Nightmare by Michael Gingold - Review

The doctors and administrators field testing a new mental health treatment protocol believe they have made a significant breakthrough with George Tatum, a man once driven to commit depraved acts of sexual violence by a horrific, confusing, and vivid nightmare. Tatum, aided by medications, appears to be seizure free and is responding well to therapy.

Those appearances are deceiving, however, as the vivid nightmare that drove him to violence still plagues him...

At the very end of Romano Scavoloni's Nightmare (1981) Susan Temper (Sharon Smith) wails out an explanation as to what motivated George Tatum (Baird Stafford) to travel all the way from New York City, down to Florida, just to menace and traumatize her three children.

This explanation, to be honest and fair, does not hold up to much, if any, scrutiny. What should make a first time viewer's eyes widen and jaw drop instead might cause said viewer's brow to furrow and have them thinking, maybe even saying out loud, "Wait... WHAT!?!"

My curiosity as to how, or even if, author Michael Gingold might attempt to weave some kind of foreshadowing of this revelation into the cult film's transcribed narrative was my primary motivation for purchasing and reading this novelization. 

The short answer is, he did not. So it goes.

Gingold's most obvious, to me, additions were a few extra killings. One that explains how Tatum came to be institutionalized. Another takes place in the restroom of a New York City grindhouse that just so happens to be showing William Lustig's Maniac. Which is a beautiful use of irony. Then there is one that occurs after an anachronistic cameo appearance of an Alamo Drafthouse style theater, which offers a nice, knowing nudge and wink to this book's readers. I doubt there are any potential readers of a novelization of Nightmare that would not know what is, or have never been to, an Alamo Drafthouse.

Although there is some minor reinterpretation of the film's climax for this novelization, most of it remains unchanged. Which is as it should be, I guess.

I cannot, and will not, fault Gingold for not writing the kind of novelization I hoped, or wanted, to read. But I can and do commend his turning a sleazy oddity of early 80s exploitation cinema into a novel that held my attention until its ominous and, it seems, sequel teasing conclusion.