Yet unlike that earlier, simpler film, Deathdream comes with an obvious and devastating subtext. Like Clark’s previous, much lower-budgeted feature Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972) – also written with Alan Ormsby – Deathdream features supernatural resurrection, with Andy seemingly conjured back to life by his mother’s prayers and devotion. After all, the film’s opening sequence unequivocally shows Andy killed in action, shot in the head as he helps a fallen comrade. So his unannounced arrival late one night is regarded by the Brooks as a welcome miracle – and in a way, it is, given that the rumours of his demise were not in fact false. The Brooks had not been expecting Andy’s return – after all, they had earlier received a letter from the army reporting his death in combat, even if his doting mother Christine (Lynn Carlin) had refused to countenance that her beloved son really was dead. “I went through it too,” adds Charles, “but when I came back I didn’t act like that!”Ī veteran of the Second World War, a patriarch par excellence and the sort of man who happily sent America’s innocent youth into Indochina, Charles had bullied his sensitive young son into signing up for service – but Vietnam, a war still waging at the time Canadian director/co-writer Bob Clark made Deathdream (aka Dead of Night), was, at least in moral terms, an altogether murkier engagement than the fight against Hitler and Tojo, and ended up a conflict at home as much as abroad in an ideologically and generationally divided America. Why won’t he at least let us tell anyone that he’s home?” This is what Charles Brooks (John Marley) wonders about his son Andy (Richard Backus), recently returned from Vietnam, and a ghost of his former self. He sits out in the yard all day long, or up in his room. “Why is he so different? He won’t talk with us.
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