Dream Demon: Between Fantasy and Nightmare
Harley Cokeliss’s 1988 horror-fantasia straddles the line between art and exploitation, with profound results
by Cian Tsang
When Spencer, Pablo Larraín’s opulent imagining of the existential crisis of Princess Diana, floated onto the big screen back in 2021, much of the conversation surrounding the movie was devoted to dissecting its horror movie adjacency. The movie, it was said, transformed Sandringham House into the Overlook Hotel, plunging Diana into a gothic labyrinth haunted by the ghost of Anne Boleyn and constructed of corridors of Kubrickian dread. In conception, it sounds engrossing—a dark fable whose horror trappings render tangible the hopeless claustrophobia of a woman who finds her sanity being sacrificed at the altar of public image, her psyche totally at the mercy of every odious force in Britain, from the parasitic press to the royal family, that atavistic institution of evil.
In execution, the movie leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a neatness to Spencer that never manages to truly horrify, a lightness of touch which fails to fully exploit the latent menace of its grim luxuriousness. What Larraín’s movie lacks is a certain sense of mess, a willingness to get genuinely nasty and stew in the complicated neural tangles of a woman whose besieged identity is falling apart. The movie performs a few maladroit, perfunctory gestures in its writing towards the idea of Diana’s identity being forcefully fractured, but there’s never an accompanying visual scheme to drive that idea home. There are sparse moments of surreal subjectivity, but they feel woefully undercooked, not nearly full-blooded enough to lend a genuine sense of disorder or dislocation. It’s odd, because Larraín’s earlier movie, Ema, about a dysfunctional couple dealing with the fallout of their child’s pyromania, is a movie whose feverish style is concerned entirely with the confusion that runs rampant when normal life has been torn asunder.
Larraín cherry-picks the horror genre, but he lacks genre instincts. There’s a great horror movie buried somewhere within Spencer, threatening to breach the prestige picture’s pristine patina, but that threat is never realized, and ultimately feels like nothing more than cosplay—champagne masquerading as vinegar. There’s nothing really provocative or moving about Spencer beyond bearing witness to the familiar, tragic arc of Diana’s life—you might as well be watching an extended Halloween episode of The Crown, all televisual propriety with a few extra bells and whistles.
That tragic arc is a fertile one, ripe for exploitation should any filmmaker with the right killer instincts and enough piss and vinegar come along to marry form and content, and give it the full genre movie treatment. Spencer regrettably isn’t that movie, and is all the less textured, and less fascinating for it. But clinging to Larraín’s movie is the acrid, ectoplasmic residue of Harley Cokeliss’s Dream Demon, a movie whose angle of attack is antithetical to that of Spencer. Made in 1988, just before the ugly zenith of the public’s interest in the disintegrating marriage between Diana and Prince Charles, Dream Demon is the story of the not at all subtly named Diana Markham (Jemma Redgrave), a charitable, virginal, upper class young woman on the precipice of entering into the world of British high society via her imminent marriage to Oliver (Mark Greenstreet), a prominent, widely adored war hero. As her big day approaches, Diana finds herself plagued not just by a persistent pair of investigative journalists (Timothy Spall and Jimmy Nail), who show up at her new home with a camera and a list of grossly invasive questions, but also by a sudden onslaught of gruesome dreams in which the men in her life, both friends and hostiles, appear before her as predatory ghouls, the flesh burning and peeling from their faces as they try to drag her down to hell with them.
You’d be forgiven, at first, for believing that Dream Demon has nothing but exploitation on its mind. The movie shamelessly parades its appropriation, from the topical woes of its heroine, to its stylistic artillery borrowed from the arsenals of horror masters. There’s more than just a trace of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser in Diana’s astral projections, all blinding blue lights and spectral smoke swirling in winds which seem to bluster from another dimension, populated by burning men and creatures pulled from a perverse fairytale. The dire consequences of her dreams feel all too familiar as well, dragging people into the lethal orbit of her unconscious mind, where they’re rendered vulnerable to the horrors that lurk within. It’s a blatant attempt to ride on the wave of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, with Diana, like Freddy Krueger’s floundering prey, trying desperately to fend off encroaching sleep, to spare herself and others from the diabolical denizens of her mind.
Dream Demon is constantly on the offensive—probing the monstrosity of the press, but also probing the very foundations of masculinity itself.
So far, so derivative. Dream Demon won’t be scoring points for originality anytime soon, nor for delicacy—but then, why should it be delicate? The movie feels disorienting, and deliberately so, forcing us to question exactly how many layers of reality and unreality we’ve seen coil and uncoil. Cokeliss’s relative lack of finesse in suturing his movie’s borrowed disjunctive elements together proves to be rewarding, generating a genuine sense of schism and slippage that wouldn’t otherwise be achievable.
This is, after all, the story of a woman whose mental fabric is fraying, who’s been thrust into hostile territory without any support structure around her. It’s a story which demands abandon and aggression from everyone involved, a willingness to dispense with the politesse that holds back a movie like Spencer. When the journalists who show up at Diana’s new home to harass her are transformed into necrotic sideshow freaks, gluttonously devouring mountains of food, we get the bludgeoning message loud and clear: the press is a beast with a sickening, insatiable appetite for invasion and destruction, constantly looking to swallow up innocence. The performers, crucially, are all game too, hurling themselves into wild swings of the psychological sledgehammer. Spall and Nail both turn their levels of cartoonish evil up to eleven, relishing every particle of slimy innuendo that drips from their repulsive maws.
