Nightmare, The (2015)
Starring Yatoya Toy, Siegfried Peters, Steven Yvette, Nicole Bosworth
Directed by Rodney Ascher
The Old Hag. The Night Hag. Shadow People. The Haint. The Mare.
Sleep paralysis.
I can’t think of a single potentially paranormal phenomenon as widely shared across cultures and centuries as sleep paralysis and the way various cultures have dealt with and experienced it.
Chances are you’ve had it happen at least once. You wake up, or feel awake, but you can’t move. You likely feel a weight on your chest, as if you’re held down. You can’t scream, you have no control. It’s possible you witness something terrifying and impossible: an intruder, a being, an energy, a shadow. Just as suddenly as it arrives, you wake up, and there’s no evidence anything has occurred. Even the break between sleep and waking can be impossible to detect, as if the feeling just passes with no change in consciousness.
This is known as sleep paralysis, and it has been experienced across humanity in all cultures. Each one reports similar details, but each one handles and explains them differently.
Director Rodney (Room 237) Ascher has created The Nightmare, a documentary examining the phenomenon via the testimony of eight people who experience it more regularly than most. He does so by bringing their reported visions to life, and in the process he has made the most terrifying movie I’ve seen this year, perhaps in more than that.
If you read The Gasp Menagerie, Dread Central’s paranormal column that I write, you’ve heard me talk extensively about Charles Fort and the Fortean approach to strange events. In short, Fort believed in presenting the evidence and letting his readers decide what they believed.
It’s this approach that Ascher takes. Much like the sometimes wild and wacky theories in Room 237, he recreates the experiences of the eight subjects in the film without judgment. They’re presented in absolute sober seriousness exactly how they are described by the victims. This approach is refreshing in this day and age of the editorial or even propaganda documentary film, but it also leads to some of the most frightening scenes in recent history.
Ascher also knows how to frame a horror film. Scary moments are built to, gradually, generating maximum dread as you wait for the other shoe to drop. When it does, even though you know it’s coming, there’s no escape. Ascher goes balls-out on these scares, reproducing creatures and events literally from nightmares.
By adhering to the testimony as closely as possible and resisting the urge to amplify or otherwise augment the scares, he’s managed to make a far more frightening film. Once a scare reaches a certain level of the fantastic, the fear is drained a bit. A shape of a man’s shadow wearing a hat doesn’t sound frightening… until you witness it in combination with the testimony of a victim describing his terror and knowing this is happening in a bedroom out of nowhere. The sense of invasion and powerlessness pours out of the screen, and it’s all viewers can do to keep their heads above water.
The stories represented here cover a wide range of different experiences with a few common threads. This gives Ascher a broad palette of fear to work with, many different visions of terror to fling at us.
Even the way the interviews are shot adds to the unease. Hand-held cameras and the framing of the shots are used to keep you unsteady. The viewer is often put in the position of an eavesdropper, a voyeur. The view drifts between interviewer and subject, sometimes only in reflective surfaces, as if we’re intruding on a moment of confidence. It leaves you feeling uncomfortable just watching a simple conversation… then the black things with sharp teeth come out, and you regret having that extra cup of coffee.
If there’s a fault with The Nightmare, it’s the finale. And really, it’s hard to fault Ascher with this as there’s nowhere to go. There are few easy answers. Even fewer resolutions. Almost every victim continues to experience their terrors. Only one or two feel they’ve reached any sort of answer about their nature. Two that do have come to conclusions that are even more terrifying than what they experience. While it’s the nature of the beast, the outcome is a bit anticlimactic. Most of the victims are left to simply shrug and accept their fate.
There are no assurances given. There’s no chance of going to sleep confident that the subjects, or the viewers, are safe to expect a peaceful rest. More than once, in fact, it’s directly suggested that simply hearing about sleep paralysis can make you far more prone to experience it. Unlike fictional horror, this horror is all too real, and yes, the film directly tells you that simply by watching it, you’ve made yourself a target.
That, my friends, is serious mojo. If The Nightmare wasn’t such an amazing, entertaining film, I’d advise you to avoid it. As it stands, all I can say is watch at your own risk… and sweet dreams.
The Nightmare is available on VOD now and on DVD/Blu-ray on August 4th.
The Nightmare (2015)
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
