Deathdream / Dead of Night / The Night Andy Came Home / It Came from the Grave / Whispers (1972/1974) ***½

     I remember a weekend night many years ago, when I was hanging out with my dad, drinking whiskey and listening to music. We had reached that stage of inebriation at which secret truths are apt to emerge, and the conversation had turned to the subject of my father’s youth— specifically, to the winter of 1968-1969, when his eighteenth birthday was looming up, with graduation from high school and eligibility for military conscription right behind it. Naturally it was the lattermost milestone that weighed heaviest on my father’s mind that winter. Getting drafted was the next best thing to a guaranteed ticket to Vietnam in 1968, as the war there reached the peak of its intensity even while the futility of US involvement in it became so obvious that Richard Nixon, of all people, could campaign for the White House on a supposed secret plan to end it quickly and cleanly. (Spoiler alert: he didn’t have one.) Trying to explain what it felt like to finish out his last semester of public school with the prospect of ’Nam hanging over his head, my dad said something that I will never forget: “I couldn’t understand why my parents were trying to kill me.”

     Partly he meant that in broad, generational terms, of course. After all, containing the spread of communism abroad by every means short of improving the lives of workers in developing countries had been a bipartisan project for a quarter of a century by then, agreed upon by the entire political mainstream of the United States. The Silent Generation had done the bleeding in Korea, and now it was the Baby Boomers’ turn. But there was also a literal, personal dimension to my father’s statement that night, which he might not have been willing to face so directly without the booze loosening his inhibitions. My paternal grandparents, like so many working-class Americans who grew up during the Depression and came of age during the Second World War, were politically liberal but socially conservative (at least until two generations of very strange progeny taught them to embrace a bit of freakishness). It would not have occurred to them to sit in judgment over the actions of their government, let alone to deem them monstrous and worthy of opposition, and they therefore held a low opinion of the anti-war movement generally, and of draft-dodgers in particular. Furthermore, my grandfather had been a landing craft pilot during World War II. He’d put his ass on the line for the Red, White, and Blue, and although he’d admit if you pressed him that D-Day was the worst of his life, his experience under fire had only reinforced his preexisting ideas about duty. How was my dad supposed to explain to a guy who ferried troops onto Omaha Beach that this war wasn’t like that one, and that there was no honor or heroism in roaming the jungles of Indochina, setting peasant villages ablaze with Zippo lighters? He’d have felt like a coward just raising the issue.

     In the end, the problem pretty much took care of itself. My father got a terrific draft number— the kind they’d never get around to calling under the rules as they stood in 1969. Then he got a student deferment by enrolling at the University of Maryland, and the draft was abolished five months before his graduation date. Still, that “what if?” has never stopped haunting him, nor has the seemingly limitless willingness of his elders to keep feeding their sons into the meat grinder. My dad doesn’t much go in for horror movies (at least not the really vicious ones they started making once he was an adult), but I think he might get something out of Deathdream. It’s basically a distillation and sublimation of everything we talked about that night, viewed through the lens of a vampire story as far off-model as Martin— which Deathdream strongly resembles in tone and technique, even if it’s somewhat less accomplished overall.

     Privates Andy Brooks (Richard Backus) and Darren Wilson (no idea) are on night patrol somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam. They get separated from their platoon when it comes under mortar and rifle fire, and Wilson is hit badly while the two of them scramble for cover. Although plainly mortally wounded, Darren takes his time in dying, and Andy catches a bullet of his own while trying to figure out what, if anything, can be done for him.

     About two months later, back home in Brooksville, Florida, Andy’s loved ones are starting to worry about him. Mail service to and from an active war zone is unreliable, of course, but it’s concerning that neither the family nor Andy’s high school sweetheart, Joanne (Jane Daly, from Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle and Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things), have had replies to any of their letters in such a long time. Then one night, the colonel (Arthur Bradley) who serves as executive officer for the nearby army base comes calling at the Brooks house with a telegram reporting Andy’s death in action. Charlie Brooks, the lad’s father (John Marley, of It Lives Again and The Car), is a veteran himself, and he alone among the family has mentally prepared himself for this turn of events, even as an abstract possibility. Andy’s sister, Cathy (Anya Ormsby, of Thunder County, who was in Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things as well), takes the news pretty hard, but his mother, Christina (Lynn Carlin, from Superstition and Battle Beyond the Stars), goes instantly to pieces. She flatly refuses to believe the colonel’s telegram, and angrily berates him and his superiors for tormenting decent folks by interrupting their dinners with cruelly absurd stories. And late that night, after Charlie unexpectedly awakens alone in bed, he gets up to find Christina sitting in Andy’s room, gazing fixedly into a lit candle and muttering, “You’re alright. You’re alive. I can tell. I can feel it. They lied. You’ll come back…”

