The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Dreams are the thought processes that occur when we sleep. Meaning has frequently been attributed to dreams ranging from ancient cultures who believed that dreams held auguries and omens to the language of symbolism attributed to them by Sigmund Freud.
In genre cinema, dreams are frequently seen as having precognitive power and able to predict events before they occur. The Surrealist movement is frequently fascinated with dreams and makes their play of symbolism literal. Some other films involve people entering into dreams or daydreams for fantastical adventures.
Dream themes found enormous popularity in the horror movie with A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and its villain Freddy Krueger, a boogeyman who kills people in their dreams. A host of sequels and copycat films about dream-invading killers followed for several years after.
Popular in the silent era was the All a Dream Ending where the story pulled back at the end to reveal that everything that transpired was a dream. The horror film also makes frequent use of the dream jump where something disturbing is pulled back from to then reveal it is a character only dreaming. Both are now clichés from overuse.
There is also the dreamscape film about people who have the ability to venture into the dreams of others or else the use of devices that allow them to do so. Also of note in the late 2010s have been a number of films dealing with the horrors of sleep paralysis.
This is another one of Robert Rodriguez’s home made children’s films that takes off in a wackily gonzo manner. The results are uneven but often cutely appealing
Another venture into the sleep paralysis theme. A film that has an amateurism on every level and looks as though it made by people who failed the first year of a film school program
A very obscure title, this is a fascinatingly enigmatic and arty film in which Edward Woodward has a dream of having a car crash that then starts coming true as he sets out
This is a romance film with conceptual ambitions that starts out by killing the heroine in the first scene and then has she and the guy meeting in lucid time-travelling dreams
Story of the sole survivor of a cult mass suicide waking from a coma to be haunted by the cult leader begging her to join them. This becomes a derivative of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films before a contrived ending
A film that feels like it should be an erotic thriller but isn’t. Antonio Sabato Jr. rescues an amnesiac Annalynne McCord who proceeds to exert a fatal influence
When Rodney Ascher’s incredibly uncanny documentary The Nightmare came out, I predicted sleep paralysis would become a new theme for horror. This starts as a sleep paralysis film but veers off to become something else
Delightful and completely charming Rene Clair comedy about a daydreamer. A much better version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty than either of the official film adaptations
An overlooked Mike Flanagan film about a kid with the ability to bring his dreams to life, this reads like a cross between an A Nightmare on Elm Street copy and the Joe Dante Twilight Zone – The Movie episode
Tatty British film that feels like an attempt to crossbreed A Nightmare on Em Street with The Silence of the Lambs. Star Elizabeth Hurley sued to prevent the film’s release.
Animated version of the Roald Dahl tale about the friendship between a young girl and a Big Griendly Giant, this is simply made but has an appealing mix of eccentricity and sweet charms
Steven Spielberg adapts the Roald Dahl story. Despite the film bombing at the box-office, it is one of considerable charms. Spielberg doesn’t produce another E.T. but then he hasn’t delivered another Hook either
Scott Derrickson makes a sequel to his earlier hit The Black Phone. The original was a modest but self-contained story, whereas this has to do some work before coming out as an original and effective follow-up
Scott Derrickson delivers an eerie film from a Joe Hill story about a child who is abducted and imprisoned by a serial killer but then receives message from beyond the grave on an old telephone.
