Fascinated by the larger, overarching, cacophonous hive of the collective unconscious, Rodney Ascher’s documentary depicts the terror of sleep paralysis
We spend roughly a third of our lives unconscious. Like most creatures, we crave sleep and ritualize it. It’s soothing and restorative. We sleep to recharge, to maintain our bodily functions, to survive. The world continues to turn around us; our bodies are vulnerable, literally paralyzed by the surge of melatonin. Delicate mechanisms within the brain click into place, the hypothalamus and thalamus and brain stem communicating and upshifting or downshifting in tandem. Our consciousness slips deeper and deeper within itself and stray thoughts, impressions, and sensations reemerge at random and are pieced together and indexed and distorted into uncanny, unpredictable shapes. A long-dormant fold in your mind may suddenly twitch, unearthing some half-remembered, haunting experience. As the amygdala kicks into overdrive, people and places from our past reappear as shapeshifting, erratic cognitive projections. The second we wake up, disoriented and sluggish, we’re expending energy and deteriorating until we crash again. This is what happens when everything is going right.
Rodney Ascher’s The Nightmare (2015) tells intertwining stories of when sleep goes horribly wrong. And it doesn’t take much to throw off this fragile internal equilibrium. The docu-horror film profiles a group of people who suffer from sleep paralysis, a sleep disorder caused by the release of an extra hit of melatonin that renders a person — the victim, if you will — completely paralyzed when they regain their senses. For most, the paralysis quickly fades and all motor control returns at once. Hyperawareness of bodily functions is an unsettling symptom of this sleep disorder, the body horror inherent — synapses firing, adrenaline pumping, labored breathing. A subset of people who experience this disorder also experience intense, vivid hallucinations in this liminal stage between their sleep state and consciousness. Often, these people report visitations from menacing “entities” who torment them in their bedrooms (check out the preserved comments sections on reviews of the movie and you’ll see how pervasive this disorder apparently is). “This is the story of eight people and what waits for them in the darkness,” reads the movie’s opening title card, which is an elegant descriptor that hints at how The Nightmare grapples with this rather abstract topic: it succinctly, evocatively states its focus, primes the audience’s horror receptors, and subtly ascribes a nefarious intentionality on the hypnopompic hallucinations.
Documentaries that depict horrors are a dime a dozen; those that function as bona fide horror movies, using startling imagery and tried-and-true genre techniques, are few and far between. The Nightmare (neck and neck with Cropsey, maybe) is one of the most often cited modern exemplars of movies that effectively crossbreed documentary and horror. Because The Nightmare, at its core, is a documentary, it warps how these horror techniques and themes operate. As in Room 237, his debut feature-length documentary, which presents various unorthodox fan theories surrounding The Shining, Ascher — who has become a leading-but-divisive pop documentarian in recent years — doesn’t set out to pierce the bubble of his subjects’ world. He locks into their stories and worldviews and delivers their experiences, perspectives, and rationalizations wholesale. And he always filters it through a pop-culture lens, where fringe psychologies are tied to the movies we watch and the common images that rattle around in the cultural consciousness. Whereas Room 237 was an elaborate video essay, The Nightmare gives over much of its time to haunting recreations of the waking nightmares its subjects describe, repeatedly, in detail. These visions range from hokey to genuinely chilling, and so Ascher reflexively inspects this fine line. As with many horror movies, your mileage may vary. But, with that documentary framework in place, The Nightmare skirts a real-world plane of terror that other similar horror films — its namesake A Nightmare on Elm Street, the wonderfully nuts Christopher Walken movie Communion, and Insidious are namechecked — can only pantomime.
Most documentaries drill down on a topic to contextualize an event or a person or a corner of human existence, fleshing it out with exhaustive, investigatory detail. As a documentary, The Nightmare is hardly a complete picture; the context of the film is pure abstraction. Ascher makes no attempt to explain sleep paralysis on a scientific level. There’s no psychoanalysis of the wall-to-wall symbolism and just a very brief Ancient Aliens-style archival slideshow. He’s ambivalent about presenting counterpoints to the subjects’ extended scene-setting. Rather, he wants to pull audiences into this world and tease out the horror show. So The Nightmare does function as a horror movie — i.e. a space where viewers can test their threshold for discomfort and explore the repressed, heinous depths of the collective unconscious. In horror movies, our primal fears are literalized, distorted, exaggerated, stylized, and purged. This essential function is close to the surface in The Nightmare. The subjects, in an extreme recreation of the cinematic viewer, are captive, pinned in position to endure a horrific Ludovico-like fiction that plays out before their eyes.
