Nightmares (1983)

We’ve barely gotten our bearings before the blood starts belching in our latest spooky season feature, when a police officer, ambushed after a traffic stop, gets brutally stabbed to death. This makes Officer Unlucky the fifth victim of an escaped mental patient / deranged killer, William Henry Glazier (Ving), who’s been plaguing the area for the past few weeks.

Now, we learn this by listening in on the evening news as a mother struggles to put her rowdy brood to bed, which also encourages citizens to stay indoors after dark until the killer is caught.

But once the kids are tucked in, Lisa (Raines) realizes she’s out of cigarettes and tries to sneak out of the house to go for more -- only to be caught by her husband (Lambie), who forbids this because, remember, there’s a psycho on the loose out there looking for his sixth involuntary pin-cushion.

However, with nicotine being a harsh mistress and all that, Lisa still manages to sneak out anyway. And after a few ominous twists and turns down a dark and lonely canyon road -- one involving a suspicious looking hitchhiker, and the other being an even more suspicious run-in with the spazoid store clerk at her destination (played by the great Anthony James) -- with a fresh pack of smokes in hand, a rattled Lisa heads for home only to realize her car is now dangerously low on gas.

Alas, with it being so late and all, every well-lit gas-stations in town are now all closed for the night, leaving Lisa with only one option: the spooky secluded all-night station on the side of that same canyon road. 

Of course, this comes complete with yet another suspicious character; the squirelly attendant (Sanderson), who seems less interested in filling up her tank and far more interested in coaxing the driver out of her car for … reasons -- he typed ominously… 

From the silents, to sound, to color, the anthology format has been around since the beginning of motion pictures. In fact: a staple of the cinematic horror genre, the anthology -- a series of unrelated vignettes linked together by a common theme or framing device -- would seem to have a brief renaissance during each passing decade, going through a period of waxing and waning as the cycle kept repeating.

But the format really seemed to catch fire in the 1960s, where you had Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (alias I tre volti della paura, 1963), Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (alias Kaidan, 1964) and Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror (1962).

Meanwhile, anthologies really took off in Great Britain, where Amicus was currently busting hump trying to compete with rival Hammer Studios and found great success exploiting the format.

Drawing inspiration from the small screen terrors of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962), which were then cross-pollinated with the four-color shocks of EC Comics, with their tales of the macabre and ironic consequences, resulting in Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), where a mysterious fortune teller ruins the day of several rail passengers, and Torture Garden (1967), where four more victims meet a similarly gruesome fate at the hands of a carnival barker.

Surging into the 1970s, this success would continue with more hosts, more tales, and more self-fulfilling demises with The House that Dripped Blood (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1973), and The Vault of Horror (1973) until this latest cycle essentially petered out with Tales that Witness Madness (1973) and From Beyond the Grave (1974).

But the format was soon dusted off again in the 1980s when author Stephen King and George Romero teamed up for Creepshow (1982), which was followed up with Steven Spielberg’s ill-fated adaptation of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), and then Cat’s Eye (1985), which was also based on a bunch of King’s short-stories.

Somewhere in the middle of all that came Joseph Sargent’s Nightmares (1983), which promised to bring four of your worst dreams to life that you’d never forget and, ergo, would never be the same after enduring them. Allegedly.

Now, unlike a lot of its à la carte brethren, Nightmares eschews any kind of linking wraparound segment. Instead, it just lets the audience cannonball right into the deep end of the pool after a brief opening credit sequence played out against a storm-ridden, Salvador Dali-esque hellscape as rendered by an Atari 2600, which dumps us right into the first of four segments, “Terror in Topanga,” which could also be read as one of the most elaborate anti-smoking PSAs ever committed to film. 

Yeah, by the time our nicotine-addicted driver arrives at the secluded gas station manned by the persistent and insistent gas jockey, it won’t take a genius to figure out where all of this is headed as the constantly absent-minded Lisa also forgot to lock her car when she went in for smokes at the other convenience store.

Thus, like the well-worn urban legend of yore, the real threat had been hiding in her backseat all along. 

Of course, while she resists the wrong man, the heroic attendant, despite Lisa’s best misguided efforts at self-preservation nearly thwarting her own rescue, manages to save her from the real killer in time.

