"In your dreams, no one can hear you scream," until now with Unearthed Films' "Unearthed Classics" Blu-ray of NIGHTWISH.

A parapsychology professor (actor/director Jack Starrett, THE LOSERS) is conducting experiments in visualized dreaming with a group of graduate students – sensitive Donna (Elizabeth Kaitan, SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY), mercenary Kim (Alisha Das, FIREPOWER), horn dog Jack (Clayton Rohner, I, MADMAN), and bootlicking Bill (Artur Cybulski, TIME TRACKERS) – in which they are able to reshape the narratives of their nightmares; however, fear always takes over when they try to project their own deaths. He spirits away the group to an old mansion built over a collapsed mine in the middle of a desert the Indians called "The Valley of Fear" where myths of monstrous creatures, animal mutations, and widespread deaths from mine-contaminated water are a reality and may have something to do with the magnetic attraction popularly associated with UFO activity. As a result of the dead owner's interest in spiritualism after the accidental death of one of his children, multiple séances conducted by mediums and devil worshippers seem to have infested the house with a sinister entity. The professor, it turns out, is less interested in success in his project than in using the developed mental acuity of his subjects to conduct a scientific séance to draw the entity out of its own dimension and into theirs. The subjects become frightened by the ectoplasmic evidence of the entity's existence and the revelation that the professor was kicked out of Duke University's parapsychology program after two previous subjects died; whereupon the professor and his hulking mental patient assistant Stanley (Robert Tessier,DOUBLE EXPOSURE) force them to continue on with the experiment even as they all become less sure what is real and what is not.

A direct-to-video boom rumination on Daoist Zhuangzi's dream of being a butterfly who fell asleep and dreamt he was a man, NIGHTWISH is a conceptually ambitious but typically muddled "nightmare logic" eighties horror film. The art direction of Robert Burns (THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE) is striking, the visual effects of Peter Kuran (THE THING) are of a studio standard, and the film comes from the period of some of KNB Effects' more surreal make-up effects but the middle of the film is a lot of characters wandering around and questioning the reality of what they are seeing and whether their friends are real or projections of their deepest fears. The better-known Kaitan seems to be the film's principal character, but the second half neatly switches over to Das who seemed at first to be the have-sex-and-die character purring over show-stealer Brian Thompson (VAMP) who has even less to do than Tessier as the project's driver. The philosophical hook of the film does manage to make something more resonant out of the usual ambiguous ending. The film was the second production of Wild Street Pictures who had previously mounted an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's THE UNNAMABLE and would later give usBRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR and SOCIETY.

Released direct-to-video by Vidmark and Image Entertainment laserdisc, NIGHTWISH passed into ownership of Lionsgate who put up the existing tape master on streaming services before the license ran out and the rights reverted. Unearthed Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen Blu-ray is derived from a new 4K scan and restoration. The image is not always so immaculate as Unearthed's Blu-ray of DARK SIDE OF THE MOON with some faint specs and scratches here and there but the detail is spectacular and the spiking of the desert milieu with saturated colors in wardrobe and gel lighting is free of distortion or bleeding. The LPCM 2.0 encode of the Ultra Stereo track is less problematic than DARK SIDE OF THE MOON or THE UNNAMABLE but the end title rock song does not seem to have as much presence or spread as one would expect. There are no subtitles or captioning options.