A ghastly fairytale adaptation. Classic Hollywood director George Cukor took several stars to shoot in the Soviet Union and the results look like a badly choreographed amateur pantomime, lacking in any essential whimsy
Low-budget but not uninteresting film that throws in a mind-bending mix of aliens, dream and alternate realities
Indie film that channels a Lost Highway vibe in which Douglas Smith searches for a missing girlfriend Jena Malone and then wakes up in an entirely different life where he cannot be certain which life is real and which a dream
Terry Gilliam’s satire on Nineteen Eighty-Four is a darkly brilliant work – it is a madly out of control film but is filled moments of wild imagination and black-than-black humour than make it an unnerving ride
Carnival of Souls was rediscovered as a cult classic in the 1980s. Then there was this remake that misses all of the haunted mood of the original in favour of makeup effects jumps and reality blurrings that make no sense
The dreamscape film was given extraordinary life by Tarsem Singh in his directorial debut who transforms a fairly ordinary script with visuals and costuming that is out of this world
The almost indescribable second film from Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet of Delicatessen fame, a Dicekensian street urchin fantasy that takes place in a stunningly designed almost-familiar world filled with eccentric characters
An extraordinary Russian film that takes place in a uniquely designed dreamworld shared by people in comas. This has an imagination and conceptual grasp that rivals Inception
A Canadian-made horror film about a teenage runaway who signs into a mysterious dream institute that conduct experiments that open up something disturbing inside her
In his first film, Neil Jordan adapts an Angela Carter story that retells Little Red Riding Hood as a werewolf film that becomes a fascinating swim of fairytale and sexual allegory
The little-seen final film from Hammer director John Gilling, an Anglo-horror styled work about resurrected Knights Templar
Adult animated film set in a zoo for cryptozoological animals, this has a great premise and eye-poppingly psychedelic visuals
A no expectation adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreams of the Witch-House from a director down the low-budget end of the spectrum that does some surprisingly modest things
Celebrated British horror anthology, which tells five ghost stories and tales of the supernatural. All are strong stories with The Ventriloquist’s Dummy segment in particular having become regarded as a classic
An early Wes Craven film about a series of killings among an Amish-like cult led by Ernest Borgnine. Craven’s eerie dream horrors sit alongside a confusing script
A dully directed imitator of A Nightmare on Elm Street, although a series of highly contrived twists eventually reveal that there are no dream horrors after all
A Woody Allen film in which he plays a writer on his way to receive an award. The film drifts in and out of a series of vignettes and stories he has written, including a number of fantastic interludes, with highly amusing effect
One of the forgotten entries in the mid-1980s spate of bodyswap comedies where elderly Jason Robards finds himself in teenager Corey Feldman’s body. This suffers from a very confused script
Jemma Redgrave is a socialite who is plagued by nightmares that take over her life. A British attempt to copy A Nightmare on Elm Street that collapses into a muddle of symbolism and reality-blurring dreams
Head-scratchingly odd fantasy film produced by John Boorman and family where a young boy is transported to a world where he mingles with characters from fiction
A film in which Nicolas Cage keeps appearing in other people’s dreams. This goes from an initial wild absurdism to something that becomes bitingly satiric as it takes on instant celebrity and Cancel Culture
The original version of Inception almost, featuring psychics entering into people’s dreams and then attempts to dream assassinate the US President. Despite much promise, the idea is prosaic in its handling
A Virtual Reality film that came out the same year as The Matrix and prefigures the dreamscape themes of Inception. Despite the possibilities, this has a dreary pace that very nearly approaches falling asleep
The very first dreamscape film, prefiguring many other films that have taken up the theme, most notably Inception. By contrast this is a dull affair that lets most of the possibilities slip through its hands.
A vehicle for Marty Feldman, a peculiar comedy where he plays an advertising executive who has Walter Mitty-like sexual fantasies
The story of the drug-addicted heir Andrew Getty determined to be a filmmaker is almost as fascinating as the one film he made before his death. The film is an extraordinary work, filled with jaw-dropping surrealistic imagery
Darkly subversive film about an alienated teenage girl, this digs its teeth into family values and depicts the uncomfortableness of puberty. On the other hand, this is only rarely the horror film others have reviewed it as
This is regarded as one of the worst sequels ever made, featuring many of the actors but with John Boorman stepping in as director. It’s an incomprehensible mishmash of ideas but not without some laudable elements
Joe Dante’s successor to Gremlins and a box-office flop. This nevertheless evokes a genteel sense of wonder in its story with Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as teen inventors who build a backyard spaceship
A really great and overlooked anthology of fantastical tales from the 1940s. The three stories told here by Julien Duvivier blow you away with their extraordinary visual stylishness
Guy Maddin has perfected a blend of silent movie stylistics and hilariously surreal melodrama. This is a Guy Maddin film on acid, a sumptuously madcap fantasia of visuals wound around a tapestry of tall tales
The long promised crossover between the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street films, this seems caught in a juggling act that fails to satisfy the requirements of either franchise
The sixth of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films, sold with the gimmick of a 3D release. New director Rachel Talaly refuses to take the material seriously and turns the show into an absurd cartoon
An anthology of short anime pieces from five different directors. Episodes range from traditional anime and Cyberpunk to mind-expanding surrealism
A standout work concerning a demon that invades dreams and then erases all memory of the person in others. Shot during Covid lockdown and haunted by an incredible sense of isolation
An anthology that adapts three stories from Ray Bradbury’s short story collection but does so with singularly heavy-handed regard. The best aspect of the film is the framing story with a brooding Rod Steiger in the title role.