From there, we abruptly cut to the next segment: “The Bishop of Battle,” where we find J.J. Cooney (Estevez) at the local arcade, hustling other gamers out of their quarters with the help of his friend, Zok (Jacoby).

And Cooney needs all the quarters he can get, too, as he tries to conquer the hottest new video game: Bishop of Battle. Seems no one has managed to reach the last level of the game yet. At least locally, as rumors abound that a couple of guys one town over managed to crack the legendary 13th level, meaning it can be done, which Cooney echoes constantly as one attempt after another, and quarter after quarter, only ends in defeat.

And so, our hero plays on and on -- and on and on and on and on -- until the arcade closes and Cooney is forcibly evicted by the arcade manager on a nightly basis.

Now, at this point, things have gotten so obsessively-compulsively bad for Cooney his grades at school are even starting to slip. This triggers an intervention with his parents, who ban their son from the arcade and ground him indefinitely.

Sticking with the established theme of blundering ahead anyway, sure enough, Cooney still sneaks out after dark and breaks into the arcade, where he finally manages to beat the game. But as he celebrates his digital victory, things go staggeringly awry as the console seems to violently implode, releasing all the digital foes from the game into the real world, who swarm and attack the disbelieving witness.

And as the laser-bolts fly and the room is rocked with explosions, using the now-functioning laser-pistol from the game, Cooney defends himself, destroying the arcade in the process. 

Then, as this firefight rages on, Cooney manages to escape into the adjacent parking garage, where he falsely believes he is safe until the Battling Bishop materializes out of the ether and closes in on our terrified Player One.

Jump to the following morning, where a search for the missing teen brings his family and friends to the arcade just as it opens. And while all the other games are still trashed, the Bishop of Battle has magically healed itself, whose screen flashes to life with a few quick frames of Cooney before he turns into a digitized character, who claims to be the new Bishop, who then challenges the next player to insert a quarter as those gathered around watch agog.

Next, we crash-cut again to our next tale of the supernatural: “The Benediction,” which focuses on a priest named MacLeod (Henriksen), who is suffering through a personal crisis of faith. Seems he can’t come to existential terms with the Almighty always allowing bad things to happen to good people after the violent death of an innocent young boy from his congregation.

And so, no longer able to make Good and Evil compute properly in the Divine Scheme of things, he quits his parish in a small desert community, packs up his car, and prepares to leave. But not before another priest (Plana) tries and fails one last time at a reconsideration and reconciliation. He then inadvertently gives his departing friend a handy jug of holy water as a going away present to keep him hydrated on his travels -- physically, not spiritually, insists MacLeod.

From there, this morality play quickly morphs into a gonzo riff of Spielberg’s Duel (1971), where a psychotic trucker tries to run down a hapless driver, mashed-up with Elliot Silverstein’s The Car (1977), where a demonic hot-rod terrorizes a desert community, and an old Looney Tunes cartoon for reasons you wouldn’t believe even if I told you, which I will.

Just watch and boggle as the ex-priest is accosted on the road by someone (or some thing) in a black GMC 4x4 (-- which, if I didn't know any better, appears to have been swiped off the set of The Fall Guy and painted black).

Some wild stunt-driving ensues as the protagonist’s car is reduced to a pile of scrap, leading to a pretty intense game of cat and mouse; or mole and mouse, as at one point the truck takes to the earth and starts plowing around like Bugs Bunny looking for Pismo Beach. (Told ya you wouldn’t believe it.)

Anyhoo, remember that holy water? Yeah, me too, and so does MacLeod, who uses it like the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, which vaporizes the devil truck. And this miracle will eventually lead him down a road of personal salvation.

This redemption also leads us to our last episode: “Night of the Rat,” which dumps us in the suburbs, where a husband and wife are kerfuffling over how to handle a most probable rat infestation.

Seems Claire (Cartwright) and their daughter, Brooke (Andersen), have been hearing something crawling around inside the walls; and assuming it's rats, she wants to call in a professional exterminator.

