Bad Dreams, Folk Curses, and Creepy Kids From a Forgotten USA

Arrow Video certainly haven’t been hasty in releasing the second boxed set in their American Horror Project series. Like the first box, it’s a set of three largely overlooked US horror movies from the 1970s – representatives of a strata of American indie horror cinema which more famous releases like The Last House On the Left or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre represent the tip of the iceberg of. It took 3 years after the release of the first one for the second box to emerge  – was it worth the wait? Let’s see…

Dream No Evil

Grace MacDonald (played as an adult by Brooke Mills, as a child by Vicki Schreck) grew up in an orphanage, but was tormented by overwhelming dreams that her father was going to come and take her out of there. It never happens; instead, she is adopted by the Bundy family, who make their living in travelling preacher game, and in that family she grows to adulthood, though never quite letting go of the search for her father.

We catch up with Grace after the death of Ma and Pa Bundy; one of her adoptive brothers, Jessie (Michael Pataki), has inherited the mantle of preacher and has reduced the show into a tawdry circus-esque act – a tent revival too crummy to afford an actual tent, in which Grace performs a high-dive act as part of the show. Her other adoptive brother, Patrick (Paul Prokop), has gone off to medical school, and she’s gotten engaged to him – which, whilst not incest in a purely biological sense, is kind of creepy in its own right.

For his part, now that he’s out in the wider world and not in the insular world of the travelling revival, Patrick gradually finds his attachment to Grace is fading and he’s falling for Shirley (Donna Anders), a fellow medical student. When Grace heads out after her act one night to chase up a lead on her father in the small town she and Jessie are performing in, what she finds is a strange hotel which turns a blind eye to the local undertaker/pimp (Marc Lawrence) bringing prostitutes around to cheer up the residents. The undertaker mentions that he knows Grace’s father, Timothy MacDonald (Edmond O’Brien), that he died just yesterday, and if she wishes Grace can swing by and see the body. Then the body gets up off the slab and kills the undertaker…

We then catch up with Grace and Timothy as they settle into a new existence in a lovely big farmhouse on a delightful ranch, with a pretty horse called Sultan. Wait, what? Where did either of them get the means to acquire this place? Why does the place flip between being beautifully well-maintained and horribly dilapidated? And why does Timothy keep losing his temper and killing people?