The Insomniac’s Guide to Night Terrors: Don’t Go to Sleep

Now Playing: Don't Go to Sleep (TV movie; 1982)

Pros: Great cast makes for a very believable family in crisis; Script cleverly keeps the source of the evil ambiguous; Stylish direction
Cons: The parents’ reaction to a family tragedy stretches credulity

When I found out that Gill over at Realweegiemidget Reviews was hosting a blogathon dedicated to the legendary TV impresario Aaron Spelling, I saw an opportunity to indulge my love of '70s and '80s TV movies, especially those of the horror and sci-fi varieties (of course!).

Even if you’ve never heard the name Aaron Spelling, if you’re of a certain age, you're very likely to have seen his work. Starting out as a writer in the mid-'50s, Spelling quickly moved into producing, and in the succeeding decades became almost an industry unto himself, producing hundreds of shows and TV movies. Starsky and Hutch? That’s a Spelling property. Charlie’s Angels? Check. The Love Boat? He was the real captain of the ship. The primetime soap Dynasty? Dynasty was his middle name.

Okay, so maybe you don’t know Aaron. How about Tori? Somehow Aaron found the time to have two children, one of whom, Tori, has something of her own legendary status in the Spellingverse. Tori started out doing small roles in some of her dad’s shows, eventually enjoying a lengthy recurring spot on Beverly Hills 90210. In addition to acting, she has also followed in her dad’s footsteps as a producer (and in the process grabbed a little of that mystical Kim Kardashian/Paris Hilton ability to be famous for being famous).

But I digress. This post is about one of the more effective TV horror movies of its era, from a man who started out as a pioneer and became a master of the genre. Most fans consider the debut of ABC’s Movie of the Week in 1969 to be the beginning of the great golden age of TV movies. The quick, cheap and original movies became a big hit with audiences and elevated ABC’s stature among the major networks.

Spelling eagerly exploited the new format and in 1970 alone produced such sci-fi and horror hits as The Love War (with Lloyd Bridges and Angie Dickinson), How Awful About Allan (with Anthony Perkins), The House that Would Not Die (Barbara Stanwyck) and Crowhaven Farm (Hope Lange and John Carradine).

Fast forward 12 years, and Aaron Spelling was sitting majestically atop the TV world as head of Aaron Spelling Productions. While the ABC Movie of the Week series was long gone and the TV movie golden age was waning, there were still 90 minute time slots to fill and Spelling was happy to oblige.

Once upon a time, this man was the King of Half of Everything in TV land.

For fans of supernatural horror (guilty as charged!), it was a great era because such films (as well as psychological horror) tended to be easy on expense accounts, and TV producers made a ton of them. They didn’t require big special effects budgets or complicated location shoots -- quite often, all you needed was a creepy looking house and a smattering of mid-level name actors and you were good to go.

As a result, we lucky fans kept getting gift after horrifying gift from the TV movie mill: A Taste of Evil (1971), Home for the Holidays (1972), Satan’s School for Girls (1972) and Cruise into Terror (1978) were just a few from Spelling’s shop in the '70s.

Don’t Go to Sleep (1982) didn’t stray far from the successful TV horror formula: as per usual, a family is menaced in their new home. However, several ultra-creepy scenes and a great cast led by Valerie Harper, Dennis Weaver and the always delightfully eccentric Ruth Gordon elevate this one several notches above the usual made-for-TV fare.

Phillip (Weaver) and Laura (Harper) are moving their all-American family (a boy and a girl) to a new home. Some past struggles are hinted at in the early going, but Phillip has a new job in the aerospace industry, and it seems the family is returning to normalcy.

There are some mild tensions -- Phillip is not thrilled that Laura’s sharp-tongued mother Bernice  (Gordon) will be living with them -- but seemingly nothing that the family can’t deal with. Little do they know that the mother-in-law living arrangements will be the least of their worries.

In an early scene, more of the family’s recent tragic past is revealed when the boy, Kevin (Oliver Robins), spots his grandmother setting up multiple pictures of the oldest daughter, Jennifer (Kristin Cumming) on her dresser. He snottily reminds Bernice that there aren’t supposed to be any pictures of Jennifer -- who apparently has recently died -- in the house.

When grandma says she doesn't have any favorites, don't believe her.

Under the surface brightness, the all-American family has some skeletons that threaten their bliss. It seems that Phillip and Laura can only deal with their grief by banishing any reminders of their deceased daughter, but that strategy is going to come back to haunt them.