Unfortunately, her husband Steven (Masur) is the worst kind of stupid. He thinks they’re just hearing things at first, then refuses to cough up the money for professional help and buys a bunch of cheap traps instead. And while this proves moderately successful with the death of one rat, this seems to escalate the violence of the rest of the infesting rodents as things start falling apart all around them.

Then, after finding what’s left of the family cat, Claire takes matters into her own hands and calls in an exterminator (Hague), who surveys the extensive damage and claw marks. He then finds evidence these vermin have chewed holes into the walls all over the house, creating a virtual maze, with access to every room; and there’s even more evidence that they’ve been chewing on the power cables, too. But what really concerns the exterminator is the size of these claw scratches and bite-marks.

Fearing they are dealing with a Das Teufel Nagatier -- a nigh indestructible “Devil Rat" -- the exterminator tries to warn the couple of the real danger they’re in, but Steven, again, being an idiot, will hear none of it. This, of course, comes back to bite him in the ass as a night fraught with tension and terror follows as things really start to go bumping in the night.

Sure, the segment kinda falls apart with the big revelation of the actual culprit as it menaces Brooke (-- a pig-sized, green-screened in live rat), who seems to be able to communicate with it. Thus and lo, together, they teach this couple a much needed lesson in family bonding.

And believe me, you have no idea how hard it was to type that last bit while trying to keep a straight face, which brings our collective nightmares to an end.

Okay, then. While the anthology film kinda petered out in the 1970s theatrically, the format would find a safe refuge on the small screen.

This was due in most part to Dan Curtis, who sent many children, like me, to bed with a bad case of the drizzles back in the day thanks to his anthology telefilms Trilogy of Terror (1975), and that damnable Zuni doll, and Dead of Night (1977) -- anyone else remember the “Bobby” segment? I sure do. Not to mention his non-anthology TV terrorizers The Night Stalker (1972), The Night Strangler (1973), and the resulting spin-off series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975).

The Oakland Tribune (March 4, 1975). 

Thus, we reach the dawn of the 1980s, where several low-budget slasher films started lighting it up at the box-office with the releases of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). And so, it should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that several TV executives were looking to cash in on this horror boom, too, scheming to draw in that same younger viewing demographic.

Prime-Time guru Aaron Spelling -- no stranger to TV terrors with telefilms like A Taste of Evil (1971), A Cold Night’s Death (1973), Satan’s School for Girls (1973) and Cruise into Terror (1978), all highly recommended -- reached out to author Stephen King, hoping to adapt some of his short stories after Carrie (1978) hit big and the successful broadcast of Salem’s Lot (1979).

The Los Angeles Times (February 3, 1978). 

But as King told Bill Kelley for the Fort Lauderdale News (November 28, 1981), “I didn’t want my work watered down by some network censors, so I was holding out. But Aaron was persistent.”

According to King, they discussed an old episode of the TV series Thriller (1960-1962) and its rather graphic (for the time) adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s short story, Pigeons from Hell (S1:E36, 1961). It’s a fantastic adaptation, truly unsettling, and a criminally underappreciated piece of horror TV history. (Last check you can stream it on YouTube. Check it out. Trust me.)

Said King, “It had a man walk down a dark flight of stairs with an axe buried in his forehead. (FTR: King was misremembering, in truth a man with a bloodied head-wound and armed with a gore-spattered axe chases another man down some steps.) If [Spelling] could guarantee me something like that, we’ve got a deal.” But when Spelling waffled and offered they could have an axe in a shoulder instead, King officially bowed out, saying, “No, no … forget it.” And that pretty much ended that as King would go the theatrical route instead.

Enter producer Peter Fischer, who found William Sackheim ready, willing, and able to have Universal sign on to produce his proposed horror anthology TV series Darkroom (1981-1982). “The show was really created by several people bouncing ideas off each other, starting with Bill Sackheim,” said Fischer (Kelley, 1981). “Universal was very high on it, and the [ABC] network’s been looking for a good anthology premise.”

The Los Angeles Times (November 27, 1981).

And this premise revolved around a photographer recounting the macabre tales behind certain photos as he developed them inside his crimson-tinged darkroom. Simple. However…

“We can’t go into graphic violence,” said Fischer (ibid). “I do think there’s an audience for the Friday the 13th type of graphic horror film in theaters but not in the atmosphere of television. I don’t think people want that brought into their home. There’s just no way that can be done on network television. So we’re going into offscreen violence -- violence of the mind. We’re getting into grisly things, but you’re not going to see them explicitly.”

