The 2015 documentary film The Nightmare by Rodney Ascher, his sophomore feature after the iconic documentary Room 237 about The Shining, was inspired by Ascher’s own experiences with sleep paralysis. Ascher tells The Cinessential that he began to have these symptoms after college and that they “left a mark.” He was interested in the people who had “traveled farther down this road than [he] had,” and wanted to look closer at the subject of sleep paralysis.
The Sleep Foundation defines sleep paralysis as “a brief loss of muscle control, known as atonia, that happens just after falling asleep or waking up.” Along with atonia, people usually have hallucinations during these episodes. In The Nightmare, Ascher interviews real sufferers of sleep paralysis and attempts to reenact their visions. The film avoids covering the scientific cause of sleep paralysis and focuses solely on the subjective experiences themselves, the hallucinations that many of the subjects describe as more of a spiritual happening rather than a physical one. As such, Ascher’s The Nightmare is more terrifying than most horror films.
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In an unnerving fashion, The Nightmare simply lays out the evidence and suggests continuity between each experience instead of presenting an opinion on sleep paralysis. Besides being a documentary about a genuinely terrifying condition, Rodney Ascher and cinematographer Bridger Nelson combine the elements of a scary movie with real-life interviews.
However, the discussions take place in the home of each subject, under the veil of poor and shadowy lighting. The camera watches each subject through dark doorways or from odd angles. Sometimes interviewees appear to be creeped out themselves. But the way The Nightmare is built and filmed isn’t even the scariest part; it’s the complex and unknown world of sleep paralysis, and the truly disturbing way Ascher recreates the sensation. Sleep paralysis seems to sneak up on these subjects and their audience just as a tangible boogeyman would.
The Subjects Recognize Their Hallucinations in Scary Movies
The interviewees of The Nightmare are deeply familiar with sleep paralysis. Their hallucinations are not a one-off but a regular part of their lives and an expected part of their sleep. One man claims that during a vision he “immediately stopped being an atheist,” and other subjects seem to say variations of the same thing. They roughly translate their sleep paralysis as a fight between good and evil, a spiritual experience that terrifies and immobilizes them, revealing a metaphysical truth about the universe (or just the human brain) in the process. Sleep paralysis is persistent for the subjects of this documentary, so much so that one man sleeps with ten televisions turned on. However, one of the most unnerving things is that some of these people recognize their nightmares in mainstream movies.
A couple of people in The Nightmare describe seeing Nightmare on Elm Street and thinking that the filmmakers had somehow pulled Freddy Krueger straight from their sleep paralysis. Others recognize the aliens from the Christopher Walken movie Communion and the faces from Insidious. There are common traits between each subject’s shadowy figure, such as their wearing of a hat and their heavy presence. This is perhaps one of the scariest things about The Nightmare — the terrifying and immobilizing realities the mind can produce.
The Nightmare Could Trigger Sleep Paralysis in You
During the making of The Nightmare, Rodney Ascher explains that his sleep paralysis was temporarily reignited. In his conversation with The Cinessential, Ascher says that he and a few crew members experienced episodes of sleep paralysis as they were working on the project. Ascher admits that he also heard “reports of people getting it after seeing the movie.”
Although these accounts can’t be easily found online, it’s clear to see why someone with a history of sleep paralysis might be triggered by this film. According to Kristen Yoonsoo Kim of Complex, some of The Nightmare’s visions were eerily similar to hers. As a teenager, Kim had a recurring dream where “creatures were tickling [her] — a story eerily similar to one of the film’s subjects, who stated that aliens would often tickle him in bed.”
Shiela O’Malley of Roger Ebert’s website sums up Ascher’s conclusion perfectly, which is that “many of these experiences sound the same.” There is an eerie continuity between the experiences of sleep paralysis subjects which is more unnerving than many horror movies themselves. Why are these visions so universal? How do completely unrelated, disparate people experience the same hallucinations? Is there something lurking beneath the fabric of visible reality?
Rodney Ascher Asks Scary Questions
The Nightmare tries to recreate the sensations of these experiences rather than explain them away with scientific diagnosis. In Ascher’s discussion with The Cinessential, Ascher says that reports of alien abductions or visions of angels could be explained by sleep paralysis. However, he is convinced that these experiences often “resist being put into neat, easily explainable boxes.” Like most great art, his film doesn’t provide easy answers, and like most great horror movies, The Nightmare terrifies us with its questions.
