Review of The Nightmare (2015) by Matt G — 07 Nov 2015

The Nightmare is a hybrid horror movie/ Documentary about sleep paralysis. In the movie there are stories told of people who claim to be paralyzed while waking up from dreams and seeing shadowy figures enter their rooms and threaten or torment them. The movie then reenacts the stories and plays them in a horror movie style.

Things I Liked:

The Tone. This movie is scary. I was actually creeped out and jumped a couple of times. It didn't linger in my mind for a long time afterward, but it did it's job while I was watching it. I found the movie to be both eerie and hard to watch but also something that I couldn't take my eyes off of. It did it's job as both an informative documentary and as a scary horror movie.

The Imagery. The movie was really cool to look at. The style they portrayed the different shadowy figures in was really interesting and the colorization helped the look of the movie a lot. The thing was very visually interesting throughout and the reenactments were accentuated greatly by the visual portrayal.

Things I Didn't Like:

The Confessors. A lot of the people they interviewed were not charismatic. What I mean by that is they were not people we seemed to care bout a great deal. They were much less interesting than the reenactments of their plights and I felt like the movie was weaker when some of them were being interviewed for a long period of time without a portrayal or reenactment.

Overall:

Overall, the Nightmare is an effective horror movie and an interesting documentary. The visual reenactments intensify the horrific description and really make the movie scary. It works on multiple levels and if not for the fact that it portrays its interviewees as slightly crazy and paranoid people it would be wholly successful.