Dream Eater
★★★☆
Dir: Jay Drakulic, Mallory Drumm, and Alex Lee Williams
Released October 24th, 2025
Runtime: 90 minutes
Found footage has become a staple in horror filmmaking for one very good reason: it’s a lot cheaper to make a film that looks like it’s assembled from footage put together on cheap cameras by amateurs. The actual shooting costs of The Blair Witch Project (1999) were around $60,000; even after post-production work and marketing the cost was under a million. Dream Eater, whose conceit is closer to Paranormal Activity than it is to Blair Witch, was made for around $100,000. It looks like it cost a bit more, though, due to the filmmakers decent grasp on shoot quality on the cheap. The setup requires it to be like that, though; Mallory (Mallory Drumm) is a documentary filmmaker and even though Alex (Alex Lee Williams) gripes about how her last doc cost more than it made, he also later in the film points out that her camera cost $6,000. A certain level of film quality is necessary.
Mallory and Alex, named for themselves, travel to a cabin for a trip that is half romantic retreat and half a way to explore the parasomnia issues Alex has been having. He had recently suffered a violent sleepwalking episode and, seven months prior, had tried to kill himself with a running car in the garage. Mallory has been asked by Alex’s sleep doctor to record as much footage of his nighttime shenanigans as possible. Dream Eater slowly spirals out, moving from bizarre, creepy parasomnia incidents to an underlying story involving a cult, ancient Greek evil, and a lot of screaming. Even as things get threatening, Mallory keeps filming; to be fair, some of it is surveillance footage of the cabin, but it’s mostly Mallory continuing to film even as her possessed, naked boyfriend is threatening to do awful things to her private parts with a razor wire.
Between the shaky plot (bog standard cult possession stuff) and the necessity for Mallory to keep filming long past where anyone else would have fled screaming into the night, there are a lot of opportunities for failure. The film has a definite problem with good exposition – witness the “Unresolved Mysteries” sequence that dumps most of the backstory via a bad Robert Stack impression – and the ending relies on a jump scare that, once you stop to think on it, doesn’t make much sense. It’s a shame, because the other jump scares the film cooks up are actually quite effective – the middle of the movie is a good exercise in slowly ramping up tension. Sometimes it comes across as too slowly, though; it’s the sort of film that you’ll check the time and wonder how on Earth the filmmakers can carve another 40 minutes out of the plot.
When it lands a scary moment, though, Dream Eater generates some real skin-crawling unease. Mallory and Alex both act well for people who aren’t principally actors; there’s little of the sort of stilted amateurishness that you’d expect from a film starring a producer and a director. They’re not perfect, of course. Mallory’s whimpering for Alex each night wears a bit thin after the first 50 minutes and the scene where Alex’s face is covered in cake is played too absurdly for it ratchet out the kind of terror the filmmakers are clearly going for. It’s better than you might otherwise consider, though, and it deserves the attention it’s gotten for the most part. Despite it’s budget, it never feels cheap. If you’re the sort of horror film enthusiast who’s watched every single Paranormal Activity iteration (guilty) then it’s a worthy side addition to a movie watching binge.
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