Spectacles of Property and Perversion: Todd Jason Cook and the Lisa’s Nightmares Series

Just as his characters presume safety and security in their home space, so too does his audience approach each title with a sense of comfort through repeat exposures. The unseating of normal life is aided greatly by the intrusion of unwelcome forces into this sphere.

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Arriving on the shot-on-video (SOV) horror scene in 1992 with his inauspicious slasher feature Evil Night, Texan Todd Jason Cook remains one of that cycle’s most recognizable creators.1 Self-distributing his films out of his Missouri City home, Cook created his own video empire and grew to become one of the most prolific amateur genre filmmakers of the 1990s. His Cemetery Cinema label (later Horrorscope and currently Screamtime Films) also began to distribute the works of other independent SOV filmmakers, providing exposure for titles that could easily have fallen through the cracks of the video underground.2 His most prolific period from 1992 to 1998 saw seven narrative films released to the video market, each demonstrating the director’s indefatigable energy and off-kilter approach to horror cinema. Dispersed among these titles were an additional seven fan club titles: Special Techniques of Low/No Budget Movies, Lisa Cook’s Deadly Workout, and the five-volume Lisa’s Nightmares series of custom tapes. Each of the works produced in this span feature Cook himself as protagonist and then-wife Lisa Cook as his co-star – often playing his spouse in an on-screen enactment of domestic reality. Cook’s filmography is among the most insular and personal in all of SOV horror, and a large part of their intrigue is in the repeated, near-obsessive centering of on-screen events within the Cooks’ own home.

Cook’s filmmaking is as defined by this homegrown approach to production as by any on-screen or aesthetic decisions. Of his 1990s releases, the vast majority feature his and Lisa’s living space as the primary setting. Works like Demon Dolls (1993), Frightmares (1997), Night of the Clown (1998), and the special release tapes employ it as their sole location. The director himself has expressed his desire to assert his home as an iconic horror location, much as other spaces, such as the infamous house from Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), have achieved recognizable status.3 It is undoubtedly an impressive dwelling: a massive, four-bedroom residence, with a stepdown den and an upstairs loft, as well as several full bathrooms and an open floor plan kitchen. Cook’s sense of pride in his domicile is understandable, and it provides a memorable setting for his visions of small-scale horror. Demon Dolls introduces another regular feature of Cook’s films: his horror room, decked floor to ceiling in posters, standees, assorted other memorabilia, and his VHS collection (which we eventually learn spreads to several adjacent rooms as well). Just as the director intended, his home has become a familiar location across his filmography, one that imparts a sense of fascination on repeat viewings of his work.

Writing in The Spectacle of Property, John David Rhodes argues that in “watching cinema, we are forever looking at and into people’s houses. This iterative, implicit preoccupation with the house is probably due to cinema’s strong relation to realism, to the representation of human lives, a large portion of which – in the ‘real life’ that cinema has frequently endeavored to represent – transpires in the house’s interior” (13). Cook’s filmography is inarguably aligned with cinematic realism, and, even if inadvertently, his films are most engaging when embraced for their stagings of domestic mundanity. This is true of the bulk of his narrative works, wherein the central existence of the couple themselves is unseated by some bizarre supernatural threat – a threat that rarely extends beyond the premises of their home. Looking at the Lisa’s Nightmares series of custom fetish tapes, however, provides more rewarding insights into his domestic horror tales, as well as a glimpse at the fan cultures of 1990s SOV horror.

Beginning in 1995 and lasting through the following year, the five Lisa’s Nightmares compilations are both of their time in the SOV landscape and unique within that tradition. David Kerekes outlines the custom fetish tape marketplace, noting that these productions exist on a mail-order level, “films made to order for individuals with a hankering to see their favorite model hiccup while topless, or die and play dead” (264). The most famous practitioner, and certainly chiefly responsible for the cycle’s popularity, is Gary Whitson’s W.A.V.E. Productions, which dates to the 1980s and was the subject of the excellent documentary Mail Order Murder (2019, dir. Ross Snyder and William Hellfire). While other companies existed in the analog video era of the 1980s and 1990s (including Louis Ferriol’s notorious Vidimax, which predates W.A.V.E.), it was with the advent of the internet that this cycle truly arrived on the market thanks to harder practitioners like William Hellfire’s Factory 2000 (Kerekes 266). What this means is that Cook’s own efforts in the custom fetish style were fairly anomalous for the time, and there is no saying to what degree he was familiar with Whitson’s own work. Specifically, his productions seem to have originated from Lisa Cook’s own fan club, an enterprise devoted solely to her appearances in Cemetery and Horrorscope productions, for Lisa Cook starred in no works save those directed by her then-husband. With mention of newsletters and even individual custom tapes made on fan request, the very nature of her status and the origins of these videos were rooted in underground insularity. That these materials are not available for examination speaks both to the obscure nature of this filmmaking model and to the intimate nature of such endeavors for fans and creators.