Ever since The Exorcist, filmmakers have been recycling the same cliches for the last forty years. This slings the cliches together with the dream incursion concept from Inception, which makes things somewhat interesting
Christopher Nolan’s The Matrix. Concerning an action theme that invade people’s dreams, this is a bold, brilliantly original SF film driven by ideas – a film that succeeds beautifully on all levels
An ingenue film about a dream journey that is made with undeniable imagination. However, the eventual allegory makes it a work that thinks it far more profound than it ends up being
This may count as the worst horror film to be released in the entire 80s VHS era. The plot concerns a man who is left a strange jar that causes a series of terrifying hallucinations
This was Victor Salva’s first sequel to his hit Jeepers Creepers. This is an intensely uncanny and much superior work to the first that heads into outlandish places
Classic anti-war film with Timothy Bottoms as a limbless, sightless soldier in a hospital bed as his mind wanders between hallucinations, visions of the afterlife and attempts to communicate with the medical staff
Gregg Araki film that centres around sexually conflicted university student Thomas Dekker and his various liaisons amid witches, a doomsday weapon, cults and premonitions
This seemed to promise something of tv’s late lamented Constantine or the first Warlock. Instead what we end up with has been turned into a ponderous effects vehicle for Vin Diesel
One of the most brilliant SF works conducted for television – the adaptation of an Ursula Le Guin book about a a man whose dreams change the world every time he wakes up
This was the second film adaptation of conceptually ingenious Ursula Le Guin novel about a man whose dreams change reality around him whenever he wakes up
Anime film based on Winsor McCay’s celebrated comic strip about a boy’s adventures in dreams. Despite a script from Ray Bradbury, the film waters the comic-strip down to the formula of the modern children’s film
Intriguingly different Chinese film about a wife who develops a mystery dream lover and the havoc this wreaks in her life. Largely a work about female desire, this seems to want to be a horror film
The South Korean version of Inception with a man using a device that allows him to enter his and others memories in search of overlooked clues to the abductor of his son
At the time of reviewing Rodney Ascher’s sleep paralysis documentary The Nightmare, I commented it would make fascinating material for a horror film. This Canadian micro-budgeted feature is one of the first to try and is interesting, even if it never truly grapples with its ideas
Olga Kurylenko deals with a demon that appears to those affected by sleep paralysis. Another sleep paralysis horror film that only tepidly dips into the subject
Melies Cinemagician is a special screening of a selection of films from Georges Melies presented by Vancouver’s Vancity Theater to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The show was a live performance involving a score composed especially for the event, displays of conjuring tricks and a magic lantern show. The same year also saw […]
Neil Gaiman and comic-book artist Dave McKean create a venture into a fantasy world with an extraordinary level of visual imagination and peopled with a remarkable panoply of creations. The results are quite unlike any other film you have seen
Tim Burton used to be the great hope of fantastic cinema but his efforts since 2000 have been greeted with general disappointment. This Young Adult adaptation plays out like a fantasy version of the X-Men
Henry Selick’s first venture into live-action in which Brendan Fraser becomes trapped in a bizarre afterlife while a mischievous monkey steals his body
One of the first films to copy William Castle’s gimmick and filmed in Psychorama wherein frightening images and words were subliminally projected on the screen. The plot where a newlywed wife has a recurrent dream of a sinister house only for it to be the one they move into has a disappointingly mundane rationale
This creates an intriguingly uncanny atmosphere in the story of a teenage girl who keeps seeing a strange goblin creature but nobody will believe her. The last half far less interestingly turns into a variant on E.T. with her racing to protect the creature
William Castle psycho-thriller (from a Robert Bloch script) that creates an incredibly haunted mood between dream and reality only to fall apart in an absurdly contrived ending
An eerie work of film noir adapted from Cornell Woolrich in which Kevin McCarthy has a nightmare of killing a man and then wakes up and finds that details of his dream are starting to come true
Rodney Ascher, director of the fascinatingly whacked Room 237, returns with a documentary about sleep paralysis that travels into a territory more creepy than most horror films get
A clearly more commercial film from cult Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto of Tetsuo: The Iron Man fame. This draws influence from Ring but this lacks much of the obsessive drive of Tsukamoto’s other films
Nightmare Detective was Shinya Tsukamoto’s venture into the dreamscape theme of works like The Cell and the subsequent Inception. Many regard this sequel as a superior work.
