Nineties teen horror novels were firmly grounded within their current cultural moment and context, with frequent trips to the mall, passing mention of popular actors and musicians, and the pesky limitations of landline telephones. However, many of these stories also drew on larger narrative traditions, from the urban legends that inform R.L. Stine’s The Babysitter quartet (1989-1995) to summer camp slasher pattern negotiated by Carol Ellis’s Camp Fear (1993) and the Lovecraftian horrors of Peter Lerangis’ The Yearbook (1994). These influences and allusions highlight the connection of ‘90s teen horror to the genre traditions upon which they build, while simultaneously offering a whole new generation of terror.
Sinclair Smith’s Dream Date (1993) offers readers a fascinating mix of intertextual engagements, with protagonist Katie Shaw’s horrors drawing on the unlikely combination of Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
In Dream Date, Katie has just moved to a new school and it has been a pretty rough transition. She’s a bit bored with her predictable and bland style, she hasn’t really made any friends since getting to town, and on top of it all, she’s having trouble sleeping. Her family’s new house is out in the country and definitely a fixer-upper: “The house hadn’t exactly been abandoned, but no one had lived there for about four years … The paint was peeling off the outside boards, and one of the shutters was hanging” (11, emphasis original). Katie’s life is lonely, boring, and predictable, and all she wants is a little excitement.
On one of the nights when Katie is actually able to sleep, she finds that excitement in her dreams, where she meets a dark, handsome stranger named Heath Granger. He comes riding up to her house on his motorcycle and makes a big first impression: “His thick, dark hair was windblown from the ride, and he had very dark eyes that made a person feel he saw a lot more with them than just the way somebody looked” (20). Katie finds herself romantically transformed as well, suddenly wearing a feminine white sundress, with her hair blowing in the wind as Heath tells her she’s beautiful.
After this first encounter, Katie starts trying to sleep as much as she can, even blowing off plans with potential new friends to run home after school and take a nap in hopes of seeing Heath. When Katie does find Heath again, there’s more than a bit of Brontё’s Heathcliff in his developing characterization, with Katie and Heath’s fixation on each other evolving into jealousy, anger, and violence. But this doesn’t really deter Katie’s fascination with Heath, at least not at first. Despite the warning signs of a persistent burning smell, a resonating sense of unease, and Heath destroying a rose bush with his bare hands to offer Katie savagely picked flowers, when “he took her hand … she felt charged with energy at his touch. He looked down at her with that mischievous, deliciously wicked grin” (39). Heath draws Katie into an intimate alliance with him, telling her “People like you and me are different from the rest, aren’t we? Katie, a lot of girls just don’t understand me, and that’s why they’re not special enough for me” (40). The way he tells it, Heath is misunderstood and just as lonely as Katie is, someone who understands her better than anyone in the “real” world ever could.
Returning to Wuthering Heights, Katie’s characterization touches on different points and perspectives in Brontё’s novel: in the opening pages of Dream Date, Katie is like Mr. Lockwood, a visitor to the region who finds himself at Wuthering Heights and in the dark of a stormy night, has a surprising encounter with a spirit connected to that place. Like Lockwood, Katie is both frightened and intrigued by this interaction, with each of them eventually drawn to hear the story of who the spirit is, how they came to be, and why they remain. However, Katie has a more intimate connection as well, playing Catherine to Heath’s Heathcliff, as the two become increasingly focused upon one another. Unlike Brontё’s Catherine, however, Katie is not the only girl that Heath has been fixated on: a local legend recounts Heath’s romance with a girl named Cindy. Despite Heath’s interference, Katie has made a couple of friends at school, including Raquelle, whose older sister is a friend of Cindy’s and who is all too happy to tell the whole dark tale when Katie sees Heath’s picture in an old yearbook and starts asking questions. Cindy dumped Heath at prom, a rejection he responded to with violence. Heath threatened Cindy, saying “nobody dumped him, and he was going to make Cindy understand that … even if he had to kill her” (174, emphasis original). He got on his motorcycle and headed for Cindy’s house—which is, of course, Katie’ new home—but he got into a fiery single-vehicle accident on the way there, and was dead before he could get his revenge. While the relationship dynamics between Cindy and Heath don’t directly echo the complicated interactions between Brontё’s Catherine and Heathcliff, there are some similarities in their toxicity.