     Never let it be said that Andy Brooks is the kind of guy to disappoint his mama. If she says he can’t be dead, well, then I guess he really just can’t. At that very moment, and without the slightest trace of explanation for how we got here beyond the pure fairy-tale magic of Christina’s candlelight vigil, truck driver Howie Stewart (David Gawlikowski) picks Andy up hitchhiking on the outskirts of Brooksville. Shortly thereafter, Stewart stops at a diner for coffee and cigarettes, and happens to mention his strange, silent, uniformed passenger to the waitress who takes his order (Virginia Cortez). That’ll be important later, because Howie never reaches his destination. He’s found along the roadside the following morning in the cab of his vehicle, his throat torn open and a single mysterious needle-mark in his arm, just below the crook of the elbow.

     Andy arrives at the old homestead between three and four AM, and his family are naturally grateful and relieved to have him back in contradiction to the tidings they received earlier. Nevertheless, it should be obvious that he isn’t quite right, even to those who didn’t just see him leave a trucker for dead by the side of the road. Pale and listless, he’s a far cry from the vigorous youth who went off to war however long ago that was. He starts keeping strange hours, too, rising when the day is half-over and staying up most of the night, roaming the streets of Brooksville or rocking with relentless, angry agitation in the same chair where his mother cast her unwitting spell of resurrection. He speaks little, eats less, and shuns the company of even those who were once closest to him. Indeed, Andy is so disconcertingly vehement about forbidding his family to tell anyone— including and especially Joanne— of his return that the gossipy mailman (Arthur Anderson) is the first person outside the family to learn of it. None of Andy’s relatives want to admit what’s in front of their faces, but neither can they fail to see it, and the Brooks house becomes a place of confused guilt, hurt feelings, and mutual recriminations.

     Then Andy strangles Butchie, the family dog. He isn’t the slightest bit furtive about it, either, killing the poor little animal right in front of both his father and a whole pack of neighborhood boys who had regarded Andy as something of a hometown hero. One of the kids tries to demonstrate his newly-acquired karate moves on his idol, triggering what any modern viewer will recognize at once as the misdirected fight-or-flight response of post-traumatic stress disorder. When Butchie intervenes to protect the target of Andy’s wrath, he catches the full, deranged fury of it instead. Charlie tries to kick Andy out of the house after that. Christina won’t hear of any such thing, refusing to acknowledge the reality of her son’s transgression. Charlie storms off to get drunk after the fight with his wife. And nobody will tell Cathy what the fuck just happened.

     While Charlie is cleaning his favorite bar out of his favorite hooch, he happens to cross paths with Dr. Phillip Allman (Henderson Forsithe, from The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez and Species II), the local sawbones. The two men get to talking about the root of Charlie’s trouble, and Allman immediately proposes a visit to the Brooks house, so that he can take a look at Andy. Unfortunately for the doc, he happens also to be the county medical examiner. He just spent his afternoon performing an autopsy on Howie Stewart, and he knows everything the police do about the dead trucker’s case. When his chat with Andy reveals that the lad hitchhiked into town on Wednesday, arriving home at three-something in the morning, Allman recognizes at once what that must mean— and Andy recognizes him recognizing it. As soon as Allman leaves, contemplating the disturbing things he’s just learned, Andy slips out to trail him back to his office. He doesn’t just coldly eliminate the newly inconvenient doctor, however. No, Andy wants Allman to know the full truth before he dies, so he forces him to conduct a quick-and-dirty physical first. Only after Allman has grasped the implications of the impossible results does Andy stab him brutally to death with one of his own medical instruments. Then he takes Allman’s biggest hypodermic needle, extracts about 50 cc’s of the doctor’s still-warm blood, and injects it into his own veins. I guess we know now what was up with that track mark on Stewart’s arm, huh?

