THE NIGHTMARE
#31DaysOfHorror — October 4th
This October, for the second year in a row, I’ll be reviewing one horror movie each day! Respected classics, trashy and forgotten B-movies, both new frights and old… I love ‘em all. Well, some of them I’ll probably hate. We’ll see.
‘The Nightmare’ (2015)
Directed by: Rodney Ascher, who also directed Room 237
Starring: Eight people who regularly suffer from sleep paralysis, like “Chris” and “Connie,” in addition to their dramatic re-enactment doubles.
Wait, what? I thought you were reviewing horror movies — The Nightmare describes itself as a horror-documentary, and I think it more than qualifies. Read on!
My Everything
Midway through the night, I found myself in bed, staring at the corner of my room. I tried to sit up and get out of bed but I could not move, as hard as I tried. I was frozen in place, my entire body feeling weighed down, my eyes wide open. My entire world was only the same unchanging view of a slightly overflowing garbage can and a pile of clothes.
And then I began to hear whispers, from some thing on the other side of my bed. I could feel it, and I knew it knew I was awake. And for the life of me, I could not turn to look at it. I could see only the slightly overflowing garbage can, and the pile of clothes.
At one point, when the terror became unbearable, I gathered all of my strength, wrenched myself over, and fell out of bed. I stood up and began to run down the hall, only to snap back to exactly where I’d been laying before. Frozen. Eyes wide open. Staring at the overflowing garbage can, and the pile of clothes.
As I lay there listening to it breathing on the side of my face, just outside my vision, unable to move, I began to accept the fact that I had died in the middle of the night. I’d had a seizure, or a stroke or something, and I was dead. Was I breathing? Suddenly I wasn’t sure, and it felt like my entire chest was constricting. It chuckled softly. This would be it, my entire everything, for all eternity. Here, in bed, in this position, unable to move, staring at the same goddamned overflowing trash can and the same goddamned pile of clothes. Forever unable to look at the horrid thing laying in bed with me, laughing at me, whispering to me, from just outside of my vision. This was going to be my world, forever more. I could feel my mind slipping.
And then I sat straight up, and it was morning, and it was gone.
I emptied my trash can.
My Review
I suffer from sleep paralysis several times a year. Most of the time, it’s not as severe as the incident described above, and often I don’t really remember what had been happening when I do actually wake up, just a lingering sense of hopelessness and of being frozen in place. But when it’s bad, it’s bad.
So, I was a bit nervous to watch The Nightmare, a new documentary about sleep paralysis that’s been described as “one of the scariest documentaries ever.” While I love horror movies, I’m not often viscerally scared by them, because I sometimes have a difficult time imagining myself in the position of the characters. While I can guess, and that’s fun in and of itself, I don’t actually know what it feels like to be attacked by zombies, or stalked by creepy little children who live in cornfields, or eaten by cannibals. But I do know what sleep paralysis feels like. I know all too well.
I’m happy — and disturbed — to say: The Nightmare gets it, too. It’s a weird movie, structurally speaking; it’s comprised of interviews with sleep paralysis sufferers as well as dramatic, horrific re-enactments of their nightmares, which makes for a strange, dreamlike viewing experience.
So many of the experiences recounted by the subjects are frighteningly familiar. They talk about nightly visitations by tall shadow men, the sensation of something sitting on their chest, awful voices that whisper terrible things from the darkness, and the recurring conviction that they had died in the night and would spend the rest of eternity staring at the same spot in their room, unable to move, forever.
The documentary is very well-crafted; in contrast to the bright, harsh lighting usually employed in talking-head interviews in many documentaries, the interview subjects in The Nightmare are filmed largely at twilight, dusk falling just outside their windows, casting shadows around the room that seem ready to come alive at any moment. Many of these people seem exhausted, ready to fall asleep at any moment, even as they discuss dreading the time each night when they must crawl into bed for fear that tonight will be another night where they experience demonic visitations.
One of the most interesting aspects of the documentary — aside from the dramatic re-enactments that seem to be paying homage to, and putting a grotesque spin on, true-crime news magazine re-enactments — is the way that each interview subject responds differently to their struggle with sleep paralysis. Some of the subjects aren’t as well-defined as the others, but the ones who get the most screentime have very distinct personalities, very specific recurring elements to their nightmares, and they develop different coping mechanisms to deal with the horrific encounters they have when the sun goes down.