Like a lot of folks of my age strata who were around when it first aired, the only clear memory I have of Darkroom was the episode where a son's plastic army men come to life and attack and kill his father, which had less to do with the allegorical tale on the horrors of Vietnam brought home and more to do with an obsession over my old Marx Battleground and Navarone playsets.

It was these same fleeting memories that drew me in for another look after tumbling down a deep YouTube rabbit-hole a while back. And it was an eye-opener, too. Often compared to The Night Gallery (1969-1973), the nastier and far meaner Darkroom owes more to those same EC horror comics of William Gaines and Al Feldstein, like Vault of Horror or Crime Suspense Stories.

With James Coburn serving as our sinister master of ceremonies for each tale of regret and woe, after an opening credit sequence that would give anybody the Screaming Wilhelms, I was kind of amazed by the lack of moralizing found therein; and how cynically downbeat and gleefully brutal the series was. Because it sure seemed to me, with each and every episode, someone gets killed, whether they deserved it or not.

Be it those that did -- the murderous biker in “Catnip” or the evil pimp who picked on the wrong granddaughter in “Needlepoint.” Or those who did not -- the girl who cried vampire in “The Boogeyman Will Get You,” the poor stranded motorist who gets fed to a monster by some old coot in a glorified pick-pocketing scheme in “The Partnership,” and even the dad who is killed by his son's toys in “Siege of August 31.” All of them met a dire and fairly gruesome fate by the end of the phantom photographer’s fractured fable.

The only episode that deviated from this well-worn path was the protagonist in “Make-Up,” where a young hood comes into the possession of an old actor's makeup case (-- think Lon Chaney Sr.). This magically bestowed upon him the visage of the characters on the labels, which allowed him to take revenge on the gangsters who double-crossed him without fear of repercussion.

Sackheim would secure a deal with ABC to broadcast the series, where things started off swimmingly. “The network, thankfully, has really backed us up,” said Fisher (ibid) “But they are understandably, well, nervous … If you want to do quality television, you’ve got to kick and scream and really take chances. We’re not doing horror, we’re not doing gore, so our differences with the network would be more on philosophical grounds … We’ve got some black, macabre humor, but not comedy. It’s a suspense series. We want it [to be] atmospheric.”

And on that front I would say Fischer and the others succeeded. As I watched, I kept seeing author Robert “Psycho” Bloch in the script-writing credits, along with adaptations of stories by Cornell Woolrich, William Nolan and Robert McCammon. Also, in the directing credits I saw Paul Lynch -- Prom Night (1980), Humongous (1982), Rick Rosenthol -- Halloween II (1981), and Curtis Harrington -- Night Tide (1961), The Killing Kind (1973) -- more than once.

There was also an amazing amount of star-wattage, too, including David Carradine (-- who gets fed to that monster), Billy Crystal (-- who found that makeup case), and Helen Hunt (-- as the girl with vampire issues), along with Brian Dennehy, Ronnie Cox, Gloria DeHaven, and Samantha Eggar. Not to mention the metric ton of character actors and familiar TV faces leavened into this thing like Claude Akins, Andrew Prine, Pat Buttram (-- who fed Carradine to that monster), and Whit Bissell.

Alas, given the subject matter, no matter how watered down, from the very beginning one could sense Darkroom wasn't destined to last very long. Before the cameras even rolled there was already trouble just getting the scripts past the censors let alone a finished episode. This would cause the execs at ABC to panic, who then cut the series back to only seven episodes instead of 13 with an option for six more if the ratings were solid enough.

And so, caught up in the current backlash against TV violence from the public, and a murderous Friday night time-slot opposite of ratings juggernaut Dallas, Darkroom would debut in November, 1981, and got absolutely pasted. It also triggered an avalanche of complaints from viewers and parent groups who found it too intense and unseemly.

The Sacramento Bee (December 6, 1981). 

