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| “ | As night falls, a new day begins... A day of unity. | „ |
| ~ Franklin Harris in his last sermons to his followers. |
Franklin Harris better to be simply known as Harris, is the leader of a suicidal hippy cult called Unity Fields in the 1970s and one of the two main antagonists of the 1988 horror movie Bad Dreams, though Harris is the worst and obsessive enemy of the young girl Cynthia who escaped his cult's mass suicide.
He was portrayed by the late Richard Lynch.
History
Little known about Harris is that he's a hippie spiritualist who then founded the Unity Fields sect, a religious hippie commune on the grassfields of a ranch called Unity Fields in mid-1970s California who like him, believed in the healing power of unity.
Everything with the Unity Fields group was then once recorded on live TV by a news reporter who wanted to get to know about these people and their leader.
But one day, when they thought the world could not understand nor love them, Harris decided it was time to go.
At their house, the cult members along with their leader Harris were performing their one last baptism, this with gasoline oil instead of water. That ended with all of the cult members suffering an agonizing death and their home engulfed in flames. One survivor out of the raging inferno was Cynthia, the young former cultist of Unity Fields who defected and got away.
Harris' Return
Frank Harris returns as an undead man.
Harris suddenly returned to Cynthia, the same young woman who escaped the fire that killed the members of Unity Fields. He appeared in human form from his former life which he appears as a seemingly serene figure. In his other form, he appears as a badly burnt corpse which referenced to his death at the fire of the Unity Fields Ranch caused by the mass suicide pact he orchestrated.
Later, Dr. Berrisford who pretends to be the deceased false prophet Harris, came to Cynthia's room in the midst of patients with servere mental problems slowly running around and attacked Alex who there tried to rescue Cynthia from his influence. He took her to the rooftop of the clinic where Cynthia begin her "final journey" by jumping off the roof. Alex got there in time to save her. But Berrisford after failed convincing his former apprentice to let her go, began stabbing Alex's hand with a syringe in order to finish them both off. But Dectective Wasserman who was on Cynthia's case in the '70s, arrived with the police and Berrisford stopped.
In the end, Berrisford fooled the detective and Alex that he going to shoot himself with a handgun before tried killing them both point blank. But Cynthia after realizing it was Berrisford and not Harris, stopped him and pushed him off the rooftop and he died landing on the roof of a car, ending his psychological and sadistic reign of terror.
Cynthia saw the last hallucinating image of Harris reaching out from beyond the grave before he finally disappeared.
Deleted Scene/Alternate Ending
After Dr. Berrisford's death, Dr. Alex Karmen who saved Cynthia from him, decided to take Cynthia to the old Unity Fields Ranch at her request. She was ready to face her demons and put the past behind her there.
Inside the charred ruins of the Unity Fields house, Cynthia walked in there with Alex before she asked to leave her alone for a moment. Alex agreed and stepped outside. While alone, Cynthia was confronted by the ghosts of the children of the cult and the spirit of her dead boyfriend Victor who missed her for so long. She then sees Harris and the rest of the Unity Fields cult along with the souls of the five murdered patients. After she learned the truth that she was Harris' biological daughter which is why he kept calling her love child, Cynthia refuses to be with the cult and begin slashing Harris' throat with his ceremonial dagger. Then the throats of the cult members and their victims began to bleed at the same time. Later Cynthia stopped and sees there was nothing. She than left the ruins of Unity Feilds Ranch with Alex for good.
Back at the charred remains of the Unity Fields house, a skeletial hand emerged out of nowhere and grabbed the knife. This was Harris' hand as he reaches out and takes his dagger back to hell with him.
Trivia
- Harris is based on the real-life cult leader Jim Jones who too driven his religious hippie organization, the People's Temple, to mass suicide/mass murder.