‘Bad Dreams’ is a Good Time [Rotten Outlook]
Note: this piece discusses self-harm and suicide.
Director Andrew Fleming has had a curious career. His legacy is core to the gothic teen-angst classic The Craft, which he both wrote and directed. Years later, he’d helm Hamlet 2, one of the early aughts’ funniest big-screen comedies. Yet, his filmic start was with 1988’s Bad Dreams, A Nightmare on Elm Street riff with Dream Warriors’ own Jennifer Rubin in the lead (because, let’s be honest, Rubin was everywhere in the eighties and nineties). Following the template of Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, Bad Dreams is etched like a standard slasher with quasi-supernatural elements in its periphery. The story follows a coma patient (Rubin) who believes the ghost of her old cult leader has returned to reclaim her. Bad Dreams is oodles and oodles of silliness that remains consistently engaging. It’s fun, genuinely well-crafted, and subverts expectations throughout.
Bad Dreams, of course, was a critical failure. Yet curiously, Bad Dreams—at the time of release—was considered more than that. In 1988, some thought Bad Dreams was dangerous. Seminal critic Roger Ebert himself remarked “I’ve mentioned before that Hollywood needs an A rating, for “adults only,” to fit between the R and the X. Bad Dreams is an obvious candidate for an A rating,” further remarking that Bad Dreams is a “foul teenage vomitoriums in which the only message is that the world is evil and brutal. Critical reviews ran the gamut of Bad Dreams being dangerous to Bad Dreams being an outright nasty piece of work. Consider it The Texas Chain Saw Massacre effect, because outside of some admittedly crispy pyrotechnic gore effects, Bad Dreams isn’t all that violent. Most of its standout kills occur off-screen. Spoilers follow.
Also Read: Private Traps and Poor Meek Women in Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ and ‘Murder!’ [The New Flesh]
The thrust of Bad Dreams follows Rubin’s coma patient, Cynthia, and the goings-on in her group therapy session. Comatose for thirteen years after surviving the cult massacre, Cynthia is treated by both Dr. Alex Karmen (Bruce Abbott) and Dr. Berrisford (Harris Yulin). The intent is to help Cynthia recover from nightmares of Franklin Harris (Richard Lynch), her deceased cult leader. The group is made up of several other teenage patients, some of whom are ostensibly clairvoyant, others who suffer from violent outbursts. Shortly after her introduction to the group, however, the members flanking Cynthia die one by one in apparent suicides. And, they all coincide with Cynthia’s nightmares where Harris himself urges her to kill herself and join the other Unity Fields (her cult) victims in the afterlife. These teens drink formaldehyde, drown themselves, stab themselves, and are even torn to shreds by a giant industrial fan.
It is revealed, however, that Harris hasn’t actually returned. He truly is simply a manifestation of Cynthia’s trauma. Instead, Dr. Berrisford has been drugging the group members with psychogenic substances the entire time, hoping to drive them all to suicide to fortify his own body of research on teenage angst. It’s a very grunge, very dark motive, and likely the impetus for the critical reception at the time of release. It was one thing for a masked maniac to indiscriminately slaughter hedonistic teens. But it’s totally different for the teens to effectively kill themselves. Media scholars have long evaluated the consequences of suicide depictions in media, with it commonly accepted—in some capacity—those filmic depictions of suicide can incite similar behaviors in audiences suffering from ideation of their own.
Also Read: In Defense of Juno in ‘The Descent’
Bad Dreams is, after all, a slasher movie, and its deaths—which, again, principally occur off-screen—aren’t necessarily of the 13 Reasons Why variety. They’re quick, carnage blips, moments of narrative release that resemble in structure the deaths from sundry other slasher enterprises. The thematic underpinnings render them darker than they might otherwise be, but Fleming’s film is chiefly suggestive, not visceral. The “danger” angle doesn’t really work, then.
Bad Dreams is at best a fun, subversive slasher outfitted with stellar VFX work, and at worst, a plodding, derivative—to use Ebert’s own words—dead teenager movie. I personally fall in the former camp. No matter one’s perspective, few would disagree that Bad Dreams is a fascinating case study in the salience of horror. The genre so often responsible for curing and interrogating societal ills is often misappropriated as the cause. That isn’t true, whether it’s two or twenty teens falling into industrial fans.
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