Ergo, despite some favorable critical response, Darkroom proved unsustainable on all fronts -- from standards and practices issues to budgetary woes, explaining why the series would be unceremoniously yanked off the air in January, 1982. But a late ratings surge on those later episodes saw the show brought back in reruns, where it all ran again between June and July, 1982, but it wasn’t enough to save the series and ABC officially cancelled it.

Probably nowhere near as interesting as I'm making it out to be, but, no matter how misguided things got, I still dug the hell out of Darkroom. Turns out I was remembering the series better than I thought, too. I had just misremembered a couple of stories as belonging to Tales from the Darkside (1983-1988) or the rebooted Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985-1989) and Twilight Zone (1985-1989) -- two series where a good chunk of the creative forces behind Darkroom wound up landing when the lights came on at ABC.

Now, for the longest time an entrenched rumor speculated that several unused or un-aired episodes of Darkroom, which were deemed too disturbing to air, were repackaged and released theatrically as Nightmares. Turns out that’s not quite true. Close, but not quite.

Seems Nightmares can be traced back to producers Andrew Mirisch and Christopher Crowe, who were hired by NBC to create their own horror anthology program to compete with their rival network. Both had some experience with this kind of format with The Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew Mysteries (1977-1979), and Crowe had actually worked on Darkroom as a producer and screenwriter, which is probably how that long held assumption got started.

“Horror lends itself to the short form,” said Crowe in an interview with the AP’s Vernon Scott (The Santa Barbara News-Press, September 8, 1983), who would also script three of the four segments for Nightmares. “There are some legitimate stories that should not be made to go two hours on film. All too often a good horror story is stretched beyond logical limits, then it becomes tedious. It’s a sin to destroy a good idea by lengthening it beyond its eloquence. It’s liberating to explore ideas that are eloquent in short form.”

As envisioned, Nightmares would be a half hour show featuring a new self-contained tale each week. But to get it sold and go to series the duo hired prolific TV and feature film director Joseph Sargent -- Colossus the Forbin Project (1970), The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (1974) and, yes, JAWS the Revenge (1987) -- to shoot the two-hour pilot movie. But when it was finished, the network got cold feet after the harsh reaction to Darkroom and decided to just shelve it.

However, someone at Universal, NBC’s parent company, got wind of this and decided to try and salvage the $2 million in production costs by repackaging it as a theatrical release. As for the switch from something meant for TV to the big screen, Crowe saw an opportunity, saying (ibid), "Television suffers constraints of mass audience appeal. It can’t offend anyone, eliminating controversial subject matter and deep conflict; not to mention sex, violence, and political concepts.”

This would explain some of the obvious inserts in Nightmares, most notably the graphic and gratuitous murder of the highway patrolman at the beginning of the first segment. But that was about it and the film barely earns its R-rating. Definitely would’ve qualified for a PG-13 but that hadn’t been invented quite yet. No. That would have to wait until after the next summer releases of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Dreamscape, and Gremlins (all 1984).

But Crowe assured Scott of three things: first -- that none of the stories in Nightmares featured or relied on the slice ‘n’ dice gore of the current slasher trend; and second -- none were set in the age-old gothic Transylvanian tradition; and thirdly -- none were meant as contemporary morality tales. This was to distance themselves from the higher profile revival of the Twilight Zone movie, which hit big screens earlier that same year.

Said Crowe, “I think we have a fast-paced, exciting and different sort of movie. Spielberg took the horror genre into contemporary times -- Poltergeist (1982), Twilight Zone -- which makes it more immediate and identifiable when something goes askew and eerie. You expect horror in a gothic castle or haunted house, but not on a modern highway, in a suburban house, or in a video game arcade. In those settings it is more effective when horror strikes. We’ve given each [segment] its own identity and feeling, including the music, which goes from punk rock in one to a Gregorian chant in another.”

The Grand Island Independent (November 10, 1982). 

And there was nothing more contemporary than "The Bishop of Battle segment." At the time, not only was there a backlash against horror tales in any medium, but arcades and video games were coming under fire, too, for their addictive practices, to encouraging juvenile delinquency, to ailments ranging from Pac-Man elbow to nerve damage in fingers and wrists from using and abusing joysticks and fire buttons all day.

