A young soldier who was thought to be killed in the line of duty in Vietnam returns home shortly thereafter, much to the confusion of his family. Upon his return, he exhibits strange, withdrawn behavior and begins wandering the streets at night.
The Night Andy Came Home, Night Walk, The Veteran, Whispers, The Night Walker, Dead Of Night, Sonho de Morte
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.
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.
"i can't believe a solider 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.
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…
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.
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…
'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…
Geoff T's Hoop-Tober 6.0 Challenge
Dead of Night/Deathdream (1974)
I'm a fairly big fan of Bob Clark's Black Christmas, so this other cult horror-thriller of his (released in the same year) peaked my interest. Colour me unsurprised when I say that is just as good, if not more so in some ways. A tense and atmospheric chiller with subtle commentary on the state of soldiers after the outcome of Vietnam.
One night, the Brooks are devastated to discover that their beloved son Andy was killed on duty in Nam. Without warning however, Andy returns in the middle of the night, much to the delight of his parents Charles and Christine, and his sister Cathy. It soon becomes apparent however that…
The same year as Black Christmas Bob Clark unleashed this bleak and unforgiving psychological chiller. Layered with themes of grief and complex family dynamics within a climate of post Vietnam trauma, Deathdream is a dense and brooding nightmare. The gradual deterioration of the mind is paralleled with the hideous decay of flesh.
A family is shattered when they learn about the death of their son Andy in the Vietnam War. When Andy returns home the same night the family wonders if it's a miracle or something more sinister. Andy isn't the same son they remember as he's much more withdrawn and only goes out at night. As his strange behaviors become more disturbing and violent a horrifying new reality emerges…
