Featuring: Siegfried Peters, Stephen Michael Joseph, and Latoya Toy
I don’t remember a whole lot of stuff from my childhood,
probably because it was so straightforward and uneventful; just my mommy and
me. But there is one strange moment that
I don’t think I will ever forget. I was
around five or six years old laying in my bed at night with my door closed,
when all of a sudden I remember waking up to the feeling that something was in
the room with me. So I went to look at
what it was, only to find I couldn’t move.
I distinctly remember trying to move my arms, my legs, my head—anything
at all—but nothing would respond, like I had lost complete control of my
body. I desperately tried screaming for
my mom, who was sleeping in her bedroom next door, but nothing came out. Eventually, I woke up in a state of panic.
I still am not sure what happened on that night. Was it just an unusually lucid dream? Did I just imagine it all, and somehow just
convince myself that it happened? Or was
it a case of sleep paralysis, the focus of Rodney Ascher’s documentary/horror
film The Nightmare? Either way, I’m very grateful that such a thing
has never happened to me since.
Other people are not so lucky. The
Nightmare follows eight such people, who experience the phenomena known as
sleep paralysis on an almost nightly basis.
Each of them describe their most “memorable” occurrences, which usually
feature shadowy men hovering over them as they lie in bed, mind fully “awake”
and in a state of alertness, while the body is asleep and uncontrollable. It’s no doubt a very frightening condition,
judging from the dozens of horror stories the participants tell over the course
of 90 minutes.
It couldn’t have been very easy, but director Rodney Ascher
has succeeded in taking a mysterious, terrifying event, and making it into one
of the most excruciatingly boring, useless documentaries ever made.
If you go into The
Nightmare knowing nothing about sleep paralysis, the only thing you will
learn after coming out is that it exists.
Yes, it’s a mysterious phenomenon that, like dreams, isn’t completely
understood, so I didn’t come out of it expecting any kind of clear answer. But to not speak to one single sleep
“expert”, or doctor just seems like an egregious oversight on Ascher’s
part. That means this movie is literally
90 minutes of the subjects talking about their experiences, while reenactments
bring their words to life.
Don’t get me wrong, the recreations are very well done, and
a couple of them actually manage to be somewhat creepy; although Ascher’s
previous work (Room 237) was also a
documentary, his lighting and shot compositions suggest a potential career in
horror films. Maybe that’s what he
thought he was doing here, cleverly combining documentary with horror, but it
falls embarrassingly short of the mark.
There are just so many ways you can present similar stories over and
over and over and over again before they become mind-numbingly repetitive;
unfortunately, here it only takes about twenty minutes.
The subjects are pretty fascinating, but like I said, many
of their stories tend to overlap. That’s
certainly not their fault; they’re just there to talk about their
experiences. Ascher just doesn’t do
anything meaningful with the footage.
Truth be told, this is a slightly interesting 30-minute documentary, blown
up to three times the size; if it would have only been mildly entertaining at a
third of its length, imagine just how slooooooow it is at present length. I’m not even exaggerating when I checked the
remaining time at one point, thinking I was almost done, only to discover I was
only 45 minutes in. It’s that bad.
Also, did the movie really need to focus on eight different
people? When all is said and done, only
two or three get a substantial amount of airtime, while the others are confined
to a couple minutes here and there, and get lost in the shuffle. Cutting back on the number of participants
would not have only removed some of the monotony from the proceedings, but also
could have shaved a few precious minutes off the film’s bloated duration.
I’m pretty much at a loss exactly what demographic this film
was targeting. It’s much too plodding
and vapid to hold the interest of anyone that’s unfamiliar with the condition,
yet all it offers to other sleep paralysis sufferers is a chance to relive
their conditions, almost non-stop, for one agonizing hour and thirty tedious
minutes. There is no digging to find out
what causes it, or if there are any potential cures on the horizon, which could
have allowed them to understand their condition a bit more; no look at how it’s
diagnosed, or if it can be controlled—a couple of the subjects weigh in on
their attempts to hinder the onset of attacks, but beyond that, it offers no
medical hypothesis or conjectures from anyone outside of the eight
subjects.
It’s kind of depressing and ironic how a movie about the
terrors of falling asleep, makes you want to do just that. A complete dozer.
RECAP: Excruciatingly, mind-numbingly boring. The reenactments are well-shot, and most of
the subjects are fascinating, but you’ve seen everything it’s got to say within
the first twenty minutes. This is a
documentary that doesn’t seem to have any idea what it’s trying to
accomplish: It offers no information
about this bizarre medical phenomenon, besides basically “it’s scary and it
sucks”, which is the only point it hammers home for 90 monotonous minutes. Seriously, your time is too valuable to waste
on something like this, to speak nothing of the money involved in acquiring
it. Just ignore it, and maybe it will
fall into obscurity, a fate that this film unfortunately deserves, despite the
sincerity of its subjects.
RATING: 2/10
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