Forrest funnels his disturbing experiences into art. He draws several sketches of his hallucinations for the camera, and he has even made masks of the creatures that come to him in the night. He doesn’t explicitly say it, but it’s clear that this helps him deal with what he sees when he tries to sleep. He also seems to be the most rational. He understands that his vision very closely resembles a stereotypical “grey” alien abductor, and instead of deducing that he was abducted by aliens, he comes to the (hopefully correct) opposite conclusion — that most people who believe they were abducted by aliens were actually just experiencing an episode of sleep paralysis.
Connie turns to faith. She tells a story of a visitation by a demonic cloaked figure who was screaming in her ear, just outside her field of vision. The only thing she could think of was to invoke Jesus’s name, and as soon as she was able to force out the word, the figure vanished. Connie is now a devout Christian, and she says her sleep paralysis has all but stopped. Connie is also interesting because, unlike the other characters, whose hallucinations are contained within the dramatic re-enactments that use lookalikes, Connie’s demons bleed over into her talking-head interviews. It’s a cheap jump scare, sure, but it also is an effective way to show that reliving sleep paralysis episodes can cause them to recur, which many of the participants report.
Chris’s sleep paralysis has escalated his entire life, to the point where he now feels pain in his sleep (thanks to a metallic claw that scratches him in the night) that lingers when he wakes up. Chris has resigned himself to his fate, believing that one day, sleep paralysis will cause him to stop breathing, and he just won’t wake up.
Different subjects believe different things about their sleep paralysis, and here’s where I think The Nightmare stumbles a bit. Many of the subjects report reading about others sharing their experiences on the Internet; they fully understand that sleep paralysis has a scientific explanation, but most of them choose to reject any suggestion that their hallucinations are just that — hallucinations. Instead of bringing in any sleep experts or scientists who have studied the phenomenon to discuss the chemical reactions happening in the body that cause these states of heightened dreaming-while-awake, The Nightmare allows its subjects to ramble on at length about demonic visitation and about paranormal or supernatural abduction. One subject even advances a complex theory that parallel universes exist next to each other like apartments in a skyscraper, and while most of “our” universe is contained to one room, perhaps certain inhabitants of other rooms have found their way out into the hallway and have come knocking, and sufferers of sleep paralysis are the ones who answer the door.
On the other hand, this is a horror-documentary, and believing that the subjects are truly being visited by sinister beings from another dimension is certainly the scarier option. Perhaps I wanted someone to be rational just because I don’t want to consider the implication that the voice I heard whispering in my ear that night wasn’t just a hallucination, just some leftover snippet of an unconscious dream. The alternative — that some thing paralyzes me in my sleep and comes to watch me struggle a couple of times a year — is too much.
The dramatic re-enactments of sleep paralysis episodes are definitely The Nightmare’s strongest element. Various reviews have complained that The Nightmare is nothing but people telling you about their dreams for 90 minutes, which everyone knows can be intolerable, but that doesn’t do justice to the way the film restages and reinterprets the disturbing goings-on that these people experience on a regular basis. Perhaps they’re scarier if you’ve experienced what the movie is portraying, but I found a number of the vignettes frankly terrifying.
There are a few jump scares — one particular appearance by a giant spider was not welcome, thank you very much — but in general, the film relies mostly on building a growing sense of dread. We watch the characters, frozen in place, stare straight ahead in utter terror as dark shadowy forms enter their rooms — which are filled with surreal, colorful lighting — and creep closer and closer to their beds. Stationary point-of-view shots are plentiful, keeping us as spectators frozen to the character’s position, trapped in their perspective much as they are trapped in their own bodies.
The film also does something that’s a bit subtle, and when I noticed it, really ratcheted up the tension; when one character describes the figures who visit them — specifically a silhouette of a man in a hat flanked by two other shadow beings — the other characters start to describe incidents where they’ve encountered the same “hat man.” Everyone just refers to him as “hat man;” whether this is a bit of directorial guidance or simply another chilling commonality between sufferers of sleep paralysis, I can’t really say.
Thankfully, after watching The Nightmare, I did not have a sleep paralysis episode (that I remember). Although I’ve read extensively about sleep paralysis online, seeing this film, watching other people’s experiences that so closely matched my own, gave me a weird sense of serenity about the whole thing even as it made me want to sleep with the lights on. It’s comforting, in a way, that people around the world regularly experience what I’ve gone through myself, even if that experience is “suffering from horrific, existential-dread-inducing hallucinations.” After all, as one of the participants says, “We’re all human.”