What follows is a brief overview of the Lisa’s Nightmares series, as well as an investigation into the central domesticity that defines Cook’s filmmaking. In these instances, there was an awareness if not a self-consciousness to the works produced, with Cook’s ideas coming not from his own mind but rather the requests of a paying audience. Thus, the stakes of the Lisa’s Nightmares titles are entirely removed from the purely expressive and subjective motivations of his narrative works. Though Lisa and her body are without question the focus of these tapes, there is an undeniable sense of the Cooks and their home now being open to a responsive and active spectatorial force. Or, as Rhodes notes, the cinematic experience includes “the lived, embodied experience of its reception by human spectators. In all of these areas … property reigns” (13). Where the majority of self-distributed SOV horror titles are lacking in substantive material to perform a reception study, the Lisa’s Nightmares releases demonstrate the reception model by their very existence. Simply put, these custom tapes exist for no other reason than fan demand, which speaks to an awareness of the filmmaker and his star’s impact and status within a particularly niche genre film world.

The debut Lisa’s Nightmares is at once the crudest and most voyeuristic of the series, coming at a point where Cook was still developing his approach to narrative filmmaking, leaving this stylistic deviation likewise struggling to find a distinct voice. More than any other Lisa’s Nightmares compilation, this volume is rooted in the mundanity that defines Cook’s best work, as most segments consist of Lisa performing basic tasks around the house before she is interrupted and killed (this summary positions the films as somewhat analogous to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, something that was most certainly unintended on Cook’s part). As such, there are numerous point-of-view (POV) shots simulating walking upstairs and down hallways, the express purpose being to show off Cook’s home as much as pad the runtime to a suitable length. There are few indications of the bizarre detours the series would soon take, but the charming simplicity of this era in Cook’s filmmaking career provides for many memorable moments.

The tape opens with a handheld shot entering the Cook house, establishing the domain that will define the series as much as its titular star. The camera approaches a topless Lisa in bed, providing the bare minimum of a frame story as she tosses and turns in between each segment. The nightmares see her performing mundane tasks before the inevitable twist ending: browsing Todd’s video collection, making spaghetti in real time, and rushing to the bathroom in the middle of a romantic tryst. At the conclusion of each, she is murdered, largely by stabbings to the stomach. In most instances, the killers are portrayed by an off-camera Todd, though in two instances he appears onscreen in a rubber Richard Nixon mask, one of many direct allusions across Cook’s filmography to the 1985 slasher Horror House on Highway Five.

Most revealing is the bizarre, extended segment that sees Lisa interviewed by Cook’s off-screen voice about her career as a “horror actress.” Defined by moody red and blue lighting and multiple camera angles punched in on her face and body, here she details her collaborations with Todd through 1995 and takes off her top at his request. The invasive handheld camera movements and verbal emphasis on Lisa’s nude scenes add a disturbing touch of voyeurism and suggestion of a power imbalance, something heightened by high-angle shots as the camera wanders around her. Throughout, Lisa rubs her stomach and mentions the custom videos she’s made for a fan with this particular fetish, something brought full circle when she’s stabbed there at the conclusion. There’s a disorienting unease to this portion of the tape that seems to pull back the veil on the very construct of the fetish tapes themselves, even as the conversation and presentation normalize them as well. Here is a knowing glimpse at Lisa Cook’s self-constructed scream queen image, something Cook fully embraced and supported to benefit his own filmmaking career.

