The Incestuous Thrills of Stephen King’s “Sleepwalkers”

Revisiting a largely-forgotten '90s horror flick with a refreshingly positive take on CONSANGUINITY!

By: Toxicka Shock
ToxickaShock@gmail.com
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When it comes to Stephen King film adaptations, there are a lot of movies based on his works that are very, very good - “Misery,” “The Green Mile,” “Carrie,” “The Shining,” etc. - and a lot that are very, very bad - “The Lawnmower Man,” “Graveyard Shift,” “Sometimes They Come Back,” “Cell,” the list, it goes on and on.

The peculiar thing is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a middle ground when it comes to the overall quality of the King adaptations. By and large, they’re either fantastic offerings like “The Shawshank Redemption” or “Apt Pupil” or absolute train wrecks like “The Mangler” or “The Night Flier” - merely mediocre King adaptations, seemingly, are few and far between.



Which brings us to a very curious little King adaptation from 1992 called “Sleepwalkers.”

Granted, calling it an adaptation is a bit of a misnomer, since it’s not based on a pre-existing King work. Rather, the screenplay for “Sleepwalkers” was written by King himself, so there’s nothing to technically “adapt” from the material.

To put it mildly, “Sleepwalkers” is an odd movie, even by King’s standards. It’s a film that, on one hand, feels like something of a 1960s B-movie creature throwback, but it also has a few glimmers and flashes of something much kinkier, like a lighter and frothier version of all those softcore Jesus Franco erotic horror pictures of the ‘70s.

I can only imagine the headaches this movie must’ve given the marketing department at Columbia Pictures. I mean, here’s a movie that pretty much revolves around a teenage incubus feasting on the souls of virgins so he can fuck immortal life back into his own mother - not exactly the kind of premise that lends itself to an straight and to the point ad campaign.

Yes, give Stephen King his props on this one - his first time pulling screenwriter duties he churns out a cornball splatter flick with one of the rare POSITIVE depictions of incestuous sexual relations in the medium.

Off the top of my head I really can’t think of any other major, big-studio horror movies that has such a pro-consanguinity bent to it. Usually, incestuous themes in horror movies are depicted as either unabashed sexual abuse or the domain of mutant hillbillies whose very humanity is questionable. But in “Sleepwalkers,” it’s quite apparent that the incestuous angle has some sincerity to it. Not only is the inter-familial sexual relations in the plot completely consensual, it’s depicted as warm, emotionally-attached and, dare I say it, with genuine love and romance. Granted, it’s still a movie about shapeshifting cat-demons who have sex with their own mothers, but you can at least appreciate the film for taking a drastically different approach with a familiar theme.

Anchoring the film is the palpable chemistry between Brian Krause and Alice Krige as the very affectionate mother and son couple, Charles and Mary Brady. From the outset of the film, before we’re given any real exposition on who they are and what they really are, the audience simply senses that something is abnormal in their relationship. When Mary walks in on her son carving the namesake of his latest object of desire on his arm, his mother’s concerns aren’t about her child’s self-mutilation or obsessive compulsive tendencies, but rather anxiety that he’s found someone to replace her as a romantic partner. This leads to a tremendous scene where the two slow dance in the living room, gazing lovingly into one another’s eyes before King stops teasing us and makes the incest motif canonical by showing Mary sticking her tongue into her own son’s mouth for a VERY passionate kiss. The two continue to lustfully make out while Charles carries his mother upstairs. The bedroom door closes shut, and we’re left to simply imagine how the rest of their evening plays out.

Well, at least *thIS* Kiss didn't include that much Tongue, I Suppose.

All these years later I’m still not entirely sure how the metaphysical stuff between Mary and Charles is supposed to work. The film seems to imply that Charles has the ability to suck out the souls of virginal women, but it’s never expounded upon why he has sexual intercourse with his own mother. The head canon explanation, I suppose, is that only through sex can he transfer the victims’ life force to his mother, but again, it’s never explicitly confirmed through the movie itself. Furthermore, there’s no father figure anywhere present in the movie, nor are there any hints as to how the feline-esque demons of the film reproduce. Do normal people get transformed into Sleepwalkers? Is it some kind of curse that’s never given any backstory? Could Charles conceivably impregnate Mary to make more cat-demons? All questions that are given zero answers throughout the course of the film, I’m afraid. Perhaps the most tantalizing excuse for the incest subplot is that there simply isn’t one - for whatever reason, they two simply like to have sex with each other, and that’s it.

You HAVE to give Columbia Pictures some props. The biggest name in the entire genre came to them with a script about cat zombie motherfuckers (literally) and they had the guts to actually SHOW the cat zombie motherfucking in the movie. And it’s an especially kitschy love scene, too, with the slow, sweaty, incestuous sex intercut with long, lingering shots of dark blue lights and footage of cats delicately traipsing around the Bradys’ bear-trap-strewn backyard. The money shot, so to speak, comes when the camera pans over to a mirror and we can see Mary and Charles doing the nasty in their “true” forms - essentially, these gaudy foam-latex ogres that look suspiciously like models cast using Play-Doh.

