Shot for peanuts on 16mm in Indiana, this eerie little monochrome nightmare is as typical an example of regional horror as you can get, a true homegrown oddity made by an Indiana University student with a handful of his friends and family. Unlike many of its modest peers, this one never even got an official distributor with its director and star, Robert Berry, driving a print around the Midwest for one-off engagements. A bootleg VHS ended up making the rounds from the usual suspects like Alpha Video, Sinister Cinema, and so on, looking too fuzzy for you to appreciate anything on the screen. Fortunately Berry held on to the one extant print of the film, which was eventually preserved and scanned by his alma mater, with a 2026 Blu-ray release from Bleeding Skull releasing the results out into the world. Very much cut from the same experimental cloth as Carnival of Souls (to which it gets compared a lot) and Night Tide, it's the kind of thing you will either click with completely or find baffling-- with the first option more likely if you watch it late at night.

Every night is an ordeal for writer Lee (Berry), who has recurring dreams involving a spooky abandoned house, his doppelganger, and a general sense of unease, all of which cause a disconnect with his marriage to recovering alcoholic Elaine (Elliott). With increasing headaches and more potent dreams he finds his work on his latest book completely sidelined, with his dreams starting to bleed over into reality and killing off their friends.

So minimalist it feels ready to turn into vapor at any moment, House of Dreams has a nicely delirious quality to its nightmare sequences that contrasts with its mundane scenes of marital struggling and socializing, which would put it in company with films like The Mask and 1966's The Black Cat as much as any avant-garde short film. It's hard to imagine your average American moviegoer responding to this at all anywhere outside of a bohemian coffee shop, but somehow this has endured after its scant theatrical playdates (which also included a handful of screenings in Europe). It's no wonder this caught the eye of the Bleeding Skull folks, whose presentation here looks great considering it's off a print with some build-in wear and tear that somehow seems wholly appropriate. Detail and black levels are both excellent, and the DTS-HD MA 2.0 English mono audio sounds fine (with optional English subtitles) so you can fully appreciate that hyper-abrasive music score.

The thorough extras kick off with a commentary featuring Berry and Jason Coffman, a major champion for the film, and it's a great, thorough listen as they cover pretending to act in slow motion, the reason all the dialogue had to be redone in post with one actress done by someone else, the fad for beehive hairdos, the casting process with everyone working for free as long as they ended up on the marquee, and much more. Coffman also provides an atmospheric, ambient alternate score for the film (with the director's blessing), somehow manipulated from the Attention K-Mart Shoppers audio archive. Also included are a production scrapbook gallery (5m6s), including an interesting newspaper article indicating his first rough cut ran way over two hours, and "Midnite Dream Theatre" (170m32s), a "VHS mixtape" featuring the entirety of Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, House of Dreams, and Carnival of Souls (the usual theatrical cut) in SD quality along with some fun B&W commercials for companies like Keds and Clairol. The usual Bleeding Skull fanzine insert is also included featuring a Berry essay about the film.

Reviewed on May 18, 2026