Sleepwalkers
Mick Garris
(1992)
Charles Brady and his mother, Mary, are the last of a dying breed whose needs are not of this world. They are Sleepwalkers - able to stay alive only by feeding on the life-force of the innocent, but destined to roam the earth, avoiding discovery while searching for their next victim. That search takes them to the sleepy little town of Travis, Indiana, where beautiful teenager Tanya Robertson is about to become an unwilling pawn in their nightmarish fight for survival.
Cast
Crew
Hook
Some doors shouldn't be opened. Sleepwalkers follows the slow, terrible cost of crossing into something that has no interest in your survival and no concept of your rules.
Identity
The film has since developed a following among enthusiasts of early 1990s horror and Stephen King adaptations, valued more for its campy energy and the curiosity value of its original King screenplay than as a fully realized horror film, occupying a minor but affectionate place in the period's genre output.
Collector Focus
King's original screenplay — shape-shifting mother-son vampires repelled by household cats — is one of his most aggressively strange originals for the screen. The cameos from Barker, Hooper, Landis, Dante, and King himself give the film a genre-historical dimension out of proportion to its critical reception.
Context
Directed by Mick Garris, Sleepwalkers was produced on a budget of approximately $15 million, with the production offsetting its lean resources through craft and camera technique. Sleepwalkers received predominantly negative reviews upon its release in April 1992, with critics finding its tonal inconsistency and the relative thinness of its central concept unconvincing despite individual effective sequences and committed performances.