At first, the youngest daughter Mary (Robin Ignico) is happy to have her own room in the new place, but quickly regrets it the first night when the wind whips up, tree branches tap on the window, and the dolls surrounding her bed seem to be moving surreptitiously in the shadows as a disembodied, rasping voice calls her name.

Soon, Mary is screaming, and when Phillip and Laura get to her room, they’re horrified to see Mary trapped in her canopy bed as it’s going up in flames. Dad quickly pulls Mary to safety and beats out the fire. A frayed lamp cord appears to be the culprit, but this isn’t the sort of house warming the family was expecting.

Mary hopes the pajamas she got last Christmas are fire retardant. 

We learn that even before the move, Mary was experiencing nightmares. The disembodied voice is now visiting her every night, and her screams for it to go away are fraying everyone’s nerves, but particularly Phillip’s (more on him later).

It doesn’t help that her bratty brother has decided Mary is gaslighting the family, and he concocts a plan to record spooky sounds on his tape recorder to further torment her. Bad move.

The nightly manifestations of the spectral voice soon give way to visits by Mary’s dead sister Jennifer (yikes!). Mary’s conversations with her sister are shot in soft focus, suggesting that she’s dreaming. There is a chilling disconnect between Jennifer’s angelic appearance in frilly dresses, and the words coming out of her mouth:

Jennifer: “They [the rest of the family] don’t want me to be here. They don’t miss me like you do. They don’t care.”
Mary: “But they loved you.”
Jennifer: “Not real love. Not like you do. They always loved you the most. I always hated that.”

Spooky Jennifer’s resentments take a grave turn (pun intended) when she starts encouraging Mary to “take care of” the other family members who want to keep them apart. And from that point in the film, taking care of business, Don’t-Go-to-Sleep-style, will involve such household items as a pet iguana, a frisbee, a plug-in radio, and (**GULP!**) a pizza cutter.

Mary discusses girl things with her big dead sister,
like wreaking horrible vengeance from beyond the grave.

They say that 80% of all serious accidents occur in the home, and much of Don’t Go to Sleep plays like an extended public service program from Hell on how dangerous even the most mundane household items can be. We think we know what’s going on with the “accidents,” but the film keeps the perpetrator(s) off-camera. Meanwhile, the escalating chaos allows Harper and Weaver to emote their hearts out.

At this point, both leads were well-established TV stars, not to mention TV movie veterans. In 1971 Weaver appeared as the beleaguered driver in the mother of all TV movie cult hits, Steven Spielberg’s Duel. At the same time, he was highly visible in the title role of McCloud, the duck-out-of-water New Mexico policeman temporarily assigned to NYC (part of the NBC Mystery Movie rotation with McMillan and Wife and Colombo).

Valerie Harper had arguably more visibility on ‘70s TV, first as Mary Richard’s friend Rhoda in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, then as the star of her own spin-off show, Rhoda, in the mid-late ‘70s. There were a few TV movie roles in that decade, but after Rhoda’s run they became a bigger part of her career. Another memorable TV horror outing came in 1988 with The People Across the Lake, co-starring Gerald McRaney.

The pair make the most out of a script that at the outset establishes a seemingly normal, happy family with a bright future, but that keeps pulling at the threads of a dark secret that eventually causes everyone and everything to fall apart.

Valerie Harper and Dennis Weaver put on a master acting class in Don't Go to Sleep (no kidding).

One of the first clues that the family is not okay is the parents’ head-scratching insistence that no pictures or reminders of the elder daughter be displayed in the new home. This seems extremely implausible, even for the most grief-stricken of families. But a later flashback reveals that alcohol and a childish prank factored into the fatal accident, and everyone, including grandma, who kept the liquor flowing that night, is feeling at least a little guilty.

As Phillip, Weaver walks an acting tightrope, portraying a weak, frightened man without making him cartoonishly so. Early dialog hints that Phillip had a breakdown over the tragedy, lost his job, and only recently had gotten back on his feet. But his self-confidence has taken a blow, and Mary’s night terrors are not helping.

He’s so uncertain about his new job that he initially rejects Laura’s suggestion that they get Mary counseling, fearing that somehow word will get back to his bosses. As things begin to careen out of control again, Phillip drowns his sorrows in martinis -- the very thing that contributed to the original tragedy.

The 3 rules of TV horror real estate: location, location, location.

