Never sleep again
THE NIGHTMARE The director of Room 237 reveals the secrets of his terrifying new documentary...
After dissecting The Shining in his outrageously funny debut doc Room 237, director Rodney Ascher returns with The Nightmare, taking a peek through his fingers at a terrifying and mysterious condition called sleep paralysis, in which people on the brink of sleep become paralysed and experience a waking nightmare. “I slept like a baby while making it!” Ascher laughs... You’ve experienced sleep paralysis. How did your interviewees’ experience compare? The woman who talked about a shadow man walking through the door and leaning over her bed, that’s what my experience most looked like. It was the scariest thing that ever happened to me. I was sure for years that it was a supernatural encounter. It happened three times, but that was the one that was the full-court panic. The great supernatural encounter of my life! Did you set out to make something scary? The experience is scary, so part of the challenge was to not just make this movie about paralysis, but maybe try to make it evocative of a sleep paralysis experience. And horror movies are kind of... their evolution is really influenced by these kinds of experiences. There’s an interesting two-way relationship between nightmares and horror. They’re tied together. I didn’t want this to be a sober reassuring piece of journalism; I wanted it to be emotionally, possibly physically, involving. Which horror films influenced you? I came of age in the ’80s, so I’m a fan of Re-Animator, The Lair Of The White Worm and the Romero Living Dead films. Even Night Of The Hunter is a really effective horror movie and a beautiful dream-like fairytale. There’s one horror movie in particular I was thinking of in relation to this movie, which was an early ’80s Italian film called Demons 2, where the last act takes place in a haunted TV studio. And A Nightmare On Elm Street is incredibly important when thinking about the relationship between dreams and horror movies. Did you ever feel sorry for the people you were talking to? Sure, we were prodding them for details about something very disturbing that had happened to them. I was afraid I was being a little ghoulish, but ultimately, there’s something very reassuring about discovering you’re not the only person who’s experienced this. My fear of being ghoulish was somewhat mitigated by the fact that it’s reassuring to be able to talk about this kind of thing with somebody else who’s gone through it. Not that this film is going to ever be described as therapeutic! Though, I’ve got a lot of problems in my life, but for whatever reason, sleeping isn’t one of them! JW ETA | 9 Octo ber The Nightmare opens in cinemas next month.
‘I was afraid I was being a little ghoulish’