Bad Dreams 1988

In 1975, the cult Unity Fields drives its followers to a mass suicide by fire under the command of its deranged leader, Franklin Harris, Richard Lynch. Only one young survivor remains: Cynthia Weston, Jennifer Rubin, a child at the time of the blaze who wakes from the flames to find thirteen years have passed. She lingers in a hospital coma until a sudden return to consciousness pulls her into a world that feels both alien and dangerous, filled with memories that won’t stay buried.

Her return begins in a clinical, tightly controlled setting where she is pulled into experimental group therapy for borderline personality disorder. The program is run by Dr. Alex Karmen, Bruce Abbott, a respectable clinician who isn’t sure Cynthia belongs in the group’s tight orbit. Yet his mentor and colleague, Dr. Berrisford, Harris Yulin, insists on giving her a chance to recalibrate to an urban life that has changed in the thirteen years since Unity Fields’ tragedy. The therapy room becomes a stage for a careful negotiation between fear and possibility, as Cynthia’s fraught history bleeds into her present, and Karmen finds himself torn between professional caution and a growing sympathy for her fragile, compelling story.

As Cynthia processes her past, she is haunted by a vision of Harris drowning Lana, a fellow patient, in a baptismal ceremony; moments later, Lana is discovered dead in a swimming pool. The visions intensify, and Harris begins to appear to her with his burned flesh, a chilling reminder of the fire that claimed so many lives. When her roommate Miriam, Susan Ruttan, is discharged, Cynthia experiences another visitation of Harris in the elevator—only for the doors to close before she can warn Miriam. Tragically, Miriam falls to death on the sidewalk below, the hospital’s grounds apparently turning into a corridor of danger.

Cynthia’s fears feel less abstract as other patients die or come perilously close to death. Ed, Louis Giambalvo, and Connie, Susan Barnes, lovers who are also patients, walk into the blades of an industrial fan in the hospital’s utility room, a pair of deaths that Cynthia attributes to Harris’s nefarious influence. The fear intensifies when Ralph Pesco, James Purcell, a troubled masochist with violent tendencies, becomes infatuated with Cynthia. After a violent outburst, he confronts her in a vulnerable moment, and, in a basement episode, Ralph suicides by stabbing himself multiple times.

After these episodes, Cynthia awakens to find Harris whispering to her, calling her his “love child” and urging her to join him by taking her own life. Harris’s presence expands when Berrisford appears to Gilda, Damita Jo Freeman, a clairvoyant patient who urged Cynthia to resist the haunting figure. Rather than succumb, Gilda drinks formaldehyde she stole from a supply room, choosing death over Harris’s control. In parallel, Dr. Karmen uncovers the extent of Berrisford’s manipulation: the bad drugs, the calculated suicides, the disturbing motive behind the research. The truth becomes a fuse that lights a race against time.

Alex reaches out to the police, enlisting Detective Wasserman, Sy Richardson, to investigate Unity Fields’s troubling pattern before the suicides escalate further. He confronts Cynthia, insisting that the visions of Harris aren’t real, while Berrisford stalks them from the shadows, intending to neutralize the threat to his plan. The hospital erupts into chaos as the emergency alarm sounds, and the powerful forces of science and deceit collide.

On a rooftop confrontation, Berrisford tries to force the hand of fate, urging Cynthia to leap. She falls, but awakens in a nightmare-reverie—the old Unity Fields house where the group’s members ended their lives. The vision collapses when she finds herself back on the rooftop, held by Dr. Karmen’s steady presence, as he and Cynthia cling to the ledge. Berrisford attempts to push Karmen to his death, wielding a weapon in a last desperate gambit to preserve his control. The police arrive, and Wasserman’s team helps the doctors pull Cynthia to safety, while the incriminating evidence against Berrisford crystallizes in the glare of the surrounding lights.

In a dramatic turn, Berrisford, cornered and exposed, pretends to commit suicide but raises his gun toward Karmen. It is Cynthia who finally seizes the moment, facing the figure who has haunted her and, with a resolve born of years of fear, pushes Berrisford over the edge to his demise. The danger recedes as the authorities secure the rooftop, and Karmen and Cynthia are rescued from the brink. Yet a final glimpse of Harris, lingering in the corner of Cynthia’s vision, hints that the trauma might still haunt her, even as Alex steadies her and reassures her that the worst is behind them.

In the aftermath, the hospital quiets, and the bond between healer and patient anchors their fragile triumph. Dr. Karmen holds Cynthia as they both acknowledge the long road they’ve traveled from fear to fragile hope. The lingering echo of Harris’s hold on her memory slowly fades as they step back from the edge, finding a moment of calm and renewed purpose in the wake of terror. The story closes on a note of cautious optimism: Cynthia is no longer a captive of her visions, and with Alex by her side, she dares to imagine a life beyond the shadows of Unity Fields.