Laura desperately tries to hold things together, but she’s no superheroine. In one particularly wrenching scene, Laura tearfully begs her husband to be stronger because she can’t do it all herself. Phillip blubbers in self-pity and denial. The scene is riveting and authentic, and Harper and Weaver are at the absolute top of their form.

But let’s not forget the kids. Any movie featuring children is only as good as the child actors, and they’re very good indeed. The movie is really Robin Ignacio’s, as Mary is at the heart of (or perhaps, the conduit for) the evil that has gripped the family. She is a perfectly ordinary little girl, cute, but not saccharine sweet, and very believable as she struggles with the darkest of forces.

Towards the end, as emotional trauma and survivor’s guilt set in, Mary becomes guarded and morose, but at the same time she’s like a psychological chess master in parrying her doctor’s attempts at getting her to open up. Dr. Cole, played to subtle perfection by Robert Webber, soon realizes that something very disturbing is lurking behind the sullen little girl facade.

"Note: Does not play well with others and does not like my antique toy collection."

Props too to Kristin Cumming, who is as prim and cute as an American Girl doll, and whose warm, big sister smile masks the casually evil words coming out of her mouth during her nightly visits with Mary. Is she an avenging ghost, a demon, or a figment of Mary’s guilt-laden imagination? Well…

All this acting talent might have been wasted if not for the top-notch writing and directing by Ned Wynn and Richard Lang, respectively. Actor/writer Wynn drops hints, mostly through dialog, of the various skeletons in the family’s closet as he simultaneously ratchets up the suspense, first with disembodied voices, then spectral visits, and finally with a house in which death appears around every corner.

Director Richard Lang, who had already built a substantial resume directing TV shows and movies by the time Don’t Go to Sleep rolled around, seemingly respects the material too much to just go through the motions. Besides being an actor’s director, as evidenced by the bravura performances all around, his mix of unexpected close-ups, jump cuts and varying camera angles keeps the viewer almost as on edge as the characters in the film.

While made-for-TV horror continued to survive through the ‘80s, franchises like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street that offered cheap and far bloodier thrills lured a new generation of horror fans back to theaters. More subtle chills tailored for TV -- especially of the supernatural variety -- fell by the wayside.

Fortunately, we have platforms like YouTube and Tubi to help us rediscover films like Don’t Go to Sleep that were made by craftsmen and women who used TV’s limitations to their advantage, creating genuine shudders instead of gross-out shocks. Who knew that a pizza cutter could be so terrifying? Or that Valerie Harper, no one’s idea of a scream queen, could belt one out with the best of them?

Wait for it... wait for it... now, SCREAM!!!

Where to find it: Acceptable (but not great) streaming copies can be found here and here.

(For reviews of other vintage Aaron Spelling-produced TV movies, see my posts on The Love War, 1970, How Awful About Allan, 1970, and A Cold Night’s Death, 1973.)

The Great Nick D’s Great Expectations

Now Playing: The Great Nick D (2024)

Pros: Refreshingly original comedy-drama that respects its quirky characters and its audience; Lead Nathan Wilson creates an endearingly eccentric character without resorting to complete parody
Cons: Occasionally succumbs to cheap laughs; a couple of scenes fall flat

Hollywood can be very hard on also-rans. As one character in The Great Nick D puts it bluntly, “Once you fly off the radar, there’s no coming back.”

In Ansel Faraj’s and Nathan Wilson’s cinematic love letter to the eccentric denizens of Southern California, the titular character (Wilson) has been off the radar long enough to grow a sizeable paunch, abandon even the tiniest scrap of fashion sense, and take up roaming the beach front in the company of his equally eccentric (and seemingly mute) buddy Aldo (Douglas M. Eames).

Even when Nick was on the radar, it wasn’t the kind of attention most people would seek out. As an aspiring young actor desperate to get into the movies, Nick took the easy path to “stardom,” falling in with a cheesy porn impresario (Justin Dray) and metamorphosing from eager young Nicholas Hatton to Nick Dick, star of such porn classics as The Good, the Bad and the Boobies.

It's Nick D-Day on the beaches of Venice, California.

In a flashback sequence, we find out that Nick’s plunge into porn had been precipitated when his beautiful roommate and fellow would-be actor Faye Davenport (Alexa Wisener) got The Call that she’d secured a plum part in Interview with the Vampire, and needed to get down to New Orleans post haste for location shooting. To add insult to injury, Nick had just purchased a ring and was getting ready to propose.

