I can't move. I can't breathe. A sense of dread and panic washes over me as I realize, There’s someone here. It's pitch black in the middle of the night, and I'm getting yanked out of bed; something or someone is pulling my legs. I try to fight it, but I can't, nor am I able to come to full consciousness. I want to scream but no sound comes out of my mouth. This is it. I'm going to die tonight.
That's one of the more terrifying experiences I’ve had during my sleep. I never had night terrors as a young child, but as I hit my pre-teens, I started to experience what's called sleep paralysis—the in-between stage of being asleep and awake, when you're aware of your surroundings but feel completely paralyzed. For some, it's fleeting moments of discomfort; for others, it's like a nightly visit from the Babadook.
Stories of the latter are the ones chronicled in The Nightmare, a new horror documentary from director Rodney Ascher, previously known for Room 237 (a documentary that analyzes—or rather, over-analyzes—Stanley Kubrick's The Shining). In The Nightmare, Ascher brings horror to level 11, with reenactments that are as scary as, if not more than, horror feature films. His eight talking head subjects tell stories of their recurring nightmarish experiences with this 'sleep disorder'—from lurking shadow men haunting their bedrooms, to alien abductions, to one guy even experiencing the pain of his dick being chopped up by a claw machine. (That last one being undoubtedly the most startling of all the reenactments.)
For those who have never experienced this phenomenon, the documentary may seem like a bunch of loonies making up wild tales. For those who have, it feels all too real.
After a screening of The Nightmare on Friday night, Ascher held a Q&A and asked audience members to raise their hands if they had ever experienced anything of the sort. About 30-percent of the room had. I raised my hand, too, which made an older couple sitting next to me look over and audibly gasp. I have never seen actual human-like figures or aliens hovering over my bed—like some of these subjects have claimed—but I have often felt a malevolent presence in my room, and have sometimes even heard indistinguishable whispering in my ear. It almost sounds like a white noise machine, but it's sinister. I've spent many a night silently praying that my episodes of sleep paralysis would be over soon. I get shivers down my spine just thinking about it again.
One particularly bad night many years ago, I actually managed to let my scream out. I screamed such bloody murder, it made my parents rush into my room in the middle of the night. I was convinced there were creatures tickling me—a story eerily similar to one of the documentary's subjects, who stated that aliens would often tickle him in bed. The most frequent experience I have is the feeling of something sitting on my chest, pushing me down if I try to get up. Sometimes, my eyes would be open—or so I believe—and other times, I can't even manage to open them. "If I could explain what death feels like..." says one subject in the film. That's how I imagine dying in your sleep feels, too.
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In true Ascher style, The Nightmare blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction. He uses eight "unreliable" narrators. There's not even one talking head of a professional medical opinion that explains the science behind the phenomenon. It's something you'd have to Google yourself. Live Science explains, "Sleep paralysis occurs when the brain and body aren't quite on the same page when it comes to sleep. During rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, dreaming is frequent, but the body's muscles are relaxed to the point of paralysis, perhaps to keep people from acting out their dreams. Researchers have found that two brain chemicals, glycine and GABA, are responsible for this muscle paralysis." These days, sleep paralysis comes pretty infrequently, and it rarely feels 'evil.' I usually just lay there, uncomfortable, but not frightened, waiting for it to pass. It's now an experience that easily fits the aforementioned scientific explanation.
In The Nightmare, however, sleep paralysis is something more supernatural, or demonic—a version more in line with the stories that have been around for centuries. Many people believed it was a visit from an incubus, or some sort of alien abduction. One of its earliest documentation can be found in Henry Fuseli's 1781 painting, The Nightmare (below).
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Without the logical explanation in the movie, it's an entertaining (and terrifying) method of story-telling that really stretches the boundaries of a documentary. As a frequent horror movie watcher, it takes a lot for me to be actually terrified. In many ways, The Nightmare often borders on cheesy (I laughed a lot too), but it was one of the few movies that I brought back home with me and couldn't stop thinking about all night. Crawling into bed that night, I was actually spooked. Ascher mentioned in his Q&A that he got sleep paralysis while making this film. So far, I haven't had any visits from the shadow men after this movie. But you've been warned: The Nightmare may give you actual nightmares.
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