The Nightmare has a twisted relationship with non-fiction. It also has a skewed take on narrative. Whereas documentaries typically attempt to follow a trail of clues with an emphasis on verisimilitude, The Nightmare faithfully recreates subjective imaginings and emotional impressions with a fair amount of creative license. The line between what is real and what is a figment of these people’s overclocked imaginations becomes hazy. For the individuals experiencing this, in the moment, it is very real, and their fear and helplessness and dread is undeniably felt. In the cold light of day, they acknowledge the unreality of what they experience, to varying degrees. Some straightforwardly describe this as simply a condition that they must endure. Some report psychosomatic after-effects, feeling physical pain after having actually woken up — most viscerally, one man explains how his hallucinations escalated to an episode where his genitals were viciously attacked by a very Elm Street-looking giant razor claw. Others find deeper significance in the experiences and cope by adopting various spiritual or religious beliefs to keep the unwanted, demonic visitors at bay. The Nightmare has no real beginning or end, and the sequences feature a lot of repetition. Figures reemerge night after night; they manifest in similar ways across all the subjects, in different configurations but similar setups. There’s no explanation given for why people experience these things, no throughline to a conclusive “cure.” At several points, the interviewees outright reject the scientific rationale, finding these notions inadequate to explain the intensity of their experiences.
At the beginning of The Nightmare, Ascher is still checked in at the Overlook Hotel. The cold open offers up a Shining moment before the movie descends into the first chapter. The movie oddly starts on a TV screen as one of the eight recounts a time when he was a child and he distinctly recalls the newscaster on the set speaking directly to him, saying, “Hey, Chris. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be OK. And one day, we’ll be back.” Why, in a movie about sleep paralysis, do we start off with a story that is not directly tied to the central conceit? This is an isolated incident, a random waking hallucination, but it’s slotted as an introduction. This is not the only rupture in the fabric of the film’s vision. Later on, there’s an odd did-you-hear-that moment when the interviewee — a man with very long fingers who sees alien-like visitors with very long fingers — glances over his shoulder and down the hallway, and Ascher lingers on his interest. What’s the purpose of something like this? A glimpse into the attuned, addled mind of this man, eroded by his experiences? Or just an opportune horror movie moment — a byproduct of Ascher’s choice to shoot the interviews in dimly lit, drab settings? The film veers again near the end when the same man concludes his story with a bizarre, clarifying encounter in the woods. He freely admits that, at the time, he was “living on the fringes of sanity,” then goes on to describe a scenario involving a blue-tinged entity, speaking telepathically through his girlfriend, relaying a message: “Don’t worry about the demons behind you.” It’s unclear where these strands fit within the larger project about a hyperspecific sleep disorder. Are they simply anecdotes that glimpse the nature of their overstimulated, war-torn minds? On their face, they are self-contained horror sketches inserted at the expense of documentary coherence. And that’s the point.
At heart, The Nightmare is a reflexive work, drawing attention to its own staging as a means of blurring the barrier between the unreality of dreams and the very real fear that permeates these people’s lives. The subjects are not your typical polished talking heads but rather everyday people, from different walks, who seem at least a little damaged by their long-term exposure — Ascher, too, claims to experience this disorder. There is a lingering sense that their perspectives have been, over time, altered, and their psyches rewired. Because, again, this is a documentary, Ascher is freed from the acute tales typical of the horror genre, where a person or a group of people endure a visceral, unnerving, perilous, psychotic ordeal. The stories told by the subjects in The Nightmare are not discrete episodes but protracted, intensifying traumas endured over long periods of time. This is not a film about demons hunting down and killing their victims; what’s at stake is the mental stability of this group of people. “If anything was going to drive me insane, it was going to be that,” one woman says, describing hearing “all the sounds of hell” while being visited by a vibrating, three-dimensional shadow man.
The horror movie techniques Ascher uses are key to how we’re meant to watch this. Jump scares are doled out — a spider dropping into frame, a skeletal face in the window, a phantasm screaming in someone’s ear. The blocking and staging reveals the figures moving into frame just as they would in a horror flick. The color scheme — with copious deep blue hues and reddish accents — and moody lighting links these separate recreations and “characters” and testimonials together. Ascher is obviously drawn to towering horror movie classics; like A Nightmare on Elm Street or The Shining, Ascher depicts a central nervous system of terror. It’s not just that the mind is a dense labyrinth in which we are all individually trapped; he seems fascinated by the larger, overarching, cacophonous hive of the collective unconscious. The logical conclusion is that these specters represent retrofitted ancient, primal anxieties — images and sensations dense with Freudian symbolism: the shadow figures, the hatted antagonist, the violation of a home invasion, the gnashing malevolence, the shame and humiliation inflicted, the panic and pain they elicit, the overwhelming feeling that these entities hate you and mean you harm. But here’s the kicker: Ascher suggests, obliquely, that people who experience sleep paralysis and these hallucinations are tapping into something. The suggestion that there is something else behind this maladaptive phenomenon is left tantalizingly open-ended. It’s this ambiguity that exposes the uneasy balance between documentary inquiry and horror movie fable.
By willfully ignoring the outside world, and fully submerging in the interconnected dream realms of its subjects, The Nightmare never demystifies sleep paralysis. If anything, it makes it more inscrutable and sinister. It keeps the campfire/sleepover/creepypasta texture of its subject intact. It’s subtler about its gambit than, say, Antrum, but Ascher seems intent on implying that this private hell could become your private hell. A running theme in the film is the suggestable nature of this affliction, that this disorder just might be communicable. The Nightmare lets that uncanny implication settle in, to the point where watching it feels like playing with fire.
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