In his bitter disappointment, Nick chose the road to nowhere, with a short, exhilarating stop in the grimy alleyways of video porn along the way. In the meantime, Faye had climbed the ladder of success to the point of an academy award nomination and the limelight of national media attention.

But a chance encounter on the beach shakes Nick up and suggests that redemption might not be as out of reach as he thought.

When Nick and Aldo run across a couple of punks shaking down a trembling young man on the beach, Nick, almost as an afterthought, scares off the would-be thieves. The kid, looking like a Harry Potter clone inexpicably transported to sunny southern Cal, recognizes the great Nick Dick, and introduces himself as Ned Zimmerman (George Russing), son of Helen Zimmerman (Kathryn Leigh Scott), who runs a major talent agency. While Ned looks like he’s 15, we later learn he’s in his early ‘30s, and an uber film nerd to the point of apparently being familiar with the video porn era.

It's good to be recognized.

Ned is fed up with being a glorified gopher at his mom’s agency, and wants to resurrect Nick as a mainstream star to prove himself. Mom couldn’t disagree more, barely able to hide her revulsion at the idea, but ultimately relents, telling Ned to his face that when it fails, it will be a good lesson for him (she’s not exactly the most supportive or diplomatic of mothers).

What happens next is not the rapid succession of gross-out jokes and one-liners that you might expect of a comedy about a washed-up porn actor. Instead, we see Nick, his optimism rekindled and practically immune to anything that threatens to snuff it out, wandering into a number of gently humorous, bittersweet encounters.

At first, Nick struck me as an over-the-top parody of a SoCal street person, with his rasping voice and straight-from-the-dumpster outfit of cheap Venice Beach ballcap, animal print shirt and purple pants. To top it off, he gets around on a scooter that doesn’t even have the dignity of being electric.

But somehow Nathan Wilson makes you believe in a character who’s been down so long, he doesn’t have the sense to dress for success (to say the least) or think twice about introducing himself as “Nick Dick” to the people who hold the key to his future prospects.

There’s a great scene when Nick first shows up at Ned’s talent agency. The receptionist takes one look at Nick and curtly tells him that “the free clinic is across the street.” As the building security guard steps in to give Nick the bum’s rush, the receptionist, a look of surprised disgust on her face, confirms that Nick indeed has an appointment. Nick, grinning broadly, asks the guard to look after his scooter as he heads off to the elevators.

Not everyone at the talent agency is a fan of the Great Nick D.

The film takes that initial scene and runs with it by having the various young, professional women that Nick encounters -- the receptionist, an assistant director, and a casting assistant -- respond to him as if he were dog excrement that they’d just wiped off their shoes. But Nick also has his fans: Phyllis (O-Lan Jones), an old hand at the talent agency, is a Nick D fangirl, and the fraternity-bro director of a TV commercial gig that Ned gets for Nick similarly gushes over him. It’s a running joke that highlights the post Me-Too era generation gap.

As Nick scoots his way around the greater LA area in search of redemption, we get quite a tour of the city’s “coulda been a contender” underbelly. At one point, Nick drags Aldo along to his old producer’s house in search of porn footage from which to make an acting demo reel (not exactly a stellar plan, but then Nick hasn’t had to sell himself for a long time).

When the producer goes off to look for Nick’s tapes, Aldo, curious about a stuffed rattlesnake sitting on an end table, reaches out tentatively to touch it. Nick quickly cuts him off: “Don’t… touch … it… you don’t know where it’s been.” That goes doubly for Aunt Judy (Lisa Blake Richards), an ageing bargain basement diva who shows up out of nowhere and wants someone to rub lotion on her back before she goes out to sunbathe.

Nick reminisces with his former producer about the good ol' bad ol' days

While that scene flirts with cheap laughs, a later sequence involving Nick’s dad seems to be going in a similar direction, but ends up in decidedly different territory. Nick, energized with his new prospects and unable to forget about the girl who got away, visits his dad in search of the ring he was going to give Faye.

The set-up is ripe. Like his son, Jim Hatton (David Selby) hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, but he does have a cozy place in the canyon and is married to an ex-exotic dancer (Kelly Kitko) who is younger than Nick, and happens to be celebrating her birthday in a highly inebriated state when Nick shows up.

Instead of going overboard with obvious jokes, co-writers Faraj and Wilson play it very straight with their characters. Sure they’re eccentric -- from the elder Hatton’s get-up, you can see where Nick got his fashion sense. But this family is more than a collection of sit-com-ish cliches.

