Review – ‘The Nightmare’ (2015)
- Tom Powers
- Apr 14, 2020
- 3 min read
As a horror fan, sleep paralysis is one of those phenomena’s that I wished, at least once, had experienced. In my 22 years of living, I have never had any sort of paranormal experience, nothing to share with my friends around the campfire late at night. This documentary made me feel stupid for ever wishing that upon myself.
The action of sleep paralysis is horrifying. According to the documentary, you fall asleep and get a slight electrical feeling, which is almost the signal that warns you what is coming next. Your eyes are open and you feel awake, which is when you begin to realise that you’re not alone. A “shadow-man” creeps his way into your room and either stares at you, or does some ungodly thing involving inducing pain, getting up close to your face, or much worse.
The Nightmare – Henry Fuseli
One thing that I noticed, in the first 30 minutes of the documentary was that I found myself genuinely creeped out! That never happens, the last film to creep me out was As Above So Below, so I was impressed.
The film concerns 8 people, and their stories about sleep paralysis and how it affected their lives, with reconstructions.
THE BEST BITS
Like I said above, this film was good at producing the scares. It knows just what images to use to scare you at a primal level. What makes sleep paralysis so terrifying, at its core, is the natural human fear of the unknown. Seeing a black silhouette creep into your bedroom at night and just stand and stare, while you can do nothing, is most likely the scariest thing any one of us can imagine. The almost amateur nature of the CGI, especially in one sequence involving grimacing alien beings, steers very close to the uncanny valley (when something appears human, but we know it is not.) The filmmakers tactically use this valley to scare its audience.
One of the most interesting things about this documentary is the way the filmmakers construct the story and allow the audience to see the sets involving the different stories. At one point, a shadow man from one guys story backs out of the room and goes into a different room with a different woman’s story, which I thought was an interesting way of showing it, maybe suggesting that the demon is the same for everyone, and simply hops around between these different experiences.
THE NOT SO BEST BITS
The point I made above is both a positive and a negative. It’s an interesting way of doing things, although I can’t find a motivation behind it. Style is cool, but without a reason or any substance, it usually falls flat. I can’t think of any reasoning behind the behind-the-scenes style scenes other than making it look edgy. Kind of like the filmmakers saying, “ooo look at us, we’re naughty, we’re showing how it’s done, ooo I am naughty.”
Probably the biggest let down for me is the believability of some stories. I’m not saying that sleep paralysis isn’t real, because enough people have it and tell their stories. Although I can’t help but feel that some of the interviewees knew they were in a cool documentary and so maybe embellished some points. For dramatic effect, I have no problem with this, but when it gets so unbelievable about ¾ of the way through the film, it invalidates all of the good stuff that happened before. Once the one guy explains how he was walking through the forest with his hippy girlfriend who liked to make stone circles and hug trees, and suddenly a blue figure turns up and starts to talk to them, and then the dark shadow-man shows up behind them and it’s all very Hollywood. I just couldn’t believe that, unless they were on very strong mushrooms. The stories that worked the best were the simple ones, because they were believable.
All in all, a solid watch, but be prepared for some outlandish stuff later on.
Comments