     Obviously Allman’s death attracts plenty of attention from the local media. Charlie may not be ready to accept yet that his strange, damaged son is a double murderer, but he does understand how the situation is sure to look to anyone else who knows as much as the doctor found out during his impromptu house call last night. He goes to the police to report a version of events that while mostly true, should be sufficiently garbled to throw them off the scent long enough for him to figure out his next move. Charlie has no idea how little time he has, however. When Andy dropped in on Allman, there was something subtly but noticeably wrong with his skin, as if it were drying out and losing its elasticity. The blood he injected fixed that, but the simple fact is that the living dead guy is starting to decay, and his deterioration is accelerating. Meanwhile, Cathy has set out to drag her family kicking and screaming, if that’s what it takes, back to the way things were before Andy went to Vietnam. With that in mind, she’s contrived a plan for the most normal thing she can think of: springing Andy’s return on Joanne as the surprise half of a blind double date with her and her boyfriend, Bob (Michael Mazes, of The Beach Girls). But the drive-in doesn’t serve fresh human blood at the snack bar, and at the rate Andy’s going rancid, I really don’t see him making it all the way through a double feature without requiring an immediate DIY transfusion.

     All modern wars send men home with psychic and somatic wounds alike, but Vietnam was the first one in a hundred years to wound the fabric of American society. Pop culture on the whole wouldn’t be ready to grapple with that until the 1980’s, so it’s striking to see Deathdream going this hard while the war was still in progress. Then again, that fearlessness in the face of things no one wanted to think about in 1972 probably goes some way toward explaining why this movie took two years to find anyone willing to distribute it.

     What’s most striking about Deathdream in the context of its time is that it isn’t outwardly concerned with the politics of the Vietnam War, whether international or domestic. There are no hippies or campus radicals to be seen here, no protest marches or [verb]-ins or crowds of chanting demonstrators. Indeed, writer Alan Ormsby and director Bob Clark treat the war as a sort of impersonal outside force— almost a man-made natural disaster— which is about how I suppose it must have felt to the families of most of the 58,000 GIs who never came home from it, and of the thousands more who came home crippled in body and/or mind. Andy’s vampirism serves in various ways as a proxy for PTSD, drug addiction, depression, disablement, and all the other ills that demobilized soldiers are prey to, and the main scene-to-scene drama of Deathdream revolves around the Brooks family’s inability to cope with the horrid disconnect between their expectations of Andy’s military service and the actual outcome. The key scene for this aspect of the film is the one in which Charlie and the mailman get to reminiscing about their own stints in the army while Andy slumps, as motionless as the corpse he is, in the lawn chair between them. The older men— the postman particularly— are downright nostalgic about “their” war. They were fighting for a cause they understood and believed in, and while they saw their share of horrors along the way, they got to return from the front as conquering heroes. What’s more, they just assume that that’s how war is, and although the specific differences between their experiences and Andy’s go unspoken (apart, obviously, from the whole death thing), it’s clear just the same that the filmmakers understand those differences to be real, profound, and of such nature as to create an unbridgeable gap between veterans of the two conflicts.

     Deathdream reveals Clark and Ormsby as astute observers of family psychology as well. Charlie believes that Christina has always coddled and smothered Andy, in ways that impede his accession into manhood. Christina blames Charlie for pushing Andy into the army as a desperate gambit to prove to his father that he wasn’t a terminal mama’s boy. And Cathy unmistakably comes in second in both parents’ affections, but is conversely free from the burden of their expectations. Although we arrive too late to see for ourselves how these dynamics might have affected the normal course of the Brooks family’s lives, what they give rise to following Andy’s death and resurrection is telling indeed. After all, we’re offered nothing beyond the sheer strength of the maternal bond to account for Andy’s return from the grave, and Charlie consistently seems to be using macho impostures of “tough love” to disguise his terrified bafflement over what’s become of his son, even from his own sight. As for Andy, all it takes to see through him is to look at him on those rare occasions when he smiles; you’d swear it was causing him physical pain.

     Deathdream is a horror film, though, so let’s not forget to consider it simply from that perspective, too. As you’ve probably noticed by now, this movie is a riff on W.W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw,” except that it jumps straight to the awful fallout of the second wish, and offers no third one to correct the mistake. It’s surprisingly true to that inspiration, too, despite all the ways it updates the premise for the 1970’s. Unusually for a fright film of this era, Deathdream relies less on the shock effect of its set pieces than on the looming, inescapable dread of what must, eventually, happen. Like Jacobs himself, Clark and Ormsby emphasize the uncanniness of a wish gone wrong and a miracle turned sour, but in keeping with the spirit of the times, they don’t look away in the end from the calamity toward which everything has been glacially creeping all along— nor do they permit the audience to look away. When it comes, the denouement is unutterably bleak, leaving no room at all for the kind of “sadder but wiser” resolution that Jacobs employed. Between Deathdream, Black Christmas, and Deranged, I truly do not understand why current horror fandom has chosen to remember Bob Clark almost solely as the boob who made Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, and Alan Ormsby not at all.

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