“BAM! Ten years of my life gone by this mad pursuit.. who is Helen Adam!?”

Helen Adam, the uncompromising artist who believed in magic, a child prodigy from Scotland who was known as “the Worm queen”, because of her skinny and gothic appearance. Despite being a cru- cial icon to the alternative poetry, punk and queer scene, an inspiration to Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and the Beat Generation she is still a mystery to us today.

All for her work, her life, was unceremoniously dumped in a container and she herself vanished. And that could have been all we knew of Helen Adam. This treasure, lost forever.

But then fate intervened, by odd coincidence an old friend passed by the container and recognized the papers, artworks, the old egyptian statues, human skulls and crystal orbs as Helens estate. And therefore we can now let Helen Adam resurface again.

The story of Helen Adam is a tumble down the rabbit hole into a world of poetry, magic, female artistry, death and rebirth, punk, ballads and mental illness. It’s the story of belonging, being an outcast, the courage to go your own way. Helen brought witchcraft, horror ballads and camp attitude into the beatnik scene in San Francisco, to the dirty punk New York of the 70s and the queer Berlin of the 80s. A completely uncompromising artist who loved her life on the fringes of society. Helen existed inside her own dark mythology, ex- pressed in her ballads, films, and collages.

The story of a very, very unusual artist who has remained a radical even today, so many years after her death.

Now we rediscover Helen’s world. We find her old films and voice recordings, her diaries and magic stones, scattered all over the world, and find that she has a lot to teach us today, in joy and horror combined. About the doom of the industrial way of life and the revenge nature will take on us, about the revenge of the women made into monsters by the patriarchy, about the joy and desire that can be found in the darkest of subjects.

In Daydream of Darkness we want to invite the viewer to step into Helen Adam’s universe.

”There would be no Beat Generation, no San Francisco Renaissance, without the primal muse of poetry as it came through Helen Adam”
- Kristin Prevallet, poet and researcher

Genre: Documentary, PoV, history
Length: Full feature documentary + 58 minutes broadcast  
Director: Tomas Stark 
Producer: Gustav Ahlgren, Picky Pictures 
Co-producer: Swedish Television, Swedish Arts Grants Committee
Status: In production, development