One of the most influential horror films of the 1980s, creating a series of dream horror copycats. Before the campy, makeup effects driven sequels kicked in, Wes Craven’s original creates a genuinely unearthly series of nightmare jumps
Yet another in the fad for 19870s/0s horror remakes, a merely efficient revival that reduces the wild, outré scares of Wes Craven’s original to conveyor belt shocks
The point where Robert Englund’s Freddy went from a boogeyman into the equivalent of Wile E. Coyote, popping up like a malevolent jack-in-a-box to quip a one-liner and dispatch victims
Fourth of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films. Under Renny Harlin’s hand, the unworldly atmosphere of Wes Craven’s original is replaced by moments of incredible silliness
The first and worst of the A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels. The dream logic becomes incoherent, while the film is twisted out of shape to become a bizarre gay Coming Out parable
The fifth of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films offers up the same old thing but director Stephen Hopkins enters at an inspired level that transforms the set-pieces with a genuine weirdness
At first glance, Stephen Sommers and Dean R. Koontz seem strange bedfellows, but oddly enough it works – Koontz gives Sommers more story than he is used to working with and surprisingly it is the likeable characters and mind-boggling quirks of plot at the forefront rather than Sommers’ usual CGI bombast
One of the most sophisticated and intelligent of the 80s copies of A Nightmare on Elm Street with a rich central idea about a girl who can enter the world of her own drawings
A venture inside the dreamscape from anime director Satoshi Kon who creates a beautifully animated work even if some of the ideas become excessively convoluted
William Malone, the director of House on Haunted Hill remake, makes an interestingly different film about a girl who has spent most of her life asleep being pursued by a genius killer who invades her dreams
This has the intriguing idea of two Demi Moore’s living on either side of the world, each dreaming that they are the other but the premise pans out as no more than a routine Chick Flick
Dennis Potter was the greatest writer to ever work in televisio. This mini-series is one of his most celebrated works, featuring characters bursting out into lip-synched Golden Oldie songs, making biting contrast to their downbeaten lives
Cult film from Don Coscarelli that takes place in a funereal twilight world and is filled with images of wild surrealism. Not a lot makes sense but the film is meant to operate on the logic of a dream. Several sequels followed.
The first and best of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm sequels, one that creates an eerie twilight zone ambience that sits between dream and reality
The third of Don Soscarelli’s Phantasm films reunites many of the regulars and goes some way towards offering explanations for everything
Phantasm was a cult hit with its eerie otherworldly dream horrors. It spawned four sequels of which this is probably the last given that Angus Scrimm died earlier this year. The series peaked a couple of films ago and here the regulars pander to a comfortable familiarity without adding anything new to the mix
The first film from the acclaimed Alan Rudolph, a hippie era nightmare where smoking marijuana causes people to have disturbing visions of sinister figures
A Secret Life of Walter Mitty for movie lovers wherein a milquetoast projectionist daydreams himself into a variety of movie scenarios as an inept superhero. Quirkily charming if never more than a single idea. Something you feel should have been a cult film
Adaptation of an autobiographical Philip K. Dick book that he wrote in an attempt to make sense of a series of bizarre hallucinations, this long-rumoured film manages, despite a low-budget, to mainline the brain-twisting nature of Dick’s writing better than any other adaptation
A film from the Pang Brothers in which a heroine enters into an extraordinarily conceived fantasy world that would appear to be taking place in her own imagination
A Japanese-made variant on the dream incursion theme of Inception. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is noted for his bafflingly surrealistic horror films but in working in a genre like science-fiction that requires an implied explainability, he makes a far less interesting film
A film from Quentin Dupieux that comes in a series of quirky intersecting stories where the dreams and films different characters are watching/making keeping blurring together in mind-boggling ways
The concept – sort of akin to
Extraordinarily ambitious film all shot in a single take at the former St Petersburg Winter Palace where the camera drifts dream-like from room to room and in and out of periods of Russian history. More n illustrated art and history program than a dramatic film but beautiful to watch.