Jim reminds his son that in his hurt and anger after the breakup, Nick had buried the engagment ring in the old man’s back yard. After digging around all night and turning Jim’s yard into a moonscape, Nick triumphantly unearths the ring, and father and son quietly celebrate as Starla sleeps off her big day in a lawn chair.

The scene is appropriately low-key, and veteran David Selby gives a great, moving performance as a dad who still believes in his son and has high hopes for him; “You’re a Hatton, don’t ever forget that,” he tells Nick.

Nick is a chip off the old block, fashion-wise.

Of course, not everything in Nick’s journey is kumbaya. Ned calls in a favor and books Nick on an entertainment podcast run by Bucky Shultz (Ben Solenberger), the entitled son of an influential Hollywood producer (Nick’s response: “What’s a podcast?).

The face-off between Bucky and Nick (over the merits of Robert Redford of all things) has a lot of comic potential, but somehow falls flat (Robert Redford, really?), although it does take shots at Hollywood’s rampant nepotism and the tendency of social media to divide nerds over the most trivial pop culture minutiae.

Similarly, Nick’s demo reel scraped together from clips of his porn movies should be funnier, but the clips themselves (and the “movies” that they’re pulled from) are so over-the-top that they induce eye-rolls instead of chuckles (although, the porn parody of the Phantom the Opera is clever in a very crude way).

The Great Nick D utilizes one of the oldest plot tropes in the book, turning “boy meets girl, boy loses girl” into “boy meets girl, boy loses girl and self-respect, boy has chance to get his self-respect back and maybe even the girl.”

There’s the requisite set-back when Ned is forced to let Nick go after the podcast debacle, but Nick’s new-found friends aren’t ready to give up, and Ned and Phyllis go behind Helen’s back to somehow get Nick an audition with a major HBO production.

Nick, ever the fashion disaster, shows up to his potential big break wearing a pale blue tux suitable for an ‘80s high school prom. To add to the tension, the casting director thinks he’s seen Nick before, but can’t quite remember where… Without going into too much spoiler detail, Nathan Wilson/Nick D performs an eye-opening audition.

Rockin' retro tux: check. Hair parted neatly down the middle: check. Acting A-game: ?

The film mostly avoids the twin pitfalls of cheap laughs and cloying sentimentality in taking its main character on his redemptive journey, and it has a great eye for the common humanity behind even the most eccentric characters.

The cast is very much up to the task of portraying that authentic eccentricity. A lot of familiar faces from previous Faraj directed productions are here, including Dark Shadows alums Kathryn Leigh Scott, David Selby, Lisa Blake Richards and Lara Parker. (Sadly, this was Lara Parker’s last role. She filmed her part some three months before passing away in October, 2023 at the age of 84. She appears in a short but very moving scene as Nick’s old acting coach, with whom he has a heart-to-heart talk.)

Another Faraj regular, Douglas M. Eames, has hardly a word to say as Nick’s buddy Aldo, but his looks of resolute loyalty and empathy under his signature lumberjack hat makes him a memorable character.

Alexa Wisener as Faye appears in intermittent flashbacks until the very end, when Nick finally catches up with her in “real” time. Even with her relatively limited screen time, it’s easy to see how Nick could become obsessed. Faye is a character that, in another filmmaker’s hands, might easily have been twisted into an egotistical, self-involved caricature, but surprise, behind the success is a real, sincere person. And Nick’s redemption vis-à-vis Faye is very honest and un-Hollywoodish.

Good times right before Faye gets The Call.

The Great Nick D is something of a departure for Hollinsworth Productions and the creative team of Faraj, Wilson and Kitko. In recent years they’ve specialized in dark fantasy and horror -- see my reviews of Loon Lake (2019) and Todd Tarantula (2023).

Nick D’s development journey has been a long one, starting with Nathan Wilson’s pitch to Faraj in 2012, and flirting with the short film and web series formats before finally making it as a feature film. Wilson and Faraj ended up co-writing and co-directing.

It’s harder than ever for a low-budget, independent film to get even a moment’s attention in today’s firehose stream of media content. With its originality and self-deprecating humor, The Great Nick D is a refreshing change from the endless cheap franchise rip-offs and exploitation flicks (Amityville Bigfoot anyone?) that shout at you like carnival barkers from streamer catalogs.

Where to find it: DVD/Blu-ray