Dream Demon 1988

Diana Markham, Jemma Redgrave is an upper-class London schoolteacher who is preparing to marry her fiancé, the wealthy Oliver Mark Greenstreet. She is plagued by vivid nightmares in which Oliver assumes violent, coercive roles, including moments that imply rape, casting a pall over the looming ceremony. When she moves into their new home, her dreams intensify: she sees a fiery vision of a young blonde girl with angel wings and becomes increasingly frightened of the house’s basement. Diana’s therapist, Deborah Susan Fleetwood, tries to reassure her, suggesting the stress of wedding planning and relentless press attention may be amplifying her anxiety rather than revealing something supernatural.

Outside the house, Diana is harassed by Peck, a persistent photographer, and Paul, an investigative journalist. Jenny Kathleen Wilhoite, a tourist from Los Angeles investigating her own past, comes to Diana’s aid and helps ward off the intruders. Diana invites Jenny in for a drink, and the two women quickly form a connection: Jenny reveals she was adopted as a child and has no memory of her birth parents, who once lived at Diana’s address. The two agree to meet again the following day, though that night Diana experiences a hallucinogenic nightmare in which Peck breaches the home and attacks her.

The next morning, Jenny returns as Diana explains her nightmare, and the two discover Paul in the house’s basement, where he threatens Diana and claims Peck has disappeared. After this tense encounter, Jenny stays to comfort Diana. Diana opens up about her mounting anxiety over the marriage and even confesses that she is a virgin. Days pass, and Jenny endures a disturbing vision in which Peck assaults her and she witnesses a young, abused girl—again echoing the earlier blonde vision. She bolts from the house and manages to rouse Diana, whose sleep-wrought fear finally subsides… for a moment. Deborah later suggests that Jenny may have astrally projected, and the two realize Diana’s dreams have real consequences in the waking world.

Back at the mansion, the two women become enveloped by shared, basement-linked visions and chilling apparitions. Terrified, Jenny chooses to return to her hotel in order to escape, eventually booking a flight back to California. Yet Diana’s sleep draws them both again into danger: Jenny sleeps in Jenny’s hotel room, and Paul arrives, having tracked their movements, to reveal that Oliver is financially ruined and pursuing the marriage as an economic rescue. As Jenny fights to wake Diana, Diana sinks into another nightmare where deformed versions of Paul and Peck torment her.

Diana awakens in the hotel, unsure whether she is dreaming or awake, and the two women drift apart as more visions—of the blonde girl, Peck, and Paul—sear through their lives. Diana is later sedated with Deborah’s involvement, dragged back into sleep to protect her, while a brainwave monitor tracks her state during these episodes. In a pivotal astral projection sequence, Deborah watches old footage of the blonde girl during a hospital therapy session—the girl is actually Jenny as a child, before she moved to the United States.

In the astral plane, Diana returns to the family home and rescues Jenny, who is trapped in a void. The two become separated again as Jenny re-enters a repressed memory: her widowed father, a volatile and abusive artist, tied her to a sculpture in his basement studio to use her as a model. He reportedly set a fire with turpentine, burning himself in the blaze, though Jenny remains bound to the sculpture as an adult. Diana pulls her free, and the two women embrace before fleeing the house together.

Later, they visit a gravestone for Jenny’s father, where a stone sculpture of Jenny with angel wings stands as a testament to her late childhood. Back in the empty, now-for-sale home, the nightmare returns with the unsettling presence of Peck and Paul—alive, and seemingly undeterred by prior events—reaffirming that the house’s history and the two women’s shared visions still hold real, dangerous power.