Matty endures a weak small screen project from horror master Wes Craven.

Lensed shortly after the axing of his ill-fated sitcom The People Next Door, Wes Craven’s TV flick, NIGHT VISIONS, premiered on NBC on 30th November 1990 [1]. A pilot for a show that never happened, the film marks one of the earliest unions between Craven and his long-time production partner, Marianne Maddalena, and, at first glance, joins Don’t Look Down (1998) as the most conventional small screen project the legendary horror master stuck his name to. However, beyond the rote buddy-cop set-up and killer-on-the-loose come on, there are just enough interesting auteur flourishes to warrant a passing gander for completists. 

Given Night Visions’ plot centres around a doctor with psychic powers (a role filled by the slinky Loryn Locklin) trying to stop a bloodthirsty psycho, dreams and layered realities are as integral here as they are in Deadly Blessing (1981), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987), and, of course, Craven’s signature text, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). The dream milieu carries over to the film’s strongest scene. Bookended by the makings of Shocker (1989) and The People Under the Stairs (1991), Craven bridges the gap in a sequence that literally blends each picture together, marrying clairvoyance and ferreting through walls as Locklin relives a past trauma. Elsewhere, casting Mitch Pileggi — the man who played Shocker’s slap-headed supernatural slasher — as a tetchy police chief adds a further wrinkle, and a later narrative development involving multiple personalities prefigures Craven’s unfairly maligned penultimate opus, the criminally underappreciated My Soul to Take (2010). 

Alas, as a whole — or, and perhaps more accurately, as a taste for what could have been had the film made it to series — it’s easy to see why NBC passed on expanding Night Visions. Despite the thematic and conceptual fingerprints, Night Visions lacks Craven’s usual pep. Directorially, it’s a pedestrian and extremely minor offering; a laboured and thoroughly beige bit of television that even the outrageous ‘maverick detective on the edge’ histrionics of James Remar can’t alleviate. It’s also technically slipshod, coming across as clunky, ugly, and stylistically barren. 

Craven and co-creator Thomas Baum fared slightly better with their next gogglebox assignment, Nightmare Café; though, like Night Visions, NBC quickly canned the programme, pulling it after six episodes. When NBC failed to air Craven’s subsequent pilot, Laurel Canyon, the fright meister — whose ties with the network date back to his first TVM, Summer of Fear (1978) — didn’t pair with them again.

In the U.K., Night Visions bypassed TV and surfaced on tape, landing on 17th March 1993 via MGM/UA Home Video. 

USA ● 1990 ● Horror, TVM ● 91mins

James Remar, Loryn Locklin, Mitch Pileggi ● Dir. Wes Craven ● Wri. Wes Craven & Thomas Baum

[1] Night Visions was originally scheduled for 21st October 1990 but was moved at the behest of Craven and MGM/UA-TV chief, David Gerber, so it didn’t clash with the baseball World Series on CBS.