Tactile Psychosis and Transvested Trauma: A Review of "Come the Nightfall"

By Richard Caeiro

Scene from the film "Come the Nightfall".

The deserted road and the chance encounter between the wealthy man and the femme fatale are classic tropes that, in Tom Michaels' hands, become a nightmare of fragmented identities. In "Come the Nightfall", horror is not announced by jump scares, but by the slow decomposition of normality.

By moving the action inside the house, Michaels establishes a direct dialogue with the legacy of Alfred Hitchcock. The setting, punctuated by remnants of women’s clothing, functions as a visual sign of an absent presence, immediately evoking the morbid mysticism of Psycho. There is a latent tension in every exchange of glances, a clear heritage of John Carpenter, where danger seems to lurk in the very grainy light of the environment.

Scene from the film "Come the Nightfall".

The film's climax leads us to a territory widely explored in horror: the killer who dresses as a woman. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this transcends mere disguise. It is the manifestation of a shattered subjectivity where the maternal figure—invoked by Bill through an external voice—was not integrated but embodied as a punishing force.

Scene from the film "Come the Nightfall".

When Bill dresses as a woman to strike with the axe, he isn't just killing the femme fatale; he is violently attempting to resolve an internal conflict with the feminine that haunts him. The axe becomes the tool of an inverted symbolic castration, where trauma manifests in a performance of fury and repression.

Watching "Come the Nightfall" awakens a almost physical nostalgia, a longing for a time when cinema was an experience of texture and real danger. The 16mm grain transported me back to the late nights watching classics like Halloween or Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, where the image felt alive, almost "dirty," carrying a soul that today's polished digital often ignores.

Scene from the film "Come the Nightfall".

There is something deeply romantic and frightening about the way we used to watch films—that mystery residing in heavy shadows and the sound of the film reel spinning. Michaels succeeds in reclaiming that feeling; he doesn't just tell a horror story, he gives us back the ritual. It’s a film that smells of old cinema, reminding us why we fell in love with fear in the first place.