My original plans to cover Dream Demon (1988) for “Outside the Blue Box” were made in the hope that it would coincide nicely with The War Between the Land and the Sea, which – at the time – was the only piece of Whoniverse media with a confirmed release date in the foreseeable future, and perhaps even at all. Flash forward a couple of months, and The War Between the Land and the Sea (affectionately christened “TWATBLAST” by fans) feels like a distant dream, not only because of its mixed reception, but also because so much else has happened since its release. Perhaps, if I had my own TARDIS, I would have known to select a title more relevant to the miraculous rediscovery of episodes 1 and 3 of The Daleks’ Master Plan, or – failing that – Russell T. Davies sharing GenAI slop of William Hartnell to his Instagram story. Anyway, here’s Dream Demon.
“But Robyn,” I hear you ask, “just what the hell is a Dream Demon? And what does it have to do with Russell Tovey shagging a fish?”, to which I am delighted to inform you that Harley Cokeliss’s 1988 horror oddity Dream Demon marked the big-screen debut of Jemma Redgrave, the celebrated actress who has so far starred in a total of 16 televised Who episodes (including feature-length 50th Anniversary special The Day of the Doctor), the aforementioned fish-focused spin-off, countless Big Finish Who audio dramas, and the 2022-23 podcast series Doctor Who: Redacted (which everybody and their mum has told me to listen to, and I haven’t yet got round to) as U.N.I.T. chief Kate Stewart.
Kate is a character with an interesting history, having first appeared in the semi-official-but-not-quite (it’s a long story) Reeltime spin-off film Downtime (1995, where she was played by Beverley Cressman), before being officially made part of Who canon in Chris Chibnall’s 2012 story The Power of Three – which is where Redgrave entered the picture. To tell the truth, Stewart is a character I’ve grown rather fond of over the years, in spite of the issues plaguing many of the stories she appears in (though that’s a criticism I could levy at a large portion of the past 15 years of Who, so it isn’t Kate Stewart or U.N.I.T.-specific). This is, in large part, due to Redgrave’s compelling performance. I found her role in the latter half of The War Between the Land and the Sea to be one of the strongest aspects of the show. Like her father, Nicholas Courtney’s iconic Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, she makes for an interesting contrast to the Doctor, in that even though she is a sympathetic and heroically-minded character, she is able to be flawed, messy, morally and ethically questionable, and even use violent force in ways which the Doctor’s nigh-unshakeable moral code would prevent, not necessarily because her doing that is “cool” or right, but rather because she is human. What I don’t care for at all is RTD’s insistence on having her refer to herself as “Kate Lethbridge-Stewart” in case any fans forget her legacy connection, which is disappointing given the existence of the great scene in The Power of Three in which Kate mentions that she dropped the “Lethbridge” from her name so that people wouldn’t just judge her by her father’s achievements – a detail which, of course, has layers when you consider that she is played by a Redgrave.
Still with me? Congratulations, you’re the target audience for “Outside the Blue Box”. Let’s talk Dream Demon.
It would have been impossible to make this outside of the mid-to-late ‘80s, and the main reason why becomes almost immediately apparent.
Released slap-bang in the middle of UK horror’s own “wilderness years”, when Hammer and Amicus were long-dead (but dreaming) and films like 28 Days Later (2002) and The Descent (2005) were over a decade away from injecting new life into the scene, Dream Demon is not, as one would suspect, a slasher film, nor is it even really the Elm Street riff that its title would suggest. Sure, its plot deals with deadly dreams, but tonally and stylistically Cokeliss’s film is far closer to something like the same year’s Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) crossed with the London-set apartment paranoia antics of Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). What mainly stands out about Dream Demon, though, is that it is such a product of its time. It would have been impossible to make this outside of the mid-to-late ‘80s, and the main reason why becomes almost immediately apparent.
Dream Demon follows Diana (Redgrave), a schoolteacher set to be married to decorated Falklands war vet Oliver (Mark Greenstreet), whose celebrity status leads her to be stalked and tormented by two sleazy paparazzi journalists, Paul and Peck – played, bizarrely, by none other than Jimmy Nail and Timothy Spall, fresh off the success of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet! By now, the issue with why the film could not have been made any sooner or later than it was becomes apparent – this is, in essence, a Princess Diana horror movie (though not in the sense of 2013’s Diana, nor 2021’s Diana: The Musical), something which makes the film’s atmosphere all the more odd in hindsight, knowing that its lead protagonist’s real-world namesake would die whilst being pursued by paparazzi just under a decade later. It’s worth noting that Jemma Redgrave would go on to appear in the TV movie Diana: Her True Story (1993), but you won’t catch me reviewing that for The Geek Show because you couldn’t pay me to watch a 3-hour-long movie about the royal family (unless it was a really, REALLY nasty genre film).