The tape’s credits begin with an image of its video cover and announce, “Starring Horror Princess Lisa Cook,” with special thanks given to her fans who “wrote the custom videos – You know who you are!” Each subsequent Lisa’s Nightmares tape begins as a fascinating detour through the most intimate moments of Todd and Lisa’s married life and their interactions with an unseen but devoted fan base. Coming the following year, Lisa Cook’s New Nightmares offers more of the same but also begins to hint at the increased comfort the pair would demonstrate with their bizarre custom tapes. The frame story sees Lisa lounging in the luxurious master bathtub and dreaming of various deranged scenarios involving her demise. Stomach fetishism is at the forefront once again, with one murder causing Lisa to exclaim “not my soft belly.” One more ambitious segment depicts Lisa out at a bar (clearly filmed in another part of the house), picking up Todd’s character and taking him home. Back in her room (in another part of the same house), Lisa does a striptease in front of a large Beavis and Butthead poster, and the pair have sex fully clothed. In this instance, the impressive dimensions of the Cook household are employed to signify multiple locations across space, while the now-familiar minutiae of the dwelling grounds the entire experiment.

In one quintessentially mundane story, Lisa reads her fan mail and gives an admirer named Mike (represented by the POV camera) a tour of the lofted game room area. She spends several minutes going through Todd’s cabinets and showing off his VHS collection while talking about her favorite scream queens. Once the tour is finished, various dolls and mannequins from other productions spring to life and attack her. Here not only is the Cook household transformed into a featured attraction, but the idea informing the story suggests that fans and outsiders have recognized its role and taken an interest in the space itself. Likewise, the premium of screen time devoted to Cook’s video collection not only reveals a collector’s pride in his possessions but also indicates where his greatest influences as an artist lie. That sense of honest revelation is a defining characteristic of the pair’s approach to horror. Much as the repeated use of the horror room in Demon Dolls demonstrates Cook’s subcultural capital as a fan and creator, this segment recognizes the reception of these elements and interacts with fan interest in the space and its material components.

Later in the tape comes perhaps the most unsettling segment in the entire series, which also recalls the first tape’s unhinged interview dream. Lisa sits in bed reading and faints when Todd appears in a cloak. He undresses her and puts her in lingerie (in a rare twist, no nudity is shown) and proceeds with a custom photo shoot of the unconscious woman. To prolong the experience, he chloroforms her throughout, then re-dresses her and leaves with the pictures. Scored by a shrill synthesizer drone, this material is far darker than anything else in the series, the use of chloroform and forced voyeurism suggesting the harder-edged custom tapes produced by William Hellfire’s Factory 2000 group in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Even without nudity or bloodshed, the invasive conception of this request and its deliberate disregard for consent (even within a fictional and thus agreed-on scenario) reveals a darker side of the custom video audience. The confinement of this scene, as with many others, to the master bedroom also implies a lack of comfort, a refusal to bring the scenario out into the wider house as its intimate nature must be put behind closed doors.

Lisa’s Nightmares 3 (1996) is framed by Lisa writing nightmares in her diary and narrating the stories. Accordingly, the tales are as banal as one expects, such as the first story which finds her arriving home and completing her routine before being tormented and stabbed. Everything is shown in real time, agonizingly drawn-out actions capturing how Lisa lives and offering little else until the violent conclusion. We see plenty of possessions throughout (such as the Brady Bunch poster on the bedroom door), the everyday reality of the home presented as mise-en-scène and a necessary counterbalance to the bleak scenario being staged on-screen. Here the elements of home décor are transformed into moments of levity, grounding an unpleasant situation in recognizable elements that defang the desires being requested.

A more striking tale later in the tape, however, is suggestive of the psychological toll that constantly staging hypothetical distress must take. The story begins with Lisa intoning, “Next thing I know, I’m going around the house and seeing myself dead all over the place.” A POV camera climbs the stairs, finding Lisa stabbed to death in bed. Heading downstairs, another dead Lisa is in the dining room, stabbed in the stomach and wrapped in a towel. She is also in the living room, dead before the TV. Here the purest function of the standard fetish tape – female death and objectification – is reduced to its bare essentials, lacking even the moments of violence themselves. Lisa’s narration is cast as a reflection on the limitations of her scream queen status, an interrogation of the fact that she must always die or strip in these films to generate a fan response. More than this, a wide range of locations in the house are centered, both as means of showing them off on camera and indicating how her function as a horror actress has been refracted across the very space that she inhabits in her daily life. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, Cook also deserves credit for his sleight-of-hand attempt at a single-take scenario to reveal the above elements.

