Nightmare is a 1981 horror film

Horror film

Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...

 directed by Romano Scavolini

Romano Scavolini

Romano Scavolini is an Italian film director.He has been directing since the 1960s. Most of his films are shot independently and with an experimental style. His best known film is Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, a gruesome horror film that was banned as a video nasty in the UK.-External links:*...

.

Synopsis

George Tatum wanders the streets, which is bad for everyone else as he's seriously warped and potentially homicidal to boot. In an effort to cure him of his never-ending sleepless nights and waking moments of nightmarish hallucinations and disturbingly real visions of carnage and brutality, he is dosed with experimental drugs which although outwardly to seemingly cure him of his night terrors and with it his psychosis, inwardly they brew a hidden unforeseen volatile streak that slowly empowers him until he is completely overwhelmed by it. Now having been prematurely freed from the Northeastern loony bin that has housed him for most of his natural life, he begins a spontaneous impulsive systematic slaughtering spree across the states on his journey back to his original home in Florida and to a certain specific family whose offspring is connected to him.

Cast

Actor	Role
Kathleen Ferguson	Barbara
George Kruger	Chief Cotter
Geoffrey Marchese	Tony Walker

Controversy and reception

Nightmare gained instant notoriety among horror fans when it was banned in the UK as a video nasty

Video nasty

"Video nasty" was a colloquial term coined in the United Kingdom by 1982 which originally applied to a number of films distributed on video cassette that were criticized for their violent content by the press, commentators such as Mary Whitehouse and various religious organizations.While violence...

 and its distributor sentenced to 18 months in prison for refusing to edit out a sequence lasting one second from the film. It has maintained a reputation as one of the most disturbing slasher movies

Slasher film

A slasher film is a type of horror film typically involving a psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of victims in a graphically violent manner, often with a cutting tool such as a knife or axe...

ever made.