In the weeks leading up to the wedding, Diana spends most of her time alone, confined within the walls of the swanky new London apartment that her in-laws bought the couple as a wedding present – which is where Dream Demon’s supernatural horror aspect comes into play. Upon moving into the flat, Diana begins to experience shocking and violent nightmares, many of which involve her fiancee and the upcoming big day. Her therapist, Deborah (Susan Fleetwood), explains these away as being the product of unresolved anxieties about her husband-to-be. Less explainable are her other dreams – visions of a burning man and a ghostly little girl in an angel costume, which seem to be drawn from the dark history of the old house that was converted into the flat where she lives. The film’s dream sequence are where things all get a bit Hellraiser (1987), with the dream-house’s basement being a labyrinth of dark stone catacombs, some kind of hell-mouth opening up at the bottom of the cellar steps, and the journalists re-appearing as festering, sleazy ghouls with exaggerated facial features. These are also the scenes in which the film showcases its delightfully gruesome gore FX work; ears are torn off, Timothy Spall gets a hand through his face, and – in the film’s opening sequence, which may well be my personal favourite – Jemma Redgrave enters the world of film by slapping her husband’s head clean off at the altar, coating her wedding dress in blood.
For as fun as all of that sounds, Dream Demon is also a bit of a mess, and doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to be for a lot of the runtime – for as intriguing as some of its elements are, there’s a distinct vibe of, “Sure, that’ll do”, to a lot of the creative and narrative decisions made throughout the piece. It’s an extremely English picture, not just in its general vibe, but also because it can’t quite decide what it wants to commit to being genre-wise; there are potentially interesting elements of drama, satire, and full-blown horror throughout Dream Demon’s runtime, and the film is never really sure whether or not it wants to commit to any of them. Combine that with the fact that someone at the studio was undoubtedly urging Cokeliss and co. to make “Elm Street for the U.K.” on the regular, and you’ll begin to understand why Dream Demon feels like a deeply promising horror film that got all mixed up somewhere along the way, ending up as more of an offbeat and slightly messy curiosity than anything else.
By the end, you’re left with a lot of unresolved questions that the film never really stops to think about, no matter how relevant they are to the plot. Why was there a pit to hell in the dream basement? Were the husband dreams and the house dreams connected? Was it the house or her that killed people using dreams and resurrected them as horrible warty ghouls? Is Diana a closeted lesbian? Okay, the answer to that last one is less pressing and up to interpretation (in my reading of the film, yes), but it is quite surprising how irrelevant the elements mentioned in the film’s title seem to be to the resolution of the film’s mystery. That being said, the film’s climax does possibly feature the most haunting use of a stone angel statue outside of Who – perhaps equally as chilling and poignant as when one showed up in the last episode of Class as a cliffhanger, and then the show never got renewed.
Redgrave isn’t the only Who cast member to make an appearance in Dream Demon. Mark Greenstreet, who played Oliver, was the Lakertyan rebel leader Ikona in Sylvester McCoy’s first Who serial, Time and the Rani – with Dream Demon being his only feature film acting credit. The film also features a brief appearance from Patrick O’Connell as a detective in one of its later dream sequences, who played the corrupt smuggler Ashton in the classic Hartnell story The Dalek Invasion of Earth. As for the film itself, there are several Who adventures which parallel Dream Demon’s story of nightmare worlds beneath the veil of sleep, and dreams which turn out to be all too real: Timothy Spall’s Harry Potter co-star Toby Jones would play the evil ‘Dream Lord’ who trapped the TARDIS team between two nightmare scenarios in Amy’s Choice, a child’s bad dreams transported the residents of Rowbarton Estate to a house full of creepy living wooden dolls in Night Terrors, face-hugging alien parasites kept their victims in a shared dream-world in Last Christmas, and of course the Whoniverse had a dream demon of its own in the form of The Sarah Jane Adventures’ Nightmare Man. Plus, regular NuWho director Rachel Talalay has had her fair share of run-ins with that other cinematic bogeyman who gets you when you’re sleeping…
Dream Demon (1988) is available on Blu-Ray from Arrow Video. It is also currently available to stream in the U.K. via the Arrow Video Channel.
OUTSIDE THE BLUE BOX – ARCHIVE