Despite these concerns, there’s an innocence to many of these requests that makes the series feel particularly wholesome despite its darkest moments. Nothing crosses the boundary of hardcore fetishes or deep-seated misogyny, and it’s impossible to deny that the tapes are a celebration of Lisa and her status as an independent starlet. Cook even recognizes this element, jokingly crediting himself as “Lisa’s Husband” on the third tape. These are vanilla productions in their representations and seemingly even their conception.

Lisa’s Nightmares 4 arrived later in 1996, during a decidedly uneven time in the Cemetery/Horrorscope filmography. Emboldened by the success of Death Metal Zombies (1995), his first crossover success, Cook’s films leapt fully into self-awareness and comedy, though there were some effectively creepy high points like Frightmares. The tape begins with Lisa and her therapist (played by Todd) working through her nightmares and dreams, suggesting a more inward-looking approach that befits the material as well as the various glances toward the fan mentality. This more overt humor, present throughout Cook’s filmography (especially the cruder comical attempts in Evil Night), is captured in the early segment that sees Todd show up as a plumber who keeps making passes at and harassing Lisa. When she kills him, Todd, as her therapist, notes the role reversal in effect and her subconscious desire to play the aggressor after so many turns as a victim. Clearly, by the fourth installment, the couple were eager to try out new ideas to reinvent their series.

A particularly fascinating function of this frame narrative is its insertion of Lisa’s reactions to the requests made of her. Featured stories involve strangulation, organized crime, and cigarette smoking, all things Lisa expresses fear or dislike toward, which her dreams are thus making her confront. There’s an unconventional component to this approach, seeing Lisa claim fan-imagined scenarios for herself and working through the ideations of her admirers. This makes the psychoanalysis framework the strongest wraparound of any tape, working the self-awareness of this period to its advantage. It also shows that Todd and Lisa were fully aware of both what their fans were demanding and their own role in creating these tapes as distinct entries from their regular features. In a way it’s a subversion of the very custom fetish tapes like Hellfire was trying to do with his far more transgressive offerings years later. Unlike W.A.V.E. releases, these reflect the insularity of Todd and Lisa’s lives honestly: a young married couple in love and having fun, albeit to please their fan base. Any derangement is on the part of the fans and their requests, which could be argued of any custom tapes, though there’s less perversity in such an intimate and unstaged setting. The tapes’ sheer naivete becomes a subversive element itself.

Closing out the series, Lisa’s Nightmares 5 (1996) is rooted in the contemporaneous horror scene, building off a Scream-inspired format of sinister prank calls. Of course, in this universe, Lisa’s favorite horror movie is Night of the Clown, and she is questioned about her belly button. This leads to a discussion of her dreams and nightmares, though in this installment every story originated with Todd and Lisa themselves, the fan response either having dried up or been deemed too excessive and repetitive. Many of the stories follow the same model, and stomach fetishes are still the order of the day, with Todd’s caller expressing his interest in this particular demise. One more extreme story sees Todd ordering Lisa to strip at knifepoint before handcuffing her and shooting her in the stomach. This builds methodically, Lisa suffering a slow death with multiple shots from a target pistol before getting stabbed to death. While hardly explicit compared to other late ’90s outings, the more prolonged and torture-based emphasis of the story stands out from earlier installments of the series.

The couple’s assertion of creative control sets the stage for the longer story of Lisa’s scariest dream ever. A POV camera tracks her as she walks into the house, freely roaming past mannequins that shake and rattle as though possessed. She heads upstairs to sketch in a room full of mannequins, constantly looking over her shoulder at the disturbing sounds they make, eventually fleeing and arming herself with scissors. Hours pass and we learn that she has turned into a mannequin herself. This stand-alone story exemplifies the unnerving brilliance that Cook’s isolationist horror can be so apt at tapping into, an impact heightened by the fact that this tale is devoid of nudity or any fetish content. Clearly, this was meant to be the tape’s showstopper and reads more as an isolated short film, echoing the final segment of Cook’s anthology Frightmares.