Of course, there’s quite the surfeit of subplots running parallel to the incest undercurrent of “Sleepwalkers.” The heroine of the film, and Charles’ unwitting prey, is the kind of wholesome, all-American, Midwest trad-wife breeding stock that has such quaint and kooky hobbies as making tombstone rubbing art and dancing like a goofball to songs from the “Dirty Dancing” soundtrack. One of Charles’ teachers appears to be a bit of a child predator, at one point attempting to grab our leading werecat by his crotch - an act that costs the perverted educator his hand in the process. And of course, what would a movie like this be without a bounty of canon fodder police officers, all just biding their time until they get killed off in exuberantly gory jump scare scenes?

You don’t need me to tell you that 95 percent of the cast is expendable. That should be obvious from the outset. Indeed, the movie concludes with Krige - looking sinister and sexy in a slinky green dress and blood red lipstick - massacring an entire household, slipping in and out of her distinct South African accent as she stabs police officers to death with ... ears of corn. Sheesh, I can only imagine the havoc she could wreak while armed with a pineapple!

Admittedly, the “rules’ of the movie are a bit unclear. One of the few plot points the movie does stick to, however, is its assertion that our mother and son werecat couple can’t be killed by conventional means. Shoot them, stab their eyeballs out, set them on fire, it doesn't matter. Indeed, the only way to kill them for good, apparently, is through the scratch of a house cat - which would explain, I suppose, the family’s penchant for setting Meow Mix-baited booby traps all over their property lines.

But the movie seems to enjoy giving our antagonists newfangled superpowers whenever the plot requires it. For example, the werecats apparently have the ability to transform solid objects just by touching them, or create invisibility cloaks at will. That both superpowers just so happen to come in handy to end a police chase sequence, I guess, is mere coincidence. Later on we learn that Mama Brady also appears to have some form of telekinetic powers - which, for whatever reason, she only feels fit to use to turn on a record player when the soundtrack suddenly necessitates it.

As is the case with many mainstream-ish horror films released in the wake of Freddy-mania, this is one of those flicks that’s a tad too reliant on the quippy dialogue. As soon as Charles turns “evil” on his virginal prey, he starts dropping puns and dad jokes en masse. Even Alice starts making with the snappy banter towards the end of the movie - although, I am sad to report that despite the prevalent cat motif, this movie, somehow, is 100 percent devoid of any risqué “pussy” double entendres. For shame, Steve, for shame.

if you're going to include an oedipus complex in a horror movie, you might as well go ALL the way with it.

Really, who knows just how watered down the movie may have been compared to King’s initial drafts. I can only imagine how much he self-censored himself during the writing process, fully aware that he might be able to get away with pre-teen sewer gangbangs in a 2,000 page novel but not so much in a R-rated, multi-million-dollar Hollywood production. The end product certainly feels compromised, but again, that may have more to do with King handling an unfamiliar medium (with unfamiliar creative restraints) than the formal executive meddling we’re accustomed to in the medium.

It seems obvious that King was angling for a trashier, pulpier, sleazier version of Paul Schrader’s “Cat People” from 1982, right down to the inclusion of a major incestuous plot device. Alas, as good as Brian Krause and Alice Krige may be in “Sleepwalkers,” they certainly don’t have the charisma of Nastassja Kinski or Malcolm McDowell. Whereas “Cat People” worked as a sincere erotic horror movie with some very kinky overtones, “Sleepwalkers” feels more like a 1950s B-monster movie throwback with some sleazy ‘70s style sexploitation elements implied but not exactly delivered. It seems like King was trying to do a bigger budget “Invasion of the Bee Girls” here, but all of the ingredients, I’m afraid, just didn’t boil together into the broth he was hoping for.



Despite its obvious shortcomings, “Sleepwalkers” is still an amusing and entertaining little throwaway from the early ‘90s. At a time when mainstream horror was about as dead as it has ever been in modern Hollywood history, King at least tried to give audiences a taste of something well beyond the comfort zones of most American filmgoers - werecats biting cops’ faces off is one thing, but consensual mother-on-son monster sex? Simply put, that was just too much for Dan Quayle’s America, and that King got away with as much graphic incest in this movie as he did is nothing short of astounding.

I’ve heard many people consider consanguinity - i.e., voluntary incestuous sexual relations between consenting and able-minded adults - to be the next big civil rights issue in the U.S. Whether or not that will be the case is to be seen, but let’s face it, it’s not like there’s a lot of positive (or even neutral) depictions of consanguinity in contemporary media. Although the film still depicts out incestuous duo as (literal) sexual predators, off the top of my head it’s still the only horror film I can think of that DOESN’T depict consanguinity as horrific sexual abuse or the recreational activities of subhuman scoundrels.

Perhaps the thing that unnerved viewers about “Sleepwalkers” the most wasn’t that it contained an incest dynamic, but that it presented that incest dynamic in a fairly banal (and dare I say it - sexy) way. This movie isn’t about mutant uncles raping their mutant nieces, it’s about two lily-white, upper-middle-class suburbanites who enjoy having sex with each other and the fact that one party gave birth to the other doesn’t mean anything to either of them. The unusual lighting and spooky music aside, the way the sex scenes in “Sleepwalkers” are filmed are anything but horrifying - rather, they’re depicted as sensual, intimate and perhaps even a bit romantic.

It might be a stretch to say “Sleepwalkers” is a pro-consanguinity movie. But at the same time? It’s definitely one of the less critical and condemnatory depictions of incest in horror film history - and from a sociopolitical perspective, it might someday be considered decades ahead of its time.

XOXO, TOXICKA