The 1980s were a wild time for horror cinema. Filmmakers were constantly trying to outdo each other with more gore, more sleaze, and more violence, all while governments and moral watchdogs were losing their collective minds over what people were renting from video stores.
This was the era of the “video nasty” panic in the UK, where films were being seized, banned, and in some cases treated like actual criminal material. Hell, the distributors behind the subject of today’s review actually ended up going to prison over it. To be fair, that was partly because they were ordered to cut the film and basically responded with “nah.”
Nightmare – also released under the title Nightmares in a Damaged Brain is a notorious video nasty from director Romano Scavolini that sits somewhere between slasher film, exploitation cinema, and outright psychological grime. And honestly, “grime” is probably the best word for it.
The setup follows George Tatum (Baird Stafford), a deeply disturbed psychiatric patient being subjected to experimental treatment at a New York mental institution. The doctors believe they’ve successfully “reprogrammed” his violent tendencies through the scientific method of loading him up with a cocktail of drugs and therapy, and decide to that he’s ok to be unleashed upon the world. Unsurprisingly, this was not a good idea.
After being released, George immediately starts unravelling. A trip through the gloriously filthy Times Square peep-show district triggers fragmented memories of childhood trauma involving his dad, sex, violence, and an axe. From there, George heads down to Florida where his ex-wife Susan (Sharon Smith), their children, and her new boyfriend are living, all while brutally murdering basically anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path along the way.
Meanwhile, Susan’s young son C.J. (C.J. Cooke) keeps insisting he’s being followed by a strange man, though nobody believes him because he’s also the sort of child who looks like he’d put a firecracker in a cat for entertainment. As George closes in on the family, the film slowly mutates into a nasty little home-invasion slasher, complete with prank phone calls, Halloween masks, axes, and enough gore to make the BBFC collectively shit themselves.
Unlike a lot of slashers from the era, Nightmare doesn’t really have a gimmick beyond “this is horrible.” There’s no iconic outfit, no supernatural hook, no campy sense of fun holding things together. George isn’t charismatic in the slightest either. He’s sweaty, twitchy, awkward, and carries himself like a man perpetually five seconds away from a nervous breakdown.
Baird Stafford’s performance is actually one of the film’s strongest elements. He doesn’t play George like some unstoppable horror icon; he plays him like a broken man whose brain has been completely hollowed out by trauma and psychosis. There’s something genuinely unnerving about the way he drifts through scenes, staring blankly before suddenly exploding into a paroxysm of madness and violence.
And when the violence happens the film absolutely wallows in it. This was one of the notorious “video nasties” for a reason. The film goes hard on mutilation, throat slashing, axes to the head, and enough arterial spraying to irrigate a small farm. The infamous hatchet murder sequence in particular is still nasty stuff, not necessarily because of what’s shown, but because of how ugly and prolonged it feels.
Tom Savini was officially credited with the gore effects, something he’s denied over the years. Whether that was him distancing himself from a film this controversial, or the producers slapping his name on there because “from the guy who did the gore in Dawn of the Dead” sounds great on a VHS cover, who knows. But honestly, who are we to doubt Tom fucking Savini? This is the same man who posed in the promotional images for Knightriders dressed in nought but a codpiece, so he has no shame and thus no reason to lie.
The film’s biggest strength – and biggest problem – is its atmosphere. Because Nightmare is absolutely suffocating. Everything about it feels unpleasant. The lighting, the locations, the performances, the soundtrack, it all creates this oppressive feeling. There’s no relief, little humour, and few moments where the film loosens its grip for a second. It’s just relentless, sweaty misery.
This isn’t like Friday the 13th where you throw it on with some mates and cheer when someone gets launched through a window. Nightmare feels closer to something like Maniac, where the violence is so ugly and personal that it stops being “fun” and starts feeling invasive.
The weird thing is, beneath all the sleaze and brutality, there’s actually the skeleton of a more thoughtful psychological horror film buried in here somewhere. The scenes inside the psychiatric hospital almost feel like they belong to a different movie entirely, one interested in trauma, repression, and the ethics of psychiatric treatment.
Early scenes of George walking the mean night time streets of New York after his release, brings to mind films like Taxi Driver. It paints New York as this den of lust, licentiousness, and filth. And it positions George as almost a defender of decency – whose disgust at this vile world is positioned as a casus belli for his killing spree.
Visually, it’s got that grimy early-80s exploitation look where every room appears slightly nicotine stained. Even before the murders start, the film feels dirty. Like everyone involved needed a shower before filming even began.
The problem, though, is that George’s victims don’t belong to that world. They’re ordinary people living ordinary lives beyond the grime and decay of the urban underclass: innocent babysitters, children, his ex-wife, and her new partner who seems to be a good man. In that sense, the film feels like a rebuke of horror’s oddly conservative tendency to celebrate killers for punishing people who stray from the boundaries of “proper” social behavior.
The pacing’s also a bit awkward. After an extremely effective and memorable opening sequence, the entire middle section of the film feels bloated and rudderless. For a narrative that mostly exists to move George from one murder set-piece to another, there’s actually none of that for a good chunk of the film. Most of the film’s kills are in the last thirty minutes or so.
I much prefer the film when it’s operating as this grimy descent into the fractured mind of a madman, where every scene has this weird dreamlike unease hanging over it. That’s where Nightmare is genuinely effective. The problem is that too much of the runtime gets bogged down in dull family melodrama that just kills the momentum dead.
All in all, Nightmare isn’t a slasher classic in the same way as Halloween, Friday the 13th, or even something like The Burning. It’s too ugly, too mean-spirited, and too uncomfortable for that. But if you’re into the nastier end of exploitation horror – the sort of film that genuinely feels like it crawled off of a grimy VHS rental shelf – there’s definitely something here.
And I’m just going to be honest here: I fucking hated the kid in this movie. Every time he was on screen I found myself rooting for George to hurry up and axe the little bastard already.
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