I was a fan of Room 237 so when I heard that the man who directed Room 237, Rodney Ascher, directed The Nightmare, I was in. Plus The Nightmare was scary real life stories, which exponentially increased my attraction to the film. The previews were excellent
The Nightmare is a documentary about eight people explaining their lifetime of experience with sleep paralysis. The Nightmare makes the point that the experiences share many common universal features regardless of the sufferer’s gender, nationality, religion, etc. The Nightmare waits until the middle of the film to discuss the historical and scientific explanation for sleep paralysis and spends the majority of the documentary illustrating the paralyzed person’s nightmare with some clever breaking of fourth wall as scary figures walk from one person’s set to the other’s. The Nightmare does infer something ground breaking: that a lot of people’s experience with alien abduction or poltergeists/demons may be explained by sleep paralysis.
What I initially found provocative got boring and repetitive long before the documentary ended. The Nightmare retained its terrifying tone, but failed to retain my interest. I was chilled by the suggestion that sleep paralysis was highly contagious, but thankfully I have been unaffected by my exposure to the subject matter. The Nightmare is a must see for people who suffer from the condition or are intrigued by dreaming otherwise skip it.