The Nightmare

Director: Rodney Ascher

Starring: Siegfried Peters, Yatoya Toy

Running Time: 90 minutes

Country: USA

The Visit (M. Night Shyamalan new horror mockumentary) was my first step into the genre of horror documentary and I have to admit that while that one merely intrigued me, the other (The Nightmare) ruined my sleeping pattern for the following nights. Darkness, impotence, sleep paranoia and faceless monsters, this film reaches to the deepest human fears and shoves them in your face.  

The Nightmare focuses on the condition of sleep paralysis and shows how people in the United States deal with it on every day basis. The documentary decided to use re-enactment to make the audience understand the gravity of the condition, but especially its horrifying reality to the people who go through it.

The film blends perfectly together a bleak, dark and indie cinematography for the interviews with bright, contrast-heavy and hypnotic visuals in the re-enactment scenes. Together they convey a very particular feeling in the audience’s guts that could only be described as ‘horror-like’. While the interviews are usually calm and relaxing, the re-enactment scenes force the viewer to fall asleep with the victim and experience his/her level of impotence.

Image: The Movie Partnership

The scare tactics of The Nightmare are interesting because it does not really use suspense, but rather employs repetition and escalation. Sometimes you are going to hear the same stories and sometimes you are going to see very similar re-enactment scenes but one after the other they shape an endless journey into the realms of darkness and bad dreams.

Despite its resonant style, the documentary starts grabbing our attention only when it starts deconstructing popular horror films such as Insidious, Paranormal Activity but also cult classics like Nightmare on Elm Street explaining how several misconceptions have been used (and very effectively we can agree on that) to merely scare the audience for few moments. It is only after this moment that the audience starts to understand the difference between real and unreal, supernatural and natural.

Image: The Movie Partnership

The only issue I had with this film is that it does not provide a professional medical recounting of sleep paralysis and that it asks us to believe everything the so called victims say. Under an attentive eye The Nightmare seems to mask the true and undoubtable evidence they were not able to find with a hypnotic look, a series of drawings and a minimalistic music. Despite this, the power of this film ultimately lies with the power of suggestion, which is something the production team masters completely. Thanks to its haunting subject matter and its stylistic bravery, The Nightmare is definitely one of the most frightful experiences of 2015, don’t miss it.