Anthology by Accident
Nightmares wants you to think it’s a horror anthology, a bold stab at urban legends with teeth. The truth is, it’s television roadkill. Born as a failed NBC pilot, it drags itself onto the big screen in 1983 like a drunk who stumbled out of a bar and accidentally wandered into a theater. The problem is, you can still smell the small screen clinging to it—the budget sets, the lighting as flat as diner coffee, the kind of stories you’d expect after the 11 o’clock news to keep Midwestern teens from necking in Chevys.
But the film doesn’t just limp. It wheezes, it coughs, it claws for air. Four stories, each one promising the chills of urban legend, each one collapsing like a soufflé in a drafty kitchen.
Segment One: Terror in Topanga
Cristina Raines plays Lisa, a chain-smoking housewife who needs a late-night cigarette run. Her husband tells her not to go because there’s a killer loose, but nicotine is stronger than common sense. This should be a simple morality play—vice leads to doom. Instead, it plays like an extended PSA against running out of Marlboros.
The twist? The gas station creep isn’t the killer—he’s saving her from the real killer, who’s been hiding in her backseat. And she throws her cigarettes away in the end, as though we’ve just watched an 18-minute nicotine patch commercial directed by someone who once saw Psycho on TV but fell asleep halfway through.
Scary? Not really. Unless your greatest fear is lung cancer and an overlong trip to the gas station.
Segment Two: The Bishop of Battle
Ah yes, Emilio Estevez, America’s favorite brat-packer, squaring off against a video game. This is the “urban legend” where the kid gets so good at the arcade machine that the game sucks him in. It’s 1983, so the game is a blocky Tron knockoff that wouldn’t scare your grandma, but the movie treats it like the gates of hell.
Estevez plays J.J., a hustler who loves video games more than his family, his friends, and presumably dental hygiene. He finally beats level 12 and the machine vomits pixels into the real world. Space invaders fly around shooting lasers, which should be the stuff of childhood nightmares—but here it looks like rejected animation from a Sesame Street counting sketch.
The final horror is J.J. becoming trapped in the game, his face forever frozen on the screen. The arcade owner doesn’t care, his parents don’t care, and by this point, neither do we. A segment meant to warn kids about obsession ends up warning filmmakers about overestimating the fear factor of Atari graphics.
Segment Three: The Benediction
Here comes Lance Henriksen, the one actor in this whole mess who looks like he’s been through hell before he even opens his mouth. He plays a priest who loses his faith after a kid dies. He resigns, hits the road, and immediately gets stalked by a Satanic pickup truck.
Yes, you read that right. The Devil doesn’t come in a fiery pit, he doesn’t wear horns or whisper temptations—he drives a Chevy. You half expect him to have a bumper sticker that says Honk if You Love Evil.
The chase scenes want to be Duel or The Car, but they’re edited with all the tension of a church potluck. When Henriksen finally destroys the satanic truck with holy water, it feels less like divine intervention and more like the filmmakers running out of film.
If you ever wanted to see a man rediscover God because a pickup truck tried to sideswipe him into eternal damnation, congratulations, this one’s for you.
Segment Four: Night of the Rat
And now, the crown jewel of absurdity. Richard Masur and Veronica Cartwright play suburban parents terrorized by… a giant psychic rat. Yes, the Devil Rodent. A creature so mighty it can chew piano keys, slam doors, and make your child telepathically announce that it just wants its baby back.
Instead of tension, we get household slapstick: clogged sinks, missing cats, squeaky crawlspaces. By the time the rat shows up, glowing eyes and all, it looks less like Satan’s spawn and more like something rejected from Jim Henson’s workshop.
The rat doesn’t even die. It negotiates. The family returns its dead baby (in a shoebox, no less), and the Devil Rodent just… leaves. Roll credits. Evil was defeated by basic empathy and waste management.
What Went Wrong?
Everything. But most of all, tone. Horror anthologies live or die by atmosphere: think Creepshow, Tales from the Crypt, even the cheaper Cat’s Eye. Nightmares can’t decide if it’s moral fable, campfire story, or after-school special. So it lands in a no-man’s land where nothing is scary and everything feels like filler between commercials.
The cinematography is TV blandness in widescreen. The music is half-hearted synth squelches that make you long for even the cheapest Goblin knockoff. The pacing drags so badly you start checking your watch halfway through each segment.
Worst of all, it forgets the one thing horror can never forget: fun. These stories don’t shock, don’t entertain, don’t even amuse. They shuffle along, pretending they’ve got teeth, while the audience is stuck watching gums flap.
Cult Following or Stockholm Syndrome?
Of course, there’s always a cult. Every horror relic has one. Some people insist Nightmares is misunderstood, a quirky time capsule of early-’80s fears—video games, feminism, Satanic panic, rodents. That’s not cult devotion, that’s nostalgia gaslighting. Watching Estevez get pixelated isn’t scary or profound; it’s just embarrassing.
Final Word: Four Flops in a Coffin
Nightmares is the cinematic equivalent of reheated TV dinner horror: tasteless, soggy, and vaguely toxic. A cigarette PSA, a video game panic attack, a satanic Chevy commercial, and a giant rat family drama—all stitched together with the desperation of producers who didn’t want to throw anything away.
It could have been campy fun. Instead, it’s a reminder that not every urban legend needs to be told, and not every pilot deserves resuscitation. By the end, you don’t feel scared. You feel conned, like you paid for four ghost stories and got handed a stack of Reader’s Digest moral lessons.
The real nightmare isn’t on the screen. It’s in realizing that someone thought this was worth theatrical release.
