Nightmares (1980 film)

Nightmares is a 1980 Australian horror film, directed by John D. Lamond. It is also known as Stage Fright. It was Gary Sweet's feature film debut.

A young girl named Cathy (Jenny Neumann) tries to keep her mother from making out with a man while driving one day, and she inadvertently causes her mother's death in the ensuing crash. Sixteen years later, Cathy is now named Helen and has become a psychotic actress. Since her mother died with a shard of glass in her throat, Helen begins hacking through the cast of her new play, "Comedy of Blood," in similar fashion.

The film was shot by Lamond immediately after Pacific Banana and edited at the same time. Lamond:

Nightmares should have been a lot better. We used the Steadicam camera for the first time in Australia on that. It was all right, but it didn’t have any story. The technique was all right. Brian May’s music was great.. It was dumped by the distributor. No-one tried, nobody did anything. But it should have been better. Because it was a real quickie. I had the chance to make a real quickie, they said if you don’t take the money we’ll give it to somebody else... That was back in the old tax regime. You had to get the money, make the film, be finished by a certain time, you couldn’t take longer.

Lamond says it was John Michael Howson's idea to set the movie in a theatre.

The film features a bitchy theatre critic called Bennett Collingswood (played by John Michael Howson) who many observers felt was a veiled attack on Colin Bennett, film critic of The Age who was often critical of Australian films.

It was the first professional job for Gary Sweet who later called the film "terrible, diabolical" but says it got him thinking "acting was, you know, all right."