener that they would send to video stores to convince them to buy the tape to rent it out. So this is what they were telling the shop owners: that if your customers like A Nightmare on Elm Street, then they’ll like Dream Demon. I did rewatch this twice yesterday and today, which is what caused me to have my strange Leonard Nimoy dream while trying to puzzle out what to say to you. But when I watched it 15 years ago and blogged about it, I had watched this tape copy and I can go back and look at my old blogs and I have notes. This movie had a different ending at the time that I watched it back then on tape. It ended with kind of something funny and the reporters reappeared. But in the version I watch now, which is on the Arrow Video streaming service, which I think is a director’s cut—the director I guess I should mention being Harley Cokeliss—there isn’t an ending where we see the reporters again. They seem to have disappeared into the mansion and disappeared into the dreams.

I will say, I think this movie is entirely psychological. I usually don’t like to have to explain away supernatural elements, but there’s only one thing that points to it being supernatural in origin, and that is that Timothy Spall is at one point in what seems to be real life eating a dish of noodles rather disgustingly, and Jemma Redgrave’s Diana does not see him doing that. Then, later, she dreams about him being disgusting and eating noodles. So there’s your one supernatural connection. But the rest of this, it’s psychological. These women, they’re in this house that’s triggering them both. One is afraid to get married for good reason, the other feels guilt for not a good reason, and I think that’s all I had to say.

I recommend that you check this movie out: Dream Demon (1988), if you enjoy the ambiguous, the bonkers, looking at nightmares on film. Personally, I can’t get enough. Until next time, have a good night and sweet dreams.