Midnight Screenings 2015 / The Nightmare / USA 2015
The midnight hit of the Sundance festival combines elements of horror fiction and documentary to create an exceptionally powerful statement about sleep paralysis, a transitional state between wakefulness and slumber during which an individual temporarily loses muscle control. Would you dare enter an actual world of terrifying experiences for which there is still no satisfactory explanation?
Welcome to a world where chilling nightmares become reality. When you lie down to sleep at night, your body starts to relax but your mind remains aware and can merely watch as you lose all ability to control your motionless body in the darkened bedroom. Suddenly, the door opens and something intangible creeps toward the bed until the hairs on your neck stand on end. You feel a growing anxiety from the evil that slowly begins to take shape. Welcome to the world of sleep paralysis, a state between waking and sleeping that countless individuals experience every day. Even if they don’t know each other, many of these people have the same experience, the same terrifying spectral visits. This chillingly realistic film, one of this year’s Sundance sensations, works with the tools of the horror genre but at its core it remains a pure documentary about a phenomenon for which scientists have yet to find a satisfactory explanation.
Hubert Poul
91 min / Color, DCP
Director Rodney Ascher
/ Dir. of Photography Bridger Nielson
/ Music Jonathan Snipes
/ Editor Rodney Ascher, Saul Herckis
/ Art Director Ben Spiegelman
/ Producer Ross M. Dinerstein
/ Production Campfire
/ Coproduction Zipper Bros Films
/ Sales Kew Media Group
Rodney Ascher has shot countless short films and commercials for clients such as EA Games, Capitol Records and VH1, but he only achieved greater international acclaim in recent years. In his short documentary The S from Hell (2010), he explored the unsettling cryptic meaning of one particular corporate logo. His first feature-length documentary and best known film so far, Room 237 (2012), a creative interpretation of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, also screened at Karlovy Vary. He also contributed a short segment to the horror omnibus The ABCs of Death 2 (2014). His second feature-length film, The Nightmare (2015), reaffirms his position as an uncommonly original filmmaker.
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