Dream Demon is constantly on the offensive—probing the monstrosity of the press, but also probing the very foundations of masculinity itself. The movie is broadly, explicitly about masculine violence inflicted upon women, but it’s all the more fascinating for its fixation not so much on the moment of violence, nor on the aftermath, but on the anticipation of the act. Speaking candidly with Jenny (Kathleen Wilhoite)—the American girl who feels a psychic connection to Diana’s home, and with whom Diana begins to share her domestic and oneiric space—Diana confesses her apprehension which stems from her lack of previous romantic and sexual experience. “Oliver’s the first man I’ve met that I’ve really liked,” she says, “and even he scares me sometimes.”
The significance of that sentiment is heavy indeed: Dream Demon taps into an anxiety that comes not with the fallout from violence, but which paralyses you before anything has even occurred, a terror which precludes you from functioning normally in the presence of half the population, let alone someone with whom you hope to be intimate. Normal, secure life can’t possibly continue as it was after an act of physical or emotional violence has been perpetrated, but can it even exist in the first place in such a milieu, in which all men, from bastions of ideal masculinity to caricaturish goblins, can act with impunity?
Oliver, the perfect British citizen, the war hero sculpted from alabaster, rendered invulnerable by his sex and social status, exacts a particularly pernicious form of emotional cruelty—exploiting Diana’s devotion to him, placing her within the perilous centre of public attention before freezing her out of his life when she most desperately needs his support, all the while committing rampant acts of infidelity. And yet even before his transgressions become known, Diana’s unconscious mind reveals a viciousness to his character that otherwise remains undetectable, beyond the reach of her regular, untrained human perception. The Oliver that appears before her in waking life is all surface charm, but the version that rears his ugly head in her dreams is a powder keg of insecurity waiting to be detonated by even the slightest hint of humiliation, ambushing Diana with explosive acts of verbal and physical abuse.
The spirit of the real Diana, killed in 1997 while being tormented by the paparazzi, hangs over the movie.
That Diana’s unconscious mind proves to be astute in its predictive power forces us to reconsider the significance of her dreams. Diana’s mind is whittling away at the truth, exposing the latent threat of masculine violence before she even becomes cognizant of its existence. In this light, her visions feel less like a symptom of slipping sanity, and more like some sort of evolutionary impulse, a sophisticated psychic response which divests men of their subterfuge and exposes them as the demons they really are. You’d think that this ability might give her the upper hand, might allow her to smell danger, avoid despair, and strike preemptively, but actually the immediate effect is utterly isolating. Her astral projections, while revelatory, imperil the safety of those around her, rippling ominously outwards, and forcing her to alienate herself from people so as to spare them from her lethal waves of anxiety. There’s a sensitivity here to the ways in which fear of violence can reduce your social ties and structures to ruin, bereaving you of your confidence in people.
And yet from that ruin something mysterious blooms, a sense of promise amidst all of the catastrophe. We see Diana’s identity collapse, but it’s a collapse that leaves room for repair in the form of a mind meld of sorts between two women from completely different backgrounds. In temperament and poise, Jenny is Diana’s opposite, a salt of the earth personality with a conspicuous presence, but she shares with Diana the experience of having her identity ripped away from her—some terrible incident in her childhood years, some personal apocalypse, has robbed her of her memories and laid waste to her emotional development. As the membrane between the two women begins to dissolve, their experiences melt into each other, each absorbing the other’s pain. There’s a sort of interconnectivity in their mutual sense of displacement, an uncovering of belonging in not belonging. Their fates become intertwined in ways that feel disarmingly intimate, pulled together by mysterious psychic forces for the purpose, seemingly, of restoring female selfhood. The realization of that possibility of coalescing across experience amidst all of this personal disarray, of finding meaning on the astral plane in the process of being unmoored and broken down, provides the movie’s greatest thrill.
It’s strange how a movie whose sense of disorder is so pervasive can also possess such a profound sense of affinity. Dream Demon proves to be so much more mysterious than its superficial obviousness lets on, and its mysteriousness only deepens when you take its central conceit—Diana’s surrogacy for the real Princess of Wales—seriously. To watch the movie today is to watch a ghost story that didn’t know that it would eventually become haunted. The spirit of the real Diana, killed in 1997 while being tormented by the paparazzi, hangs over the movie, imbuing it with a quality that’s difficult to grapple with and precisely define. You can’t really call it prescience, because the Diana of Dream Demon escapes that fate and leaves the devils of aristocracy behind. To call it an exhortation would be more suitable perhaps, an urgent scream for the real Diana to break free from her sepulchral union. But what this quality feels like most is actually fantasy. In the end, Diana and Jenny both find resolutions to their traumas: Jenny reclaims and makes peace with her traumatic past, while Diana dispenses with her marriage and entombs the satanic press within a putrescent mind prison. Nightmare gives way to reverie, an alternate reality in which Diana survives—in which liberating hopes, rather than paralyzing fears, are realized. For all of the movie’s surface pungency, it’s the escapism of it all, the way in which the terror of reality gives way to dreamland, that proves most compelling.
Cian Tsang is an essayist and Ligotti superfan based in the UK. You can find him on Twitter @CianHHTsang.
