Dream Eater’s three writer/directors, including star Mallory Drumm, financed the film themselves.Route 504/Supplied
The set of their horror movie was her parents’ cabin in northern Quebec.
The three writer/directors – Mallory Drumm (who also stars in the film), her husband Jay Drakulic, and her co-star Alex Lee Williams – had financed the $50,000 budget themselves, squirrelled away from their years of making corporate videos for, among others, Canada Goose, RBC and Burger King. Before they and the other five crew members – including Drakulic’s 16-year-old nephew, doing a high-school internship – could begin shooting, they first had to shovel a metre of snow off the creepy homemade merry-go-round, and carve out paths to the ramshackle shed and cobwebby crawlspace.
During the nine-day shoot, Drumm and Drakulic slept in the location. On night six, they heard a BOOM that shook the foundation – they had to crawl around with flashlights to make sure the cabin wasn’t collapsing. In the morning, they realized that sound had been a ton of snow falling off the roof and breaking through a door; they had to shovel out the living room before the rest of the crew arrived from their Airbnb down the road.
They never expected that Eli Roth, the godfather of contemporary horror films, would reach out to them through Instagram after they won best feature at the 2024 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. And now their movie about a living nightmare, Dream Eater, which opens Oct. 24, is every Canadian independent filmmaker’s fantasy come true.
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I met the trio at their publicists’ office in downtown Toronto. Genuine candidates for the nicest people on Earth, they had just signed their first film posters, which read “Eli Roth Presents” above the title, and were joking that their signatures would devalue them. Nearly every sentence they uttered about their good fortune had either “whoa” or “mind-blowing” or “surreal” in it.
Those words also describe Dream Eater. Alex (Williams) suffers from violent parasomnia (sleepwalking, sleep-talking, potential self-harm), and it’s getting worse. He and his filmmaker girlfriend, Mallory (Drumm), who’s documenting his symptoms on camera, think a midwinter getaway to a remote cabin in the woods might help. It doesn’t. As Alex’s blank-eyed moaning goes from, “He won’t let me sleep” to “He told me to let him in” to “He’s behind you!” you might be pinching yourself to wake up.
Played by Alex Lee Williams, Alex, right, suffers from violent parasomnia.Route 504/Supplied
The trio hope that Dream Eater will do to bedtime what Psycho and Jaws did to showers and ocean swimming. “What’s more unsettling for us to invade than your sleep?” Drakulic asks. “It’s supposed to be this cozy thing, but you’re unconscious, vulnerable. What’s lurking in the dark? What are you doing that you don’t know you’re doing? And who, really, are you sleeping next to?” (He’s not exaggerating: Some parasomniacs have killed their bed partners.)
“When you’re a horror fan, you’re always looking for that fix, that fix of scare,” Roth told me in a separate video interview. “The last 15 minutes of Dream Eater is the scariest footage I’ve seen in any movie this year. Alex is so terrifying, and Mallory emotionally is so real. Every time she wakes up, every time we hear the security system say, ‘Front door open,’ we’re dreading what she’ll find. This is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen, period.”
Roth, who whipped up his first fear frenzies with Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005), knows first-hand how gonzo indie horror-making can be. “Alex really is barefoot outside in the snow, in Canada,” he says. “It’s like the pencil in the ankle in Evil Dead – we can all imagine what that feels like. They’d shoot all night and then go edit. They’re lunatics. I think they spent nine months in post. The sound design is meticulous. It could be a landmark movie in the found-footage genre.”
Dream Eater is the second film in Roth’s new venture, The Horror Section, which he envisions as “a kind of mini-studio, a company that owns a bunch of titles, a Marvel for monsters,” to help finance scary films and get them into theatres. “Horror movies are like baseball cards and wine,” he says. “They don’t go stale, they become vintage. If fans love the characters, monsters and mythologies, they can jump generations.”
Roth doesn’t know how Dream Eater will fare at the box office – “Twenty years from now we could be on Dream Eater 7, or it could be a one-off,” he says, “but the title will have value, because it had a theatrical release. And I can put Mallory, Jay and Alex on everyone’s radar, the way Quentin Tarantino and Peter Jackson helped me.” (The three recently scored agents in Los Angeles, but they vow they’ll keep working here. “We’re Canadian indie to the bone,” Drakulic says.)
I could talk all day to them, and to Roth, about why they love horror: Because “the audience become active participants in the experience,” Drumm says. Because “horror helps you acknowledge the evils and darkness in your own life, and helps you believe you can fight them, and find a catharsis you might not otherwise,” Drakulic says. “It plants a seed in your mind that germinates when you go home.”
Eli Roth thinks Dream Eater ‘could be a landmark movie in the found-footage genre.’Route 504/Supplied
Because, Roth says, “life is a series of avoiding potholes until you eventually fall into one. And death is such an unpleasant, undiscussable subject. But horror movies give you a way to talk about it in a way that doesn’t make you cowardly. It’s a way to make fun of the inevitable.”
And because horror is a prism that refracts light onto real-life terrors – in Dream Eater’s case, unprocessed trauma and abusive behaviour. “Alex has trauma he refuses to deal with, and he visits it on Mallory,” Williams says. “We all know someone in a relationship like this, where a little abuse becomes a lot.”
In fact, the first cut of Dream Eater ended with an act of abuse, which some of its Canadian producers considered too bleak. Roth helped the trio find a higher-octane conclusion – and showed up on set the day they filmed it. “A found-footage movie lives or dies in its last 30 seconds,” he says. “It needs to be bone-chilling-terrifying/cut to black – Wreck, The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity. If audiences are like this [covers mouth with hands] when the credits roll, you win.”
To prove that Dream Eater is literally pulse-pounding, Roth’s company concocted a genius marketing event: At a test screening, they hooked all 80 audience members up to heart monitors. “You could see the pulses going up, 80, 130, 140,” Roth says. “Some people hit 170. They were sweating like they were running on a treadmill. You can only get that in a theatre, where you’re trying not to look but you have to look. And these three did that for $50,000 Canadian. It shows what you can do when you’re clever with filmmaking.”
A horrormeister to his core, Roth adds, “Go see it. When you discover a great scary movie that first weekend, it becomes one of the most fun nights of your life.”
Dream Eater opens in select theatres Oct. 24.