At first blush, Shocker cannot help but come off like a retread of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Its first act flits between terrifying dreams and their inexplicable impact on reality. Instead of spreading out among an entire neighborhood, these visions centralize on Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg), a high school quarterback with a grim past who dreams the latest murders in a serial killer’s spree just before they happen. The film’s opening shots, of the unseen killer assembling televisions in rooms cluttered with cathode ray tubes, wires and the odd bloody weapon, even prefigure Craven’s eventual turn to self-aware satire. As the initial sequence ends, the jerry-rigged TV comes to life in time for the killer to tune in to a news program reporting on his crimes. We thus meet the antagonist not by name, or even a face, but by the simultaneous sensationalism of his case and his own impulse to watch his atrocities dramatized on the evening news.
The shrewdness of this observation is soon lost, however, to dream sequences that lack the inventiveness of those in Nightmare. The matter-of-factness of Jonathan’s dreams—solely predictive, rarely a bend of physics—comes off as a cheat at times, dispensing with Craven’s exciting and sardonic explorations of slippery, oneiric logic in favor of roundabout exposition. The film is further held back by Berg, who was around 25 at the time of shooting but looks and behaves even older, lending his idyllic high school scenes a farcical bent. He cannot even fake the kind of whimsy that has always been an inherently comic part of horror movies that cast their young flesh way too old, and he regularly drags down scenes with his ill-fitting stabs at gravitas.
Things pick up when we get belatedly introduced to the killer, Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi), who, in true Craven horror-comedy fashion, is demented enough to be abhorrent but so wildly overacted as to make every line a work of full-body comedy. Pileggi doesn’t chew scenery, he tears at it like a dog with a toy, grasping each line by the incisors and shaking his head back and forth until he finally flings every word across the room. He makes Robert Englund look subtle by comparison, and his energy reverberates in the frame even when he’s not visible within it. This is most evident in a sequence where Jonathan leads cops to Horace’s hideout, which he has converted into a makeshift labyrinth of cluttered, wall-length shelves complete with hidden surveillance points and secret rooms. The setpiece looks more like a dream than Jonathan’s erstwhile visions, and though Horace appears only in the form of watching eyes and darting hands, he dictates the claustrophobia and terror of the scene.
When Horace is finally apprehended and executed for his crimes, however, Craven finally imbibes the film with a sense of purpose and turns the proceedings over to pure mania. Horace makes a deal with the devil, who lives in a television in case you thought They Live didn’t make its points about mass media clear enough, and survives his electrocution to become electricity itself, capable of flitting in and out of corporeal form and of possessing anyone in his vicinity. Here we get some classic Craven dark comedy: Horace’s limp transfers to his vessels, giving away the strangers who suddenly lunge for Jonathan but resulting in physical gags of attackers run-dragging their legs to keep up with the athlete.
Like other second-tier Craven films, Shocker may never attain the formal or satiric heights of his best work, but once it finds its groove, it remains there with incredible focus and lean, purposeful filmmaking. The climax, in which Jonathan winds up leaping into television in a ploy to trap and defeat Horace, leads to a gonzo sequence of the two brawling through everything from old Vietnam War footage to James Whale’s Frankenstein, at one point interrupting a new bulletin on their strange sightings to fight on the anchor’s desk. This is prime Craven, but so too are the more somber scenes in which Jonathan must deal with the agony of seeing loved ones possessed and killed, like a chilling and unexpectedly moving scene of his coach (Sam Scarber) fighting against his possession as Horace compels the man to mutilate himself for his insolence.
Early on, Jonathan’s girlfriend, Alison (Camille Cooper), dies gruesomely, but she returns as a ghost at times to defend and guide him, giving the film a tender side that peaks in a poetic scene of Jonathan diving for her lost necklace, which harms Horace on contact, from the bottom of a lake. Shots of the lake’s placid, moonlit surface offer a moment of calm, but both Jonathan’s lone search and the loving appearance of Alison’s ghost underscore the tragedy of what this boy has been through, and the toll it has taken on him. Few people could stage deaths like Craven, even fewer with his comic aplomb, but he also treated death with a respect that not many in his genre did or do, and even a relative throwaway like this film shows his sympathy for the characters he torments.