There is no available data on the economic impact of the series, though the five-volume run certainly suggests its popularity within the niche horror video underground. The Cooks produced two more features, the 1997 anthology Frightmares and 1998’s Night of the Clown, the latter a surrealist exercise in tedium starring the couple alone and manifesting a frustratingly insular dose of their peculiar humor. Following that production, Cook took an extended hiatus from filmmaking, continuing his amateur skateboarding career. Today, he still distributes his own films and the works of others via his Screamtime Films label, essentially a continuation of Cemetery and Horrorscope. Of his filmography, only Special Techniques of Low/No Budget Movies and the Lisa’s Nightmares tapes are unavailable for purchase. The couple divorced amicably in the early 2000s, making their on-screen collaborations potent artifacts of a particular era in both time and the couple’s lives.

Tedious as they may be, even for hardcore fans of Cook’s unique offerings, these five tapes stand as the most revealing and illuminating entries in his filmography. As an avowed Cemetery Cinema enthusiast, I would argue that appreciating these works requires an extradiegetic understanding of Cook’s world and aspirations to fully examine. Thankfully, the insistence on domesticity and realism in any of his works means that the nondiegetic elements are never far removed from what ends up on-screen, it’s simply a matter of tracing Cook’s intentions to better grasp his concerns. One element worth considering in this regard is the VHS-exclusive nature of the series. Throughout Cook’s filmography there is an element of malleability, his frequent revisions of numerous titles asserting the works as projects constantly in a state of flux or evolution. In many cases, the largest and most notable omissions are the removal of unlicensed music and the slight revision of runtimes for clarity and efficiency. As far as I can tell, due to their unavailable status, the Lisa’s Nightmares tapes are unchanged in any form, rendering them undiluted experiences, intrinsically linked to Cook’s impulse in the moment of production.

It isn’t uncommon for SOV productions to be shot in the homes of friends or the filmmakers themselves – in many lower-budget cases, it’s close to being the rule. While these all offer glimpses at the unspectacular nature of middle-American life, there is rarely an effort to center the spaces themselves as focal points. Moreover, among those who produced several films throughout the 1990s, these locations rarely recur with any prominence.4 The recurrence of this setting not only acts as a familiar touchpoint, but also ensures that the more surreal and horrific moments of his filmography succeed despite their limited means and budgets. Just as his characters presume safety and security in their home space, so too does his audience approach each title with a sense of comfort through repeat exposures. The unseating of normal life is aided greatly by the intrusion of unwelcome forces into this sphere.

The voyeurism that defines the Lisa’s Nightmares series also speaks to this interruption of private domesticity. Here, for an assumably small audience of devotees, Todd and Lisa Cook restage and even idealize their most private moments on-screen.5 Rhodes speaks to the topic of comfort, arguing that “while we can grant the charm of this or that house as it appears in this or that film, a serious reckoning with the cinematic spectacle of property will necessarily dislodge us from some of the cozy familiarity we attribute to and experience in both houses and cinema” (12). For an audience almost thirty years removed from the release of the series, and one entirely divorced from the wish-fulfillment origin of their creation, the Lisa’s Nightmares compilations serve as apt examples of this sensation. Whatever sense of awareness fans may have gained of the Cook household and the couple’s life within it through other works, several moments in each tape serve as intrusions and disruptions. The most lasting fascination is not only in the capture of their property and existence, but in the Cooks’ willingness to disturb these very things and perhaps even unsettle their audience in making available such revealing moments. As with SOV horror in a larger sense, the nostalgic comforts that serve as entry points can become deceptively jarring when exposed as nakedly as they are.

Works Cited

Cook, Todd. “Commentary.” Special Features. Demon Dolls, Screamtime Films, 2013. DVD.

Gallagher, Hugh. “Z Queen Lisa Cook.” Draculina #20, 1994, pp. 46-47.

Kerekes, David. “The Small World of the Snuff Fetish Custom Video.” From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: Highbrow and Lowbrow Transgressions in Cinema’s First Century, edited by John Cline and Robert G. Weiner. Scarecrow Press, 2010, pp. 205-211.

Rhodes, John David. The Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.