Review by Quin
I am no tough guy. Those around me will tell you that I can be a very anxious person. I know this is odd for a guy who reviews horror movies, but I’m actually rarely scared by what I review. When I decided to review the new Rodney Ascher documentary The Nightmare, I figured I’d go all out and watch it right before bed. I know the reviews for it so far have been overwhelmingly positive, pointing out how terrifying it is. But you know what? It just didn’t resonate with me at all. I think it fails as a documentary and it fails as a horror movie.
The film begins with a dictionary definition of the word nightmare – “Late 13th century Middle English (denoting an evil spirit thought to lie upon and suffocate sleepers) Incubus.” As you can see, this definition is rather limiting and perhaps even a bit self serving for the film. The only other information we are given before the barrage of testimonials that follow is a quick explanation that this film is the story of eight people and “what waits for them in the darkness.” These eight people come from everywhere from Torrance, California to Manchester, England. One by one, they delve back into their memories to explain their experiences with a phenomenon known as sleep paralysis. During REM sleep, a chemical is released that prevents you from acting out your dreams. I’ve heard that the human body can do everything asleep that it can do while it’s awake. You may have heard about all of those incidents reported in the news where people on Ambien were sleep driving. The brain knows how to make sure that doesn’t happen. If someone wakes up during REM sleep, they may experience hallucinations. Supposedly this is also where you can control your dreams. I’ve tried a few times, with no luck. I’ve already given you more information than what can be gleaned from The Nightmare. Some of it is from Wikipedia and I also have a friend who is really into dream journaling and something he calls “mining his dreams” which is going back through a dream to see how much you can recall and then using it to enhance creativity.
I must admit that the thing I found interesting about The Nightmare was the fact that most of these people began experiencing their sleep paralysis before the internet. So many of these people who knew nothing of each-other – all had experiences with pretty remarkable similarities. However, so much of it just seemed like archetypes that are already in all of our minds. Dream interpretation is nothing new, and if you thumb through any book on the subject, it’s amazing the things that are listed. The symbolism seems far fetched, but it’s hard to deny that it’s really a thing. For instance, the shadow figures standing by the bed, the tapping on the window, the black blobs floating in the air, or the black cat sitting on the chest – these are seen over and over. Not just in the eight from this film, but as far back as the 1781 Henry Fuseli painting The Nightmare. The incubus actually goes back to Mesopotamia 2400 BC. Again, I’m giving you more info than the documentary, but some of the subjects talk about learning quite a bit about their experiences through google searches.
One of the huge problems I had with The Nightmare was the methods which it used to show us what these people had supposedly been through. The most glaring of errors was not defining any clear boundaries as far as what constitutes the sleep paralysis portion of the experience. To me, most of what these people were describing was clearly a dream. One guy talks about getting out of bed during an episode, and having a conversation on his cell phone which ended with him smashing it to pieces. When he woke up, the phone was just fine. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the reason his phone wasn’t broken was because he dreamt all of it up. It reminds me of Charles Fleischer’s character in A Nightmare on Elm Street, when he says, “If you don’t dream, you go…” He means cuckoo, and some of the subjects in The Nightmare are already there.
The Nightmare was directed by Rodney Ascher who previously brought us Room 237, the meditation on several outlandish theories on the film The Shining. I loved that film, for the same reasons I didn’t like The Nightmare. In Room 237, these people were given the floor to talk about their theories uninterrupted. Most of it was completely crazy, but it allowed the viewer to be fascinated and roll their eyes at their own pace. The film didn’t set out to side with these people. It just gave them a place to talk. As batshit insane as most of it was, I found it fascinating and entertaining. With The Nightmare, Ascher admits that he has experienced sleep paralysis. It’s brief, but in a weak stretch of an explanation, he says that during the credits of Natural Born Killers, there is a shadow figure with red light. He actually says the words, “The people who made this have had the same experiences as me. This is a message to me.” And this is where The Nightmare jumps the shark. Ascher should have stayed out of the movie completely. Instead of his occasional question or his personal experience, we should have heard from some experts. I want to hear what psychologists and scientists have to say. Heck, I’d even be interested in getting the thoughts on some spiritual leaders. Anything is better than self diagnosis and babbling about memories from decades ago. Memory is extremely faulty, folks, and when one of the subjects said that sleep paralysis was his earliest memory and his “awakening into the world” I chuckled audibly.
Finally, the re-creations of these sleep experiences (that’s the best thing I can think to call it) are creepy at first. But they become repetitive very quickly. Some of them are pretty cheap looking and others are just comical. But so many reviews will tell you that the film is full of horrifying visuals that put you in the experience. I just don’t get it. I hope this movie gets a second review from Brutal as Hell. I’m sure there will be an opinion from one of my colleagues that is wildly different from mine. I absolutely welcome this, but surely I can’t be the only one who sees through this poorly made mess. If I have somehow angered the shadow people and I start getting these visits, you will all be the first to know. As a famous philosopher once said…unpleasant dreams.