Back Catalog Review: The Nightmare (2015)
Sleep paralysis is terrifying. Imagine waking up in bed, completely unable to move, even as you try desperately to will your muscles to respond. As you lie motionless, you feel a dark presence. It could be someone talking to you, tapping incessantly on your window, or maybe even dark figures with glowing eyes menacing your motor-less body from increasingly close distances. Regardless, these beings infect your psyche with absolute fear and dread. This is all real and, like I said before, terrifying. According to this film and its subjects, many of the people who experience this phenomenon believe that it cannot be explained away as simply a dream, but that it falls into a different category. They feel a connection to something outside of our reality, something evil. Now, if you reacted to those last few sentence with total acceptance and you believe in that connection between evil forces and the living, then The Nightmare may just be the scariest documentary you will ever see. For those more skeptical, it might fall a little short.
Rodney Ascher's films defy simple categorization. His debut feature Room 237, the conspiracy-packed film about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, technically classifies as a documentary. It certainly is documenting some fairly out-there theories, but it lacks the perspective you find in the best of the genre. When Ken Burns makes a documentary about baseball, he doesn't just interview current players, he interviews owners, managers, former and current players, sports journalists, sports analysts, etc. While making The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris, who pioneered the re-enactment technique Ascher employs here, did not just interview Randall Adams' defense team, but also the investigators, prosecutors, and other key figures in his case. In both Room 237 and The Nightmare, Ascher steadfastly avoids any alternate opinions. There are no scientists, sleep experts, or honestly any experts of any kind. I'm sure this is by design. Ascher wants all the attention to be on his subjects, and that might be fine if I weren't constantly questioning their reliability.
Really, the larger problem here is that Ascher seeks to make a real horror movie, or more accurately, a hybrid of horror movie and reality in which the former is meant to scare you deeper than the latter. However, in trying to present what is real in as scary a way as possible, Ascher draws attention to the inherent artifice of his trickery and in turn weakens the potential impact of the film. Jump scares can be really fun, but it's still a parlor trick. As is shooting each interview in a poorly lit room, or cutting in footage of the interviewee craning their neck to listen to a noise they heard outside. This stagecraft mixed with Ascher's unwillingness to venture outside the realm of speculation reads as him urging his viewers not to look at the man behind the curtain.
As well made as much of the film is, its salacious presentation doesn't allow it to feel much more than a History Channel pseudo-doc with higher production values. This would have been amazing as an episode of The X-Files. Imagining true-believer Mulder arguing for the existence of sleep-invading spirits or chest-sitting demons against Scully's eternal wet-towel skepticism is only too easy. Unfortunately, in a world where we acknowledge that those fantastical FBI adventures are nothing more than entertaining fiction, I'm too much of a Scully.
