House of Dreams (1963)

 

Director: Robert Berry

Screenplay: Robert Berry

Cast: Robert Berry, Lance Bird, Charlene Bradley, Pauline Elliott and David Goodnow

An Abstract Candidate

 

[Major Plot Spoilers]

You can encounter some truly idiosyncratic films, ones you have never heard of and have no expectations entering them, which are something to be cherished. The most rewarding, even if flawed, feel like being in the creator(s)' minds, translated onto a format of any type. Even larger budgeted productions can sometimes be like this, but the lower budgeted films are more likely to be as personal as you can achieve. House of Dreams is fascinating as, made by Robert Berry - directing, producing, editing, partly shooting and starring - it feels like the lost sibling of Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), a revered film whilst most of us, as I was, have never heard of this film at all.

House of Dreams is a supernatural mystery, horror but not as presumed to usually mean, more a curious short tale where one man, an author entirely fixated on his work, has macabre dreams that involve a strange house, each dream revealed if by fate or a sickly reoccurring chance to chime the death of someone he knows. These dreams are never explained, and I will have to warn a potential viewer you will never have a culprit to what this all means. The dreams are merely ominous predications already adding to a man's life. There is enough to deal with, between his writer's block and his distancing relationship with his wife, a sobered alcoholic who went into a clinic for mental health, who just wants her husband to show care for her.

Here, drama's tendrils in genre are found fully. Drama is a genre which is a vague one because of how vast and varied that term can cover, on itself likely to be found in any form as much as in danger of being dismissed as really bad melodrama unfairly, as much as horror is so vast yet can be dismissed as schlock. The amount of horror and gothic stories fully of dramatic beats which are compelling show they are natural bedfellows, and even the least appropriate examples that could be conceived, such as a splatter film, are inherently enticing to me to imagine. House of Dreams fully fits a micro-budget "art horror" genre tag, one where I realise one of the things I love in films, and why drama and horror are an enticing pair, is simply that even when heavy handed, as this can be, the moment a character opens up whether about their neurosis or quirks is inherently compelling for me.

The tone of the film, and its complete lack of a conventional explanation for itself, suits this, where the first death our writer lead dreams of, in real life a car accident, just leads to a very awkward post wake meeting with the wife in a scene imbibed in late fifties and early sixties bland suburbia, the wife with a bouffant hairdo and everyone mumbling around coffees in the lounge, the kind which feels closer to real life and also inherently suits the eeriness then a conventional acting performance from the cast. Here where it is more appropriate to, with the neurosis on display, it feels stiff at points in the tone to the point of ghostliness, a film in monochrome whose almost sibling nature to Carnival of Souls feels so eerie in itself, because both films have so many common traits, both why they succeed and how they were made, which also emphasises this compelling type of horror drinking from a form of drama. Two films, just a year out of each other, shot in the early sixties shot outside of Hollywood, with Carnival of Souls was shot in Utah and Kansas, House of Dreams entirely in Indiana; Carnival...  is fixated on an amusement park for its lead's obsessions, Saltair Amusement Park near Magna in Utah used, whilst House... about the titular house the protagonist dreams of too; both have idiosyncratic scores; both are about comfortable conservative middle America of the early sixties, sedate Americana, undercut by uncomfortable emotions under the skin; both have curious acting choices and dream sequences for the leads which take very little yet cause everything to be likely to dissipate into vapour if the images were touched. [Major Spoilers] And both end with the protagonists dead, or already being dead, with epilogues where the local police have to come and clear up the tragedies. [Spoilers End]. Neither is traditional horror, though fully indebted to tropes of the genre, as they are neither traditional drama yet indebted to its tropes too.

If there is a difference, House of Dreams is a chamber drama, more so the drama, that just happens to have nightmares in their centre, preludes to deaths in car accidents or suicides. Metaphors are for cowards spoke the horror author Garth Marenghi, and honestly, I come more to the conclusion for any work that attempting to strip the unnatural and supernatural in stories down to having a hidden meaning undercuts them and is pointless. When the emotions felt by a character experiencing them, and how the viewer processes this, is weighty enough. There is also enough surrounding House of Dream just in the lives of these characters anyway, even without the protagonist's gothic nightmares in the titular house to unpack. Even without the fixation on a rundown yet haunting place in the protagonist's dreams, you have a writer struggling to write, his gothic prose full of dread and horror, with a wife felt unloved and with a fragile state of being already which, between alcohol and anxieties, she could fall prey to again as he ignores her. In little time to tell this narrative, this manages a lot in its own style.

House of Dreams is the kind of film, whilst out of the period covered, of Stephen Thrower's Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (2007). The musician/author/commentator's book on regional horror cinema from the United States for me is a book of great reverence for, and alongside his enjoyment of the more openly pulpy side of them, he has championed idiosyncratic works of great depth, House of Dreams the kind of film this amateur writer would feel he would find so much within. Whilst feeling its incredibly low budget, production which feels like it was created with only a few people, no one with a lengthy acting career or an acting credit at all but still trying their hardest, everything that is imperfect to the film just adds to its aura, where its style is found even in having to use what was at hand. One major set, the titular house, manages to evoke a great deal before the more overt and eerie symbolism is used, and even that is based on the inherent ghostliness a person could feel wandering an abandoned house where ghosts, literal or those of another's memories gone, linger. Even a little detail like painting the film's credits around the house and its floor in the opening adds uniqueness to the production. Thankfully, the Indiana University Cinema Archive also found virtue in this film made in their state, preserving the film as part of their own cultural history. As someone who has only now heard of House of Dreams, I am happy for its preservation and for more to learn of this. It is the kind of unique film, once ultra-obscure and in some ways still is, that is a compelling discovery to find.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eerie

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium