A hallucinatory, erotic, and ominous vortex, Jess Franco’s Nightmares Come at Night (1970) is a beguiling movie of entrancement, and one of the purest expressions of his personal artistry. Evoking the doomed, criminal love mysteries of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, whose novels were adapted as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Nightmares Come at Night centers around a love triangle in which one player is oblivious of the game in which they are being played.
Nightclub dancer Anna de Istria (Diana Lorys) suffers from bad dreams in which she commits murder. As the movie begins, she awakens from one such dream with blood on her hands. Her lover, Cynthia (Colette Giacobine), originally asked her to move in with her and promised to launch her career, but now thinks that Anna is going crazy. Anna confides in Dr. Paul Vicas (Paul Muller) who, unbeknownst to her, is in cahoots with Cynthia, using Anna’s growing mental instability as part of a sinister plot. Meanwhile, a criminal (Andre Montchall) spies on them from next door while he waits for the loot, along with his girlfriend (Soledad Miranda).
Like Vertigo, this is a film about obsession, desire, madness, and control, and brings to mind classic psychological thrillers such as Gaslight (1944), and Hammer films like Taste of Fear (1961), Paranoiac (1963), and Nightmare (1964), in which protagonists must question their own sanity. For Franco, however, the plot and its resolution are mere outlines in which to stage his psycho-sexual operas in which the lines between reality and fantasy are an ecstatic haze. The deeper subject of this film is rapture, and what it means to be on different sides of the attraction. A great example of this is the strip-tease scene in which Anna first meets Cynthia. In flash-back, we see Anna dancing in a Zagreb club, while in voice-over she describes how her boss told her to dance slower in order to hold the attraction of the audience. Meanwhile, in the crowd is Cynthia, whose conversely steals the attention of Anna. In this way, the stage turns into the crowd, and Anna the performer becomes Anna the audience-of-one for a solo performance of Cynthia, who performs only with her eyes. This dynamic seems like a reprise of The Diabolical Dr. Z (1966), in which Irma Zimmer (Mabel Karr) watches Nadia’s performance (Estella Blain) as Miss Death, and then manipulates her to become a somnambulant assassin for her revenge mission.
In Franco’s films, the line is often blurred between the real world and dreamworld, especially so in Nightmares Come at Night where the protagonist is often unable to distinguish her own state of being in the moment. “Always this silence around me,” narrates Anna, “softening my steps through this big house, a feeling of living somewhere else in a strange world. At every moment this feeling to delve in a dream not knowing if I was asleep or still awake.” It is only the nightmare is over, when she awakens, or when she comes out of a deep conversation, that Franco pulls us back into relative objectivity.
One aspect of Franco’s cinema that fascinates me is his investigations into how fiction and fantasy play out in “reality,” and how his characters are always engaged in some element of role playing. For Franco’s characters, there’s often little difference between who they say they are and who they really are. The subjective and the objective are intertwined. One helps define the other. Franco explicitly discusses this concept when Anna remarks to a man (who may or may not be real);”You love cinema, too.” He responds, “I love when it allows us to escape from the daily routines. It opens the door to a wonderful world.” Anna’s response seems to be Franco speaking from behind the camera: “I understand. It’s exactly what happens to me. You only have to trust and let go. You’ll unravel ways you’d never have discovered on your own.”
Nightmares Come at Night is among my favorite of Franco’s films that I’ve seen. Photographically it’s a stunning movie, with subtle, naturalistic photography whose almost documentary sensibility is almost counterintuitive, considering how surreal and phantasmagoric much of the film feels. The overarching sensation of disquiet is reinforced by master composer Bruno Nicolai’s use of dissonant string harmonies, reverb percussion waves, and repeated piano/guitar patterns that create an air of cyclical uneasiness.
Once thought to be lost, Nightmares Come at Night is among the rarest and most recently rediscovered of Franco’s films, existing in only one print in the entire world. While there is some print damage (and one sequence so dark it is hard to see), the copy streaming on Kino Cult retains a lovely celluloid aura, which is particularly flattering to the soft light and muted hues of Franco visual palette. Kino’s Blu-ray also includes audio commentary from Tim Lucas, Franco trailers, and several exclusive documentaries: a “making of” featurette, an “Homage to Jess,” and a short explanation from Kino producer Brett Wood on the extraordinary journey of the print to its present state.
Streaming on Kino Cult, or available on DVD/Blu-ray.
–Cullen Gallagher
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