ABCs of Horror 3: "N" Is for The Nightmare (2015)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

It is likely that for most horror genre-related prompts you might give me, I would prefer to first stop and think, to mull the question over. Queries about topics such as slasher films or zombie movies could result in twisted, winding forays into further subgenres or time periods. It’s rare to land on a concrete answer to one of those questions immediately, with utter certainty. But if you asked me the following: “What’s the most frightened you’ve ever been while watching a documentary?” Then the answer would be crystal clear. It’s Rodney Ascher’s The Nightmare, and no other experience has ever really come close.

Not “disturbed” or “shocked,” mind you–we’re not talking about The Act of Killing here. No, I’m talking about scared. Have you ever watched a documentary and wanted to turn it off halfway through, because you were becoming more and more unnerved by the possibility that the subject matter here might become suddenly and unintentionally relevant in your own life? That’s the experience of watching The Nightmare, a film whose title describes not just the sleep cycles, but the waking lives of its unfortunate subjects. Simultaneously pitiable and terrifying, it’s a very difficult film to dismiss.

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Rodney Ascher is a documentarian specialist, a filmmaker with a dual interest in classical horror and the real-world obsessive potential of the human mind. Ever since his 2010 short film The S From Hell, which revolved around people who said they’d been traumatized as children by the logo of the film studio Screen Gems of all things, Ascher has explored obscure niches in search of the stories of people with strange or unusual points of view. In 2012’s Room 237, he assembles a hodgepodge of conspiracy theorists who all believe deeply strange, conflicting things about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, ranging from it being a message film about the cultural assimilation of native Americans, to a secret admission that Kubrick faked the Moon landings. In 2021’s A Glitch in the Matrix he does similarly, seeking out those who believe some small (or large) part in simulation theory, the idea that all of our reality could be an elaborate simulation created by a more advanced intelligence. But in The Nightmare, Ascher’s subjects aren’t simply obsessives who have fallen hopelessly down the rabbit hole of a particular topic; they’re people who are haunted by something totally beyond their control. That something is the phenomenon known as sleep paralysis.

When these people fall asleep, they never really know if they’re about to be in for another traumatic experience–unable to move, shadowy figures closing in on them, menacing them … or worse. They tell their stories in talking head interviews, accompanied by reenactments meant to at least evoke some sense of what they’re claiming to have experienced. But it’s not the reenactments themselves that are frightening, as they’re the type of stuff typical of horror shorts or arty student film projects, all black silhouettes, voids creeping in from the edges, punctuated by the occasional jump scare. What’s legitimately scary is seeing the very real pain and fear in the eyes of those who are sharing the stories of their unpredictable nighttime experiences. You can see the worry and the fatigue etched in their faces after years of being unable to enjoy one of our most basic human respites, or even their fatalistic certainty that what they’re talking about having happened before will inevitably happen again. Many of the people in The Nightmare want help, but they have no idea of where to turn. We get the sense that their efforts have all been in vain, that perhaps no one in our world is properly equipped to help them in the first place.

Seeing these people face to face, something that never happens in Room 237, gives the subjects here significantly more pathos–we are invited to sympathize with what they’ve endured, and you never doubt the veracity of what they at least believe they’ve experienced. We feel for them, but Ascher still holds them at arm’s length. We don’t get much detail on what kind of treatment they’ve sought, only that it was unsatisfactory in their minds. There are no interviews with doctors or researchers, no sleep studies or brain waves. We don’t really know how many victims potentially suffer from mental illness or brain conditions, but you may have your suspicions. Perhaps it even comforts us to have those suspicions, because the implication of the alternative–that this could happen to anyone, on any night–is a significantly more disturbing reality. We want the assurance of knowing why these things happen, to be able to say with more certainty that they won’t happen to us.

Instead of scientific rigor, though, Ascher employs his signature detachment and neutrality. He offers up no critique at all of whether what his subjects are saying might be more likely to be true or false, and the clear reason why is that the objective truth of their statements has never been the driving reason for his filmmaking. He’s really not interested in that. Ascher’s documentaries are about allowing their subjects to unload their baggage and intensity, to give some small clue of how their unusual minds work. He trusts the audience to absorb and process the conspiratorial thinking and desperate rationalizations of Room 237 or the paranoia of A Glitch in the Matrix, and trusts viewers to likewise realize that his films aren’t genuinely about their purported topics: They’re exclusively about his fascination with other people who are experiencing states such as obsession, delusion or alienation. I would argue, in fact, that Ascher has tended to trust his audience entirely too much to come to these realizations on their own, and I say that having read far too many takes on a film like Room 237 that honestly believed the director’s primary intent was a genuine exploration (or even endorsement) of evidence for conspiracy theories related to The Shining. They miss that the director’s priority is instead an examination of how very different, potentially addled perspectives all interact with the same piece of media but draw dramatically different conclusions from it. He’s fascinated by how our brains confabulate.

Or who knows–maybe I’m reading too much into the guy’s work, exactly like those poor souls who are going frame-by-frame through Kubrick’s masterpiece, trying to figure out why they can’t look away. All I know is that treatment of The Nightmare’s subjects is compassionate but a little on the cold side–even though Ascher at one point lets us in on the reveal that he has also personally experienced sleep paralysis, he’s still not trying to make believers out of his viewers. He just feels fascination and horror at the way they’ve gone through their lives, a sense of creeping dread that is passed through the screen to the audience.

It almost does feel somehow infectious, never more so than when one of the victims interviewed says the following: The first time he experienced sleep paralysis was on the day he was first told about the phenomenon. That is not what an audience wants to hear, a few hours before crawling into the supposed safety of their comfy beds. I could happily have gone my whole life without hearing that. Ascher’s documentaries each provide an illustration, in their own way, of how the power of suggestion can rewrite our reality unpredictably, at any time, but never with more terrifying immediacy than in The Nightmare. And now, having written this piece, here’s hoping that I wake up tomorrow.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.

ABCs of Horror 3: “N” Is for The Nightmare (2015)