Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

In W. Scott Poole’s excellent book, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror, he traces the roots of modern horror to the First World War. A recent watch of Nosferatu (1922) reminded me of this connection, coming only a few years after the war which decimated the young men of F.W. Murnau’s Germany. Those who did survive were changed by the experience, a generation nearly wiped out in a plague of nationalism that swept across Europe. 

Bob Clark’s Dead of Night–later retitled to the more familiar Deathdream–reinterprets the vampire myth and transposes it to Vietnam War-era America. By the time of filming in 1972, the war was highly polarized, and American veterans of the war had thrown their medals on the steps of the Capitol in protest. The film opens with Andy (Richard Backus) getting shot and killed in Vietnam, with the words of his mother, Christine (Lynn Carlin), seemingly echoing in his final thoughts, reminding him that he promised to come home. When his family receives notification of his death, Christine refuses to believe it, and sure enough, Andy shows up a few hours later, seemingly alive, much to the relief of his mother, father (John Marley), and sister Cathy (Anya Ormsby). 

Over the next few days, Andy displays strange behavior, and the trucker who drove the hitchhiking veteran home is found dead with a puncture wound in his arm–obliquely referring to rates of heroin addiction among Vietnam veterans as well as vampirism. While the family and their friends want things to return to the way they were before Andy was deployed as soon as possible, Andy’s condition continues to escalate, showing a mix of real post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms (the original Nosferatu audience would have called it shell shock) and ghoulish behavior. He is violent to neighborhood kids, kills his father’s beloved dog, and also takes his doctor’s blood to inject it into himself via syringe. By the end of the film, Andy’s father has taken his own life, and Andy has thrown himself into a makeshift grave of his own making while his mother sobs beside it, whimpering “Andy's home. Some boys never come home.”

Deathdream is nothing if not direct, but if it only depicted a veteran who came back wrong with a ghoulish appearance and need for blood, I doubt it would resonate as hard as it does. Clark had two horror movies released in 1974. Deathdream hit theaters in August, and the immortal classic Black Christmas–a foundational text of the slasher subgenre–followed in December. Both of these films attack toxic masculinity head on but in different ways. Where Black Christmas depicts the stalking of young women by an unknown obsessive, Deathdream shows the effect of a toxic culture on young men.

The main avenue for this depiction is Andy’s father, Charles. After his son returns, Charles is constantly bad mouthing him. He doesn’t understand why his son has been so fucked up by his experiences in the war. “I saw things and didn’t come back like that!” he complains. When Christine tries to show compassion and tell Charles to have empathy for their son, he throws it back in her face: “He enlisted because he didn’t want you to turn him into a mama’s boy.” While Charles is likely dealing with a massive case of projection, it is easy to conjecture about Andy’s home life before he enlisted, showing the kind of prison that toxic masculinity creates: conform to the ideal or be labeled as queer or feminine. It is never made clear if Charles fought in World War II or Korea, but regardless, the combination of brutal jungle fighting conditions, unclear objectives, and a cold reception at home compounded the stress placed on Vietnam veterans. All of this is succinctly included in Deathdream, and watching it is as heartbreaking as it is scary.

Deathdream writer Alan Ormsby later wrote Schrader’s Cat People (1982), which ends with a man literally putting a woman in a cage as a way to prove that she has become docile. Toxic masculinity is a cage, and trying to break out of it can make you feel like one of the walking dead. A ghoul puppeted by society’s worst tendencies.