The consolidation of Hollywood studios during the 1910s has never stopped regional independent filmmaking, but it’s obscured much of that history. That’s why researchers still discover odd little flawed gems fashioned from imagination and sweat. A case in point is House of Dreams (1963), a slice of nocturnal horror made by a handful of Indiana University students on summer break. After shooting it on 16mm, creator Robert Berry struck a single 35mm print and drove it personally to a few local drive-ins. If you didn’t see it then, you pretty much missed out.
We can only imagine that, in the intervening six decades, Berry must have wondered whether he really made a movie called House of Dreams or only dreamed it. Well, the proof is now on Blu-ray from a label called Bleeding Skull. We can’t use the term “restored”, but the highly watchable print in all its sometimes scratchy, sometimes hissy glory has certainly been exhumed, complete with an interview commentary track by Berry recalling anecdotes of its production.
The production of House of Dreams is as interesting as the film. Berry states that although he majored in theatre, he received no support from the department for his impossible dream of filming a feature film. Borrowing $1,100 from his mom, he pleaded with a local dealer until he could buy a 16mm Auricon camera with an optical sound system. Except for one scene, the sound recording proved a bust and required an expensive dubbing session for the dialogue, sound effects, and music. By then, one of his cast
was no longer available and had to be dubbed by someone else.
A bearded Robert Berry stars in House of Dreams as a married novelist agonizing over his third novel, which is inspired by a nearby haunted house. His frustrations and irritations have a bad effect on his wife (Pauline Bradley), an alcoholic recently returned from a mental hospital. In his nightmares, the writer keeps visiting the dilapidated house and having visions of people dying there. In the first case, the corpse is his own brother. In an ominous glimpse of how the story’s going to go, he awakes from the first dream to learn that his brother has indeed died in a car accident.
You can probably write it from there, and House of Dreams is over in 70 minutes. The bare-bones premise serves as a showcase for the creepy dreams. Do the dreams predict what will happen or cause it? Do the dreamer’s own subconscious desires make him get rid of those annoying him? Or is the house using his interest to possess him for its own nefarious purposes? All possibilities are in balance, and the scenario is more interested in teasing the viewer, as dreams do, rather than giving answers.
Here are two curious details about those dream sequences. First, each one features Berry sporting pajamas of a different pattern. Clearly, this is a continuity code for the editing, so that he could always know which footage belonged to which dream. That shows forethought. Second, one dream is introduced by panning the handheld camera down, then cutting invisibly to a leftward pan that brings Berry’s sleeping face back into the frame. This disorienting choice foreshadows a similar idea used by Roman Polanski for a dream in Rosemary’s Baby (1968).
Since Polanski was in Europe during 1963-64 and couldn’t possibly have been exposed to a film that showed in a few Indiana drive-ins, here is evidence of how film history, which is directly tied to its technical possibilities, can breed similar ideas around the world at the same time. The ’60s saw a proliferation of handheld 16mm films that got blown up to 35mm for theatrical release, and handheld ideas were becoming common currency. Berry told newspapers that his project was inspired by having seen a lousy horror film on TV and deciding he could do better.
What he tells interviewer Jason Coffman on the Blu-ray is that six months before filming, he lost his father and both brothers in a plane crash, leaving his mother and himself in grief. No wonder his scenario features an anguished creative type haunted by a brother’s death.
House of Dreams also stars Charlene Bradley as the brother’s widow. Speaking in one scene is David Goodnow, a local radio deejay who later anchored CNN Headline News. Lance Bird plays a local police officer and friend. Bird usually handled the camera when Berry was onscreen, so he’s responsible for much of the photography. Berry blames a poor viewfinder for the fact that some close-ups cut off his chin. He also states that he hired Bird, a handsome cornfed boy, largely on the strength of Bird’s Jaguar, which Berry drives in prominent scenes.
All scenes in the writer’s house are shot in Berry’s family home in Decker, Indiana. The scenes in the haunted house are shot in a nearby abandoned property owned by his mom. It was all free production value.
According to clips from Indiana newspapers at the time, the small farm town was aflutter at a local boy shooting a “real movie”. Several locals turned out as extras. When House of Dreams played a run of several days at a local theatre in Vincennes for several showings a day, the screenings were packed, and Berry made back most of his admittedly negligible budget. By the way, that theatre’s owner appears as an extra, as does the actual local sheriff; aspiring local auteurs should take note of such canny casting. Then Berry toured drive-ins and signed autographs for his moment in the cinematic sun.
The real star of House of Dreams, the titular house, features in the moody opening credits, where the ghostly camera wanders up the stairs and pans over the peeling walls. The credits are scrawled in chalk on those stairs and walls. The music credit is for one Abbe Esben, but the woozy organ wafflings during the dreams are actually by non-musician Berry pounding on his mother’s instrument.
Those organ sounds and the dream structure make House of Dreams an obvious comparison with another local indie of the era, Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1961), which was shot in Kansas and Utah. In fact, the Bleeding Skull Blu-ray offers an option for playing House of Dreams as a double-feature with Carnival of Souls. They throw in contemporary commercials and trailers as well as a copy of Maya Deren‘s dream-inspired experimental short “Meshes of the Afternoon” (1943) in its 1959 incarnation with music by Teiji Ito. You could dream away almost three hours.
As Berry states in the interview, he wasn’t yet acquainted with Harvey’s film, but it’s clear that both Harvey and Berry were acquainted with Rod Serling’s TV series of The Twilight Zone, which began in 1959. Berry calls it one of his favorite shows. The two dream-haunted films have obvious affinities with certain episodes. The series also influenced other mysterious indies of the era, such as Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide (1961).
I’d guess Robert Berry was also influenced by writer Richard Matheson. Not only did he write many episodes of Serling’s series, but he also wrote many stories of frustrated writers arguing with their wives to cover their own faults and frustrations. During a postwar era celebrating gung-ho heroes, Matheson mined the flip side of masculine crisis and failure.
Founded in 2004 and run by Annie Choi and Joseph A. Ziemba, Bleeding Skull is a label devoted to unearthing bizarre no-budget DIY obscurities of “trash horror” from the US and abroad, films whose very limitations are endemic to their creativity. In fact, they’re among several labels carrying on such thankless work. House of Dreams may not boast the gory exploitation of some of its offerings, but it fits the profile of an ambitiously creative, way-off-Hollywood obscurity.