By Terry Sherwood
When you have an exploitation title such as He Sees You When You Are Sleeping, you expect a Christmas-themed Slay ride in some remote House or toy factory. That’s surprisingly what you get in this Charlie Steeds-directed film that looks like it came out of Charles Band’s forgotten Full Moon Features. The story has the usual signposts yet what makes it run are the characters and the sincerity with they are played
To begin with, you have the flashback as a child, Chester Van Buren witnessed his parents being murdered by an axe-wielding maniac dressed as Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. The boy managed to escape, and the killings are thought to be the work of Henry Bates, a mentally ill man who had escaped from a nearby mental institute. The film then moves to seventeen years later and adult Chester (David Lenik) who also wrote the screenplay, has returned for the first time to his childhood home, at the behest of his Aunt Marion (Caroline Williams) who Chester has allowed to live in the home while he was incarcerated in mental institutions. Aunt Marion invites Chester for Christmas along with her son, Burke (Cedric Gegel), his girlfriend Melody (Natalie Veater), as well as Chester’s girlfriend Afton (Nellie Spackman). Unknown to Chester is the plot to drive him insane so the family can take control of the house. To top it off, someone dressed up as Santa is on a killing spree. Sound familiar to Horror fans?
The charm of this film is the actors who perhaps unknowingly make fun of the genre of film newly triggered by big-budget fare such as Knives Out (2019). That film brought the drawing room detective stories back into fashion through dialogue, characters and some selected locations. The actors were having fun with the dialogue in that one and also in He Sees You When You Are Sleeping. First, you had Uncle Nick (Scot Scurlock). Channeling his “Crypt keeper’ as he tells the young Chester a Christmas-themed horror story. Burke, Aunt Marion’s son delivers one of the best lines when he intones with acid ‘We are out of (pause) wine”.
The rest of the people that have inhabited this celluloid situation in many films like childhood sweetheart Eden (Peyton Michelle Edwards), just drips with saccharine in a fun way that you may have to check into the diabetic ward of your local hospital. Burke’s girlfriend Melody Natalie Veator) has a good turn as the suffering laconic girlfriend who intones that it’s the holidays while dressed in a skin-tight silver spangled flapper mini dress. The only missing would be the cigarette holder and the short hair made famous by silent film female actor Louise Brooks.
The dialogue in some ensemble moments does spin out of the actor’s mouths well with those that hate do hate and those that Love do love. Even when the secret plot is revealed to all you still get a sense that this is the thirties style that this film is trying to do. The home looks like most of the large wood-panelled homes that appear in these Christmas films since the darker original Black Christmas (1974). Colours are warming wood tones and shadows all crisply rendered in the style of Full Moon Features. The only thing missing from this work is Full Moon would drop in the occasional soft-core nudity because that is what the exploitation film was about for many.
He Sees You When You Are Sleeping is a silly holiday horror film filled with cool dialogue, actors and some mild gore reminded of the classic slasher era. Oddly it would be a good introduction to the slasher horror genre particularly for those who don’t usually watch for fear of being drenched in Terrifier-style mayhem. As charming as an old friend’s visit on the holidays.
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