That 1992’s Sleepwalkers was the first film Stephen King wrote directly for the screen is both a promise and an enigma. The idea suggests an unadulterated slab of Stephen King, the pure, uncut thing, untempered by the guiding hand of a translator. Watching the film, though, I can’t say I have any idea of what King thinks cinema is, or what its relationship to the written word is supposed to be. Sleepwalkers is quite a bedeviling monstrosity itself, actually. On one hand, it feels like a shredded expanse, the forced tightening of a larger, deeper, book-length text, the kind of thing that people refer to as the result of badly adapting an “unfilmable novel.” On the other hand, it feels equally like the product of King in the full grips of his drug-infused mania, badly grasping at half-finished ideas before they fade into murky nothingness.

In a literal sense, this film is neither of these. He was sober when he wrote it, and it was not, apparently, based on a larger text. But it feels like both. There are both too many and no ideas within it. It feels both overworked and entirely unfinished. It suggests the offspring of a man in the apparent full command of his own artistic invention who nonetheless doesn’t understand the core of what he has produced. It is a film whose genesis is as opaque as its final state. This is, charitably speaking, not a fully fleshed-out storyline. For all the flesh that gets ripped, shredded, broken, serrated, and corn-cobbed (read on), there’s very little meat on the film’s bones. It has the patina of a man who isn’t quite remembering why he has released this into the world, or where he wants this to go. The film accretes in, and is best remembered in, a fog.

At times, this internal confusion pays real dividends. Near the film’s end, a ghostly army of cats descends upon the central conflict, gliding across the film as though they sit atop it, not within it. Why the cats care about the titular sleepwalkers is never articulated, and how they sense them remains even more uncertain. But in images like this, which are associative rather than causal, the film suggests an undigested dream logic more than the bad leftovers of another film, or an inchoate idea unrefined. These moments feel like omens of a higher cinematic form, functionally breaking the narrative to the point of abstraction. The text comes alive in these moments, or in the finale, where the film unleashes its inner impulses and then caves in just as quickly, disintegrating into an end credits blur within literal seconds of the conflict concluding, as though the film has been shocked into awakening, or has recognized that its own thin-ness is not only inconclusive but impossible to conclude. The arbitrary, essentially unexplained nature of the film’s mythology is as frequently amusing as it is frustrating, but here it achieves real, perhaps accidental, poetry.

Before that awakening, we spend roughly 90 minutes in a cinematic bad dream with Charles Brady (Brian Krause) and Mary Brady (Alice Krige), two centuries-old half-cat/half-human shapeshifting travelers called sleepwalkers who nomadically move from town to town siphoning energy from human virgins. Presently, they’re in a nondescript Indiana town (tellingly, the film’s ambiguous geography suggests any state) and presently targeting Tanya Robinson (Madchen Amick), as infatuated with Charles’s lonely, introspective brooding as his subterranean ferocity. Right? Okay, so far, so good. What is a sleepwalker? Why are these the final two? Why are they incestuous, and why must they prey on this virgin? And why, pray tell, do cats immediately assault them when they can detect their existence, as though they are locked in an eons-long war to preserve some conception of species purity?

For that matter: what are we supposed to feel about the titular creatures? What does it mean that the creatures reflect an unacceptable other and our deepest, uncanniest core? I have suspicions that the film is King’s own attempt to work through the sometimes-incompatible visions of what a monster is supposed to be, but it does feel like he hasn’t moved beyond recognizing that these tensions exist. He isn’t particularly sure what he feels about these doomed outsiders who are also lamentable offspring of multiple sources who are also ferocious assailants who show no compunctions about killing bystanders. King’s film tends to present them as whatever they need to be to keep the story going – another reason why it feels more like a dream than a script. Indeed, it feels like he likes cinema in this context simply because he doesn’t have to explain how all these images link together. He can release them into the wild, letting them retain all of their ferocious idiosyncrasy in the process.

That impulsive confusion, of course, poses real conundrums for a supposedly finished text. Sleepwalkers genuinely feels like it is missing its middle act, devoid of any kind of linking material or anything resembling “character development.” In the middle of the film, Charles is mauled by a cat, and, rather than catalyzing a moment of wounded self-realization as a lost soul or demonic self-actualization as a full-fledged horror monster, he spends the rest of the film slowly dying on the couch. At that point, frankly, things improve significantly. Mother leaps into action, and there is a certain feral romanticism to this final section, helped by Krige’s sensual, fragile, bestial performance as the mother, more in control of her loneliness than Charles, and thus less prey to the ridiculous shifts of the screenplay.

There’s something extractable here. Nicholas Brown’s editing is intriguingly indifferent to space and time, and the cinematography by Rodney Charters and music by Nicholas Pike aspire to and sometimes achieve a mood of spectral gloom that is sinister and romantic in its way. Likewise, the appreciable make-up effects by Tony Gardner are haptic and sensual in a way that was itself an endangered species. He stages phenomenal effects of human devastation, an aria of flesh transformed and disfigured, in amusingly morbid grace notes, for instance a back-stabbing with a corn on the cob, a skewering of middle-American domesticity, or a dance with the deceased husk of a creature, a tacit suggestion that it was always just a puppet, a thing without life in some crucial way.

Ultimately, though, Sleepwalkers suffers from comparisons to other adjacent texts, like Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, which manages to make its forsaken creatures feel lonely and terrifying at the same time, rather than only when it needs us to feel one or the other. Amick’s presence obviously recalls Twin Peaks, specifically its aura of besieged small-town normalcy and its narrative structure of a nightmare that thinks it’s a dream. Mostly, though, Sleepwalkers feels like it glances at these things accidentally rather than intentionally. I mean, the excuse for that is right in the name: we, all of us, are the sleepwalkers, unattuned to the strangeness lurking beneath us, desperately in need of a shock to our system. But the text itself isn’t absurd or disfigured enough to truly destabilize us. It feels like it is failing to do something, not succeeding at challenging what our guideposts for “something” is. This is a vision of strange voyagers that is, crucially, not completely in touch with its own strangeness. It seems to think, beneath all this, that it is a normal movie, and that is both its abiding, if minor, fascination and its unfortunate, if curious, curse.

Score: 6/10