Thankfully, rather than romanticizing Heath’s brooding and violence, Katie quickly wises up to the kind of guy he really is, then begins to resist and distance herself from him. Katie gets a handle on who Heath is and how he operates relatively early in their acquaintance, realizing that “Heath played three characters: Mr. Wonderful (incorporating Mr. Mysterious and Mr. Tough Guy), Mr. McNasty, and The Poor Little Boy” (78), with each of these personas designed to prey upon and manipulate Katie, depending on what he wants from her. Once this realization sinks in, “Katie couldn’t believe she had ever fallen for Heath’s manipulations. The hypnotic spell was definitely broken” (78-9). Even once she’s on to him, however, Heath terrorizes and hurts Katie, demonstrating his ability to influence the real world when he calls her on the phone to threaten her and later, turns the water in her shower to scalding. When Heath gets annoyed with her, he plays a game he calls “Illusion,” where Katie’s face appears to melt off as she looks at in the bathroom mirror, as “the flesh continued to flow until an entire side of her skull was exposed … then, horribly, Katie watched as masses of cockroaches poured from the grinning, lipless skull” (112, emphasis original). He apologizes and begs for forgiveness, then tells Katie that if she doesn’t do what he wants, he’ll possess her and make her kill her dog or her parents. Heath taunts her with the control he threatens to exert, creating gruesome scenarios in her head as he tells her “You wouldn’t want to wake up one morning and find out that you’d been walking in your sleep and done something … terrible. Maybe gone down to the kitchen and gotten a knife out of the drawer … a big knife? Maybe gone after that dog, or gone back upstairs and into your parents’ room?” (118). Heath threatens to destroy everything she loves with Katie’s own hands, a possibility that leaves her terrified and frozen. (Unlike so many ill-fated dogs in ‘90s teen horror, Katie’s basset hound Bopper survives, though Raquelle does tell Katie about the time Heath killed a kitten. Raqelle’s sister wouldn’t let him come around their house any more after that, but Cindy kept dating him for a while longer, raising some serious questions about her judgment).
When Katie begins to hold her ground and resist Heath, that’s when Dream Date takes a distinctly Nightmare on Elm Street-ish turn, with Heath tormenting Katie in her dreams and slowly eroding the barriers that separate her waking and sleeping lives. Now when she falls asleep, her interactions with Heath are terrifyingly shifted, much less “Lockwood meets the ghost of Cathine” and much more “Nancy versus Freddy,” as Katie has to simultaneously work to protect herself and figure out how to stop Heath for good. Similar to Nancy grabbing Freddy’s hat during a nightmare, Katie hatches plans to bring proof of Heath’s existence back to the real world to prove that she isn’t crazy, tricking him into writing her a love note and recording his voice on the telephone, but he explodes into the waking world to attack her, reclaiming and destroying these artifacts. Katie downs cup after cup of coffee, trying to stay awake and keep Heath contained, while he continues to force his influence into the real world, including attacking Jason Miller, a boy Katie starts dating in the “real” world, forcing Jason to fall asleep at the wheel and crash his car into a tree near Katie’s house.
As Katie is worn down by exhaustion and sleep deprivation, she struggles to keep Heath’s influence at bay and she starts to lose her grip on reality. While in Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy makes his way into the real world when Nancy drags him back with her from her dream, Heath’s colonization of reality is more insidious, as he begins to take possession of Katie herself. Katie loses track of time and of her own actions, as her dreaming and wakeful states blur together.
Then Heath begins to speak through Katie. Some of these appearances are laughed off as jokes, like when Heath speaks through Katie’s mouth at lunch one day in the cafeteria, asking a fellow student to “‘pass that mustard over here, huh?’ … in Heath’s deep, sandpapering tones” (193, emphasis original). Heath-as-Katie insults the checkout clerk at the grocery store for counting back her change too slowly and when Katie visits Jason in the hospital, Heath’s intent to eradicate Katie completely becomes clear, as he promises unconscious Jason that “When this is all over … we’ll ditch her and have some really wild times!” (187, emphasis original). While Heath was initially satisfied with claiming Katie as his own and driving Jason out of the picture, now that Katie is unwilling to be part of his scheme, Heath will instead destroy her and move on to corrupting other teens, like a released contagion.
While Nancy has to bring Freddy into the real world to attempt to defeat him in Nightmare on Elm Street, in Dream Date, the only chance for Katie to beat Heath is by ending his existence in the dream world, claiming something of his, and then crossing the barrier of his ghostly influence with it in hand. She knows from his earlier rages in response to the love note and the recording of his voice that taking this evidence of his existence into the real world is harmful to him, and when she asks him if she can hold a medallion he wears, she’s hoping this will be the item that will break his spell. But he catches on to her plan, jumps on his motorcycle, and follows her in hot pursuit. It momentarily looks like Katie is doomed, but she keeps just far enough ahead of Heath to lure him to the edge of the property, and when he crosses the barrier of where he died, “there was only an orange rush of flame … as the motorcycle leapt over the road and landed on the other side. She heard Heath screaming as if from far away” (211). And then he’s gone, turned to ash and blown away, much like Freddy disappears toward the end of Nightmare on Elm Street when Nancy turns her back on him. Of course, Freddy always comes back and he has reasserted his presence before the movie’s closing credits–but in Dream Date, it seems that Heath is really gone for good.
The influences of Wuthering Heights and A Nightmare on Elm Street are an unexpected combination in Smith’s Dream Date, but these allusions offer readers the opportunity to think beyond the specific subgenre conventions of ‘90s teen horror and take in the larger landscape. The traditional Gothic tensions of Wuthering Heights, including the significance of place and emotion in hauntings, draw the savvy reader’s attention back to those long established tropes, which are reframed here within the ‘90s horror context, still resonant and powerful. The slasher film tradition is much closer in terms of historical and cultural context, with a similar focus on teens as both protagonists and audience, and the seemingly endless proliferation of sequels and series that define slasher films and teen horror book series alike. While the Gothic, the slasher film, and the teen horror novel take different narrative and stylistic approaches, each has horror at its heart, sounding the depths of human evil, supernatural influence, and the terrors that haunt our dreams.
