I suffered from an episode of sleep paralysis a couple years ago and it was nothing to write home about. It was odd being semi-conscious and understanding my body couldn't move because it was actually asleep, but I had eaten a pot edible the day before so I always thought it was the reason. The incident always lingered in the back of my mind, though and I was glad to learn someone made a documentary on the issue. Except The Nightmare isn't really a documentary. It's scary as hell, but it could very bell be scripted for all I know.
So, The Nightmare is a series of interviews made with people suffering from sleep paralysis. That's it, really. All these people are suffering from elaborate and vaguely similar hallucinations during their episodes and they each share their own fucking bone chilling story one after the other. Don't get me wrong, these stories will scare the everloving shit out of you. The one about the phone call in the middle of the night particularly freaked me out. But that's all these is to it. The Nightmare is like an enhanced version of a creepy Reddit conversation.
There is very little documentary value to The Nightmare and knowing it is from the same director than Room 237, I wonder if it's not by design. I might've entirely missed the point of The Nightmare, but that point wasn't to earnestly discuss the reality of people suffering from sleep paralysis because there is very little documentary value to it. There is not a single interview with a doctor about the phenomenon. The closest there is to it is the story of a visit to the doctor that ended up with abnormal EEG readings, but the subject never followed up on it because he didn't see what science could do for him.
So, The Nightmare is a series of interviews made with people suffering from sleep paralysis. That's it, really. All these people are suffering from elaborate and vaguely similar hallucinations during their episodes and they each share their own fucking bone chilling story one after the other. Don't get me wrong, these stories will scare the everloving shit out of you. The one about the phone call in the middle of the night particularly freaked me out. But that's all these is to it. The Nightmare is like an enhanced version of a creepy Reddit conversation.
There is very little documentary value to The Nightmare and knowing it is from the same director than Room 237, I wonder if it's not by design. I might've entirely missed the point of The Nightmare, but that point wasn't to earnestly discuss the reality of people suffering from sleep paralysis because there is very little documentary value to it. There is not a single interview with a doctor about the phenomenon. The closest there is to it is the story of a visit to the doctor that ended up with abnormal EEG readings, but the subject never followed up on it because he didn't see what science could do for him.
So, these are the guys who allegedly visit everybody suffering from sleep paralysis.
There are only two ways this thing can go, right? Either the shadow people exist and are causing sleep paralysis for an ulterior motive nobody can explain right now *, or there is a brain condition causing these hallucinations. They are so similar to one another, it could be neurological. But no, The Nightmare gives the middle finger to any pragmatic query I have about the subject because sleep paralysis is apparently not the point here. Knowing Rodney Ascher's rap sheet I might be missing the point entirely, but The Nightmare does seem more interested in freaking people out than anything else. At least it does something well, right?
The Nightmare was a rather frustrating viewing experience. It is deliberately chronicling an emotional truth in other to elicit a powerful response from its audience rather than trying to understand the strange disorder that it sleep paralysis. I'm a big picture kind of guy, so it drove me nuts that The Nightmare wasn't willing to alter the purity of its direct testimonies in order to keep the movie as frightening as possible, so I intellectually threw in the towel about two thirds in and started doing other things during the last part of the movie. I might've entirely missed the point, but it just felt like watching an X-Files episode gone rogue.
* And I'm 100% ready to admit this is a possibility. It's 50/50 really, given what the documentary tells us.