Dream No Evil (1970)

 

Director: John Hayes

Screenplay: John Hayes

Cast: Edmond O'Brien as Timothy MacDonald; Brooke Mills as Grace MacDonald; Vickie Schreck as young Grace; Marc Lawrence as the Undertaker; Michael Pataki as Reverend Paul Jessie Bundy; Paul Prokop as Patrick Bundy; Arthur Franz as John the County Psychiatrist; Donna Anders as Shirley; William Guhl as Sheriff Mike Pender

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Err Shirley, your duck is bleeding very badly.

From John Hayes - a working director whose career varied between World War II set action films to adult movies - Dream No Evil is part of a stint of horror films he made in the seventies, and is a woozy and idiosyncratic one you can happily slot among the many from the seventies. Arguably something like this, upon revisiting it, explains why I have felt ambivalence at times to the period of "elevated horror" movies from the 2010s on, or the late 2000s on films from figures like Ti West, christened auteurs but at times never capturing the unpredictability even a Dream No Evil possesses even when it has some obvious plot tropes front and centre.

Grace (Brooke Mills), in the prologue, is an orphaned child adopted into a church who, searching for her father, works with her future brother-in-law as an adult when he has taken it over and turned it into a travelling faith healing show, she part of a carnival stunt of her falling off a giant ladder for his preaching. With John Hayes having written the script as well, this becomes a proper creative piece for a genre and he emphasises a slow burner, set up with Jessie (Michael Pataki) the dubious preacher brother-in-law and her fiancée, a doctor who is developing a relationship with a female colleague where he is working from, all whilst Grace's story is one of reality fading away. From here, the film is peculiar, the narrator in particular an idiosyncratic touch as an inclusion, like this was a horror story for a TV show, far from a critique but tonally setting up the tone.

The biggest flaw is that you know what this twist is, that the narrator even gives it away early on bluntly, without hiding it, as Grace rescues her father from the morgue table but is unsure of reality. That the film has the narrator not hide this clearly emphasises that this, however, is of the least importance. The film's emphasis is on different priorities, as it takes a long passage of time to get to the central premise, but not without having used this time to spend it with the cast. It allows them to breathe until Grace is set on course by an undertaker with a second job as a pimp, whose older sex workers are catering to elderly men, the rumour her father having passed undercut when he gets up off the morgue table and gets a scalpel as an offensive weapon.

It takes forty minutes of an eighty minute film to reach this, but it is worth it, especially as it is clear the film realised the twist was obvious even without the narrator, working around it in both the drama before this point, and afterwards with its strange melodrama between reality and dream. The obviousness of the plot twist comes in mind that, even when it is explicitly dealt with onscreen, that it was clearly not the point as a film still goes on and even Grace herself debates this, questioning her father at one point for being an illusion. Instead what prove the apparent filler is the concern, such as the extended scenes of the fiancée trying to get a tired and strung out female colleague woken up to go to an important exam, character building where even the landlady who is there for that sole scene gets a lot to build herself with. That this is ultimately a tragedy, of what happens to Grace even if this follows genre trappings, including someone getting a scythe in the torso, is itself the most important thing to consider, this ultimately a bleak drama at its heart where we see someone unravel, a story John Hayes wanted to tell and the genre trappings far from undercutting this emphasises this central aspect. Dream No Evil, which has thankfully been re-evaluated and made more readily available, is among a lot of films which have had these characteristics, but together it really emphasises the worth of that older era of genre films from American independents when any, like this one, can shine.