What is it with Stephen King and cats anyway?
The first – but certainly not the last – feature-length collaboration between Stephen King and director Mick Garris, Sleepwalkers arrived with a certain novelty: it was King’s first full-length screenplay written directly for the screen (not, though, his first original work for film thanks to Cat’s Eye). But if you’re expecting that kind of authorial proximity to lend coherence, you might be in for a disappointment. There’s many a slip twixt page and screen but even then, the results feel desperately, almost pathologically uneven; a campfire tale, a dark fairy tale, a perverse romance, or a high-school creature feature or sometimes all of them at once and ironically the film’s confused identity ends up being its most consistent trait.
Brian Krause and Alice Krige play Charles and Mary Brady, a mother-and-son pair of shapeshifting energy vampires, the eponymous Sleepwalkers, who roam from town to town, draining life from virgins to survive. When they move to a small Indiana town, Charles sets his sights on Tanya (Mädchen Amick), a local girl whose innocence is his intended meal ticket. What follows oscillates wildly between an off-kilter love story, Oedipal horror, and slapstick monster movie. It’s hard to tell if Garris is deliberately leaning into absurdity or if the film simply overwhelmed him and the tone wobbles so wildly that by the time the finale arrives, you won’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream, but none of them in the good way.
King’s familiar preoccupations provide the boundaries: small-town America as a crucible for hidden monstrosity, the corruption of innocence, the darkness inside domesticity, but they’re invoked without conviction, as if ticked off a list. The script teases some mythic underpinnings (references to an ancient species and predatory cycles) without doing anything interesting with them. Instead, we get telekinetic cat-hating monsters who weaponize corn cob holders and carve out human hearts in a splatter of latex and bad compositing, while looking like refugees from Whoville. If Sleepwalkers has a moral, it’s that special effects and make up can’t be trusted to cover up cracks in the story this big.
Still, there’s a curious energy to it, a kind of carnival chaos that turns its flaws into funhouse side shows. Between the rubbery transformations and the ill-advised action sequences, it’s clear everyone’s having a good time, especially when the film becomes an impromptu horror convention on celluloid, packed with cameos from Clive Barker, John Landis, Joe Dante, and Tobe Hooper, Mark Hamill, and, of course, King himself. They’re an indulgent nod to the audience, acknowledging Sleepwalkers’s absurdity even as it doubles down on it.
For Garris, this unbelievably slapdash directorial effort marked the start of a long, uneven relationship with King’s work, that would later produce 1994’s The Stand, 1997’s The Shining, Desperation, and Apple TV’s Bag of Bones. In that respect, Sleepwalkers feels like a reckless first date, all chemistry and chaos but very little compatibility and while Garris would clearly retain King’s favour, it was probably due to his fidelity rather than his feel for adapting the material.
As a film, Sleepwalkers is a mess: the performances are overripe, the pacing erratic, and the effects belong in a wax museum that caught fire, but as a curio in the King canon, it’s oddly endearing; a clumsy but sincere attempt to blend his recurring motifs of isolation, family rot, and small-town dread into something new for the nineties. It fails spectacularly, but it does so with enthusiasm, which may be why its reputation endures more as a cult punchline than a cinematic embarrassment.
