The frightening netherworld of night terrors and sleep paralysis sounds utterly terrifying just in description alone; people trapped in awakened states of semi-consciousness, unable to move, but capable of witnessing some truly horrific hallucinations that seem all too real. Or are they real? Are these nightmarish horrors a manifestation of something supernatural? A chemical imbalance triggered by stress or one’s lifestyle? A sleep disorder based on the anxieties of the human subconscious? All of this is explored, but not much of it illuminated in any meaningful way in Rodney Ascher’s docudrama “The Nightmare.” Ascher’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed “Room 237” that gave wacko conspiracy theorists plenty of room to wax about their idiotic, totally-off-base hypotheses about Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” his latest doc takes a creepy and creative approach to the malady of sleep paralysis and its devastating aftereffects.
Studying eight different subjects, mostly from the...
