Nightmare USA: Volume 1, Part 2

In the ninth episode of Daughters of Darkness, Kat and Samm return for the second of a two-part series inspired by Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA. They kick things off with a discussion of Bob Clark’s devastating classic, Deathdream (1974), a Canadian production that reimagined the zombie film while simultaneously offering up a fresh adaptation of W.W. Jacobs’ story “The Monkey’s Paw” and confronting the effects of the Vietnam War. Frederick R. Friedel’s Kidnapped Coed (1976), on the other hand, is an odd mashup of genres that follows the strange romance that develops between a kidnapped young woman and her captor as they travel through the American countryside.

The episode also explores one of the most delirious and delightful of all ‘70s cult films, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), George Barry’s singular vision of a demonically possessed bed that consumes its inhabitants. It really must be seen to be believed. They conclude the episode with a look at Don’t Go in the House (1979), about a sympathetic serial killer who burns women to death in his own basement, and The Children (1980), a hilarious “killer kids” movie about radioactive zombie children set loose on a rural town.