Imagine this: you are falling asleep, or just waking up, and you are suddenly unable to move. Your body, limp and functionless, is laying there on the bed while your mind is completely awake. The horror of it, the helplessness, takes a hold as you gradually begin to realize that you are utterly vulnerable in the quiet and still of the night.
And then, the Shadow Men come for you.
It sounds like the plot of a horror movie – and it more or less has been, thanks to Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street – but for some people the condition of “sleep paralysis” is a terrifying reality. One of those individuals is documentarian Rodney Ascher, who in his latest film attempts not only to illuminate the struggle of eight other people afflicted with sleep paralysis, but to dramatize their plight and make you, the viewer, a victim too.
But if you want real, scientific data to back up and explain the events of The Nightmare, you are out of luck. Ascher’s film focuses almost entirely on the experiences of individuals suffering from sleep paralysis, whose regular, sometimes even nightly ordeals have clearly taken their toll. Feelings of persecution, paranoia and victimization abound in each of these subjects, and while Ascher’s attempts to visualize their nightmares are sometimes genuinely disturbing, the really scary part is watching how ordinary people, when faced with the inexplicable, begin to rationalize their visions and lose their grip on reality.
It’s a similar approach Rodney Ascher took to his previous documentary, Room 237, which was ostensibly about the many elaborate theories the fans of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic The Shining have gradually developed. Some, like the theory that Jack Torrance has been subtly established as a real-life minotaur in the maze of The Overlook Hotel, seem halfway reasonable. Others, like the belief that Kubrick used The Shining to confess to his involvement in faking the Apollo 11 moon landings, sound outright outrageous. Practically all of them involve a level of observational detail that spoke volumes about the individuals who sought definitive answers to a Rorschach test, and the innate subconscious necessity to find reason where – perhaps – there really is none.
Yet dreams don’t have the same guiding authorial hand as a motion picture, something Ascher himself seems to struggle with in The Nightmare. By striving to capture the subjectivity of disturbing dreams, and inject his audience into the terror, he runs the continuous risk of losing his relatively objective viewers. It may be that you look upon the shared visions of unfocused shapes manipulating the bodies of the helpless sleepers in The Nightmare and come to your own, rational interpretations. Perhaps these are vague but nearly universal memories from infancy, in which the subject was awoken in the middle of the night by their parents, tickling them or changing their diapers. Perhaps there are any number of other, perfectly reasonable conclusions to be drawn.
Rodney Ascher’s interest in logical explanations is apparently quite limited, however, given how very little screen time he gives to them. The afflicted subjects of The Nightmare have mostly been driven quite far towards the brink, and care little for anyone else’s theories when their own experiences seem far more potent and real. If Ascher’s eerie recreations don’t lull you into your own somnambulist state, or if they don’t speak directly to your own personal experience, then The Nightmare may not terrify you the way it was obviously half-intended. But even if you approach the unsettling world of its subjects from a state of pure academia, you are bound to at least be intrigued by the plight of these individuals, who are so close to their dreams that they can no longer escape them, even in their waking hours.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
