In this fascinating effort, Bob Clark plumbs the great American Vietnam guilt trip more than a decade before Oliver Stone brought the issue out into the open. The film maintains a particularly unsettling mood. The opening credits – frozen over an indistinct face and accompanied by distant echoing voice, saying “Andy, you promised you’d come home” – are incredibly spooky. As is the soundtrack of echoing children’s voices whispering “Andy” throughout. The still blankness of Richard Backus’s performance as Andy becomes unsettling in its intensity.

The middle of the film more disappointingly goes off into traditional monster/vampire movie cliches and loses the impact of the strangeness amid the normality of family life that Bob Clark has sustained up to that point. Still, a young Tom Savini offers some good low-budget deliquescing effects and there are some striking images – of Richard Backus in white skivvy and hidden behind dark glasses and gloves; the scene at a drive-in of he drinking his girlfriend’s blood in the backseat, which is simply taken as them making out by the couple in the front; and the peculiarly touching ending where Backus collapses into a grave and starts pulling dirt in over himself.