“I really had played video games only three or four times,” admitted Emilio Estevez in an interview with columnist Bob Thomas (The Bryan-College Station Eagle, September 15, 1983), who starred in the segment. “I spent $25-30 in an arcade and became slightly addicted. I discovered there are addicts who become completely obsessed with the games. It’s almost a physical addiction, like cigarettes, and some kids steal quarters from their parents so they can play.”

According to the credits, Dean Mitzner, who had worked on TRON (1982), was the production designer for the video game sequence, which went so far over-budget it nearly sank the pilot before it was even completed. In hindsight, perhaps they should’ve saved some of that money to try again with the giant rat FX at the end of segment four?

But the studio felt enough money had been spent and Nightmares would be released on September 9, 1983, with little fanfare, no press screenings, and very little spent on advertising  --never a good sign to any critic worth their salt. However, there appeared to be a national cross-promotion between local radio stations and theaters across about a dozen states for a special midnight sneak preview / pajama party for Nightmares, where you were admitted free if you showed up in your jammies. But the number of free tickets corresponded with where the radio station fell on the FM dial. 

The Daily News (August 27, 1983).

But this did little to engender critics. As David Chute of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner explained about the lack of press screenings (September 13, 1983), “It usually means that a studio thinks it’s got a real stinker on its hands. All too often, gloomy expectations for a film become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nightmares may have been condemned to death by the very people who ought to be supporting it.

“[The film] is no big deal,” said Chute. “The bloodthirsty exploitation crowd I saw it with on Hollywood Boulevard was audibly impatient with the ironic and mostly gore-free approach. It’s just a pleasant little chiller that deserves better handling from Universal … If this one dies a dismal death it won’t necessarily be the movie's fault.”

The Evening News (September 15, 1983).

“Nothing spoils a horror story faster than a stupid victim, and Nightmares, an anthology of four supposedly scary episodes, has plenty of those,” were the first shots fired by New York Times critic Janet Maslin (September 19, 1983), and it only got worse from there. “Instead of making you want to wake up as quickly as possible, Nightmares is guaranteed to put you into an even deeper slumber,” concluded Richard Freedman of the San Francisco Examiner (September 9, 1983). And Fred Herman of The Modesto Bee added, “Nightmares wants to be the 1983 summer sleeper ‘you’ll never forget.’ It’s anything but. [It] isn’t really downright bad -- just bland and derivative.”

Said Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle (September 10, 1983), “If you’re a gore or splatter fan, forget Nightmares as a memorable moment of hemoglobin. There’s not much specific violence (or sex, for that matter) in this film. I don’t especially like anthology-style movies, but I’ll try not to let that taint my brilliant critical observations about Nightmares and why it’s destined to be only a passing fancy. A slightly grating one at that.”

The Houston Chronicle (September 12, 1983). 

Others found the film too derivative, like the El Paso Herald-Post’s Clay Hutto (September 16, 1983). “Like most movies this summer, Nightmares is not creating as much as imitating other material. The fact Nightmares was originally designed for television is not surprising. The film has a television sense to it. The movie is thoroughly conventional in its conception. It’s not that Nightmares is boring; it’s just not original or interesting.”

Jeff Simon of The Buffalo News (September 16, 1983) agreed, but still felt the film had a few redeeming qualities. “The pulp-schlock way of constructing public nightmares is to steal them from others. That’s what Nightmares does.” But even “with all the petty thievery and juvenile goings on, Nightmares still manages to be a slick piece of work … It works even though you know everything that is about to happen [happens].”

Lansing State Journal (September 16, 1983).

Meanwhile, comparisons to the recently released Twilight Zone adaptation were inevitable. “Nightmares borrows from other films, and in structure, production, and acting it is little more than a bargain basement variation on Twilight Zone: The Movie,” wrote J. Butkewicz for The Times Leader (September 15, 1983). “But unlike that feature, audiences for Nightmares have few preconceptions. Twilight Zone had to live up to the much lauded TV series and suffocating pre-publicity. It never survived audiences expectations. Nightmares doesn’t suffer the burden of a previous model. Nightmares just suffers from its own mediocrity.”

