Deathdream: The Vietnam Zombie Homecoming

The telegram arrives, the mother refuses it, and the son comes home anyway. That is the whole machine of Deathdream, and Bob Clark built it in 1974 out of a W. W. Jacobs story from 1902 and a war that was still running when the cameras rolled. American troop withdrawal completed in March 1973; the film shot in Brooksville, Florida, on a Canadian-American co-production budget that would embarrass a modern commercial. It has been released as Dead of Night, The Night Andy Came Home, and Whispers, which tells you how little anyone knew what to do with it.

What they had was a horror film in which the monster sits in a rocking chair wearing sunglasses and says almost nothing, and in which the real horror is a mother’s face as she decides to keep believing.

The Monkey’s Paw with a draft card

Jacobs’s story gives you three wishes, a dead son, and a knock at the door that the father mercifully prevents anyone from answering. Clark and screenwriter Alan Ormsby open that door. Christine Brooks (Lynn Carlin) hears that her son Andy has been killed in Vietnam and simply declines the information. She sits in the dark and insists he promised to come back. He does.

The adaptation is smart because it moves the wish from the parent’s grief to the culture’s. Every returning soldier in 1974 was a wish granted on somebody’s terms: the son goes away, something else comes back, and the household reorganises itself around the pretence that the two are the same person. Clark does not need a metaphor lecture. He just films Andy (Richard Backus) sitting in the family living room, chalk-white, unblinking, while his father tries to start a conversation about the future.

The casting does an enormous amount of unshowy work here. John Marley and Lynn Carlin, who play Charles and Christine, had both been in John Cassavetes’s Faces in 1968 — two performers trained in the long, unbearable American domestic argument, in the pause before someone says the cruel thing. Marley by then had also been the studio boss who wakes up beside a horse’s head in The Godfather. Put those two in a Florida bungalow with a corpse for a son and the film’s genre engine barely has to run. The marriage does the work.

Andy in the rocking chair

Backus’s performance is the reason the film survives. He plays Andy as a young man doing an impression of himself from memory — the smile arrives a half-second late, the head turns before the eyes do, the voice has the flatness of someone reading his own dialogue off a card. It reads as trauma to anyone who wants it to read as trauma, and it reads as a dead thing wearing a face to anyone who wants that instead. The film never adjudicates, which is why the ambiguity holds for the full running time rather than collapsing in act two.

Clark’s most efficient scene is the one everybody remembers: Andy and the family dog, in daylight, in front of the neighbourhood children. It runs almost without music. There is no gore, no lunge, no shock cut. A boy who used to be gentle demonstrates that he has stopped being able to feel the thing he is doing, and a group of kids watch it happen, and the camera holds. That is the entire postwar anxiety of the period rendered as one bad afternoon on a suburban lawn. The scene works because Clark refuses to release the tension with a sound cue. You get to sit in it, which is the correct punishment.

Notice too how little Andy is allowed to want. Most horror monsters have appetites the film can dramatise. Andy has a maintenance requirement — blood, taken with a syringe, administered to himself like a prescription — and the mechanical, medical quality of it is worse than hunger would be. He is not feeding. He is topping up. The clinical framing keeps sentimentality out of a premise that is otherwise built to invite it.

What Savini brought back

The makeup is credited to Tom Savini, working alongside Ormsby, and Deathdream sits at the very start of the run that would make Savini the most imitated effects artist of the era. Savini had served in Vietnam as a combat photographer. He came home having looked at a great deal of real damage through a viewfinder, and the decomposition work he does on Backus over the course of this film is the first time that experience shows up on screen under his name.

That biographical fact is not trivia. It explains the specific character of the makeup, which ages Andy in a direction most 1970s horror had no vocabulary for. He does not become a rubber ghoul. He desiccates. The skin tightens, the tissue retreats, the face becomes an object that used to be a face — closer to a photograph of a casualty than to a Universal monster. Compare it with the theatrical grotesques of the same decade and the difference in intent is obvious. Savini’s work here is documentary in temperament, and the film’s dread comes from the fact that the process is irreversible and visibly on a timer.

Clark had already made Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things in 1972, a jokier, campfire-shaped picture with a genuinely good final ten minutes. Deathdream is the film where he stopped winking. He would follow it in the same year with Black Christmas, which invented most of the grammar the slasher would spend a decade cashing in; readers chasing that lineage should start with our piece on Black Christmas and then look at the twelve films that invented the slasher. Two horror landmarks, one director, one calendar year, and then he went off and made Porky’s and A Christmas Story. The 1970s were like that. We have argued elsewhere why the decade earned its reputation, and Clark’s 1974 is exhibit A.

The real ancestor, and the real descendants

The obvious lineage runs to Romero — a walking dead man in an American house, shot cheap, aimed at the culture. The truer ancestor is the returning-soldier melodrama, the kind of film where the veteran comes home changed and the family has to absorb it, and Clark simply refuses to let the absorption succeed. Watch Deathdream and you are watching a version of that story where the pretending has a body count.

Its clearest descendant is Jacob’s Ladder, which took the same premise — Vietnam as a wound that will not stop happening — and moved it inside one man’s head. Where Clark keeps the horror in the living room and lets the family carry it, Jacob’s Ladder internalises it entirely. The other descendant is every zombie film that decided the dead should be pitiable; Romero got there with Martin four years later, giving his monster a razor blade and a nervous disposition for much the same reason Clark gave Andy a syringe.

Deathdream circulates on the cult and boutique-restoration circuit and turns up regularly in repertory horror programming; the restorations that surfaced in the last decade are a considerable improvement on the murky tape versions most of us met it through. It is worth the search.

The verdict: this is the most emotionally serious American horror film of its year, and its year included The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Hooper made the better nightmare. Clark made the better argument. A film about the dead that spends its energy on the living, on the specific cowardice of a family that would rather host a corpse than admit a loss, is a rarer and harder thing than a chainsaw. If you want the double bill, run it with Deranged, the other 1974 Ormsby picture, and marvel that one writer had that range in twelve months.

Spoilers below

The mechanics of the last act are where Clark’s discipline pays.

Andy’s decay accelerates, and the film starts closing his options one at a time. The trucker who gives him a lift, the doctor who gets too close to a diagnosis, the drive-in cinema where the pretence finally collapses in public — Clark stages the escalation as a sequence of doors shutting rather than a chase. By the time the police are involved, Andy has already lost.

The ending is the reason the film is remembered by the people who have seen it. Andy goes to the cemetery and digs. Christine helps him. That is the shot: a mother on her knees in the dirt, assisting her son into a grave, having spent the entire film refusing the fact of the grave. The wish is not undone by force. It is honoured, finally, by the person who made it, and the honouring is the worst thing she has ever done.

Clark holds on Christine’s face rather than cutting to spectacle. It is the same instinct as the dog scene — put the camera on the human cost and refuse to let a sound cue release the audience. Charles, meanwhile, has been destroyed by the opposite instinct: he tried to know, and knowing was survivable for nobody in that house.

The marker Andy has prepared for himself is the last joke, and it is not funny. He came home to bury himself, and the only thing his family could give him was the shovel.