But not all the reviews were negative -- at least not totally. Terry Lawson of The Journal Herald (September 10, 1983) found the film’s TV origins to be a boon, saying, “Oddly, all those restrictions conspire to make Nightmares better than any other so-called horror or fright film this summer. Stripped of the freedom to show us graphic bloodletting or titillate us with gratuitous sexual situations, writer Crowe and director Sargent have been forced to rely on pure suspense and good storytelling to make their movie work. And if nothing here really scares us silly, nothing makes us sick either, and for that alone they deserve at least a small amount of praise.”

The Journal Herald (September 10, 1983).

Ken McMillan of the Southtown Star (September 25, 1983) concurred. “It may be another instance of ‘the less one expects, the less likely he’ll be disappointed,’ or it may be that Nightmares is, as its advertising states, the sleeper hit of the season. Either way, Nightmares provides four neat little thrillers that are told with skill and provide suspense without the usual overkill of excessive bloodletting and gore … This one should have people squirming and suspicious, even upon their return home from the theater.”

And we’ll give Jay Carr of the Detroit Free Press (September 20, 1983) the last word. “Nightmares is a lot less pretentious than the movie version of The Twilight Zone, and a lot easier to take. It, too, consists of four separate episodes, each bent on infusing terror into everyday landscapes. It doesn’t bother with such niceties as building suspense, and nobody gets terribly serious about acting. Nightmares just throws stuff at you. But something about its unadorned straightforwardness earns it a few points. If it doesn’t aspire to be more than a cinematic comic book, a Tales from the Crypt, for people who don’t read, it at least succeeds on this level. In other words, it has the courage of its cliches.”

But Universal’s gamble paid off as the film would bring in just over $6.5 million despite a near universal critical panning.

Mirisch and Crowe would fare better when they revived Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1985, where it competed with the similarly resurrected Twilight Zone and Amazing Stories (1985-1987). And with the proliferation of syndicated TV packages and original series on pay channels, which tended to take less heat from network censors, the anthology format once more had a boom:

Tales from the Darkside, Monsters (1988-1990), The Hitchhiker (1983-1997), Tales from the Crypt (1989-1996), Freddy’s Nightmares (1988-1990), The Ray Bradbury Theater (1986-1992), and The Outer Limits (1995-2002). One could almost consider it the golden age of the genre format.

But that also led to a lot of frustration on the viewers part, trying to remember which segment belonged to what program or film. As the old joke goes: Was that a Zone or an Outer Limits? A tale from the Darkside or the Crypt or the Unexpected? A Way Out or a Thriller? Only the host knows for sure.

I honestly don’t remember seeing Nightmares in the theater back in 1983, odd since it was kind of in my wheelhouse back then; but I must’ve seen it somewhere because I clearly remembered the video game segment, where Estevez contracts Pac-Man Fever and gets sucked into a video game.

But the fairly hysterically-executed superimposed rat terrorizing the family? I honestly thought that one belonged to Tales from the Darkside. And I could’ve sworn the hitchhiking segment, where the battered victim keeps repeating his mantra, “Hey, lady, thanks for the ride!” originated here. But, nope, that was from Creepshow 2 (1987).

Sadly, at the time of publishing, Nightmares doesn't appear to be legitimately streaming anywhere but is available on both DVD and Bluray. I'm just not sure if there is enough there to warrant a purchase of a hard copy. 

Still, and overall, Nightmares ain’t all that terrible and actually overachieves in a few spots with some genuine chills, but it just can’t quite shake its small screen origins. Not necessarily a bad thing, but the difference is blatantly apparent.

Originally posted on October 19, 2016, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

Nightmares (1983) Universal Pictures / EP: Andrew Mirisch, Alex Beaton / P: Christopher Crowe / AP: Alan Barnette / D: Joseph Sargent / W: Christopher Crowe, Jeffrey Bloom / C: Mario DiLeo, Gerald Perry Finnerman / E: Michael Brown, Rod Stephens / M: Craig Safan / S: Cristina Raines, Joe Lambie, Lee Ving, William Sanderson, Emilio Estevez, Billy Jayne, Lance Henriksen, Tony Plana, Richard Masur, Veronica Cartwright, Bridgette Andersen