The Nightmare (2015)

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

this is a documentary about sleep paralysis, not an educational film on the medical science and history of the phenomenon, but a series of narratives by people who have experienced it firsthand and their interpretations of their experiences the documentary is intended to scare, with an accompaniment to the interviews and short re-enactments of primarily minimalist, suspenseful synth and droning/pulsating percussive noise by composer Jonathan Snipes. the interviewees are all fairly articulate, the film is well-edited and the monster/(dream) entity designs and costumes for the re-enactments are artfully haunting the film is very effective at what it sets out to do, namely exploring a phenomena people throughout the world, including the director, have experienced and its effects on their beliefs and personalities it inspires a large enough fraction of the fear and contemplation in the viewer that the phenomena itself must inspire in those who experience it firsthand to make it well worth watching and recommending

Gosh, I wish this movie wasn't so technically flawed! You know what, I'll get to that in a minute. This flick is pretty cool, it is a documentary about people with Sleep Paralysis, a condition that causes you to feel petrified in the moments between wake and sleep and is accompanied by horrifying visions. This is the fuel for nightmares, so the title is pretty well suited to the film. The reenactments are pretty good, there are a couple of lame jump scares, you see them coming, but they still make you jump – not scary, but still gets the blood moving. Where The Nightmare shines, though, is in the reenactments with the shadow figures; they're creepy, they're moving around your house at night, they're watching you sleep, and they might be trying to steal your soul.Sadly, though the visuals in the reenactments can be pretty good, there are some massive editing issues for me. The film has a self reflexive participatory mode (using that documentary film class right there) and while mode works fine for the film, I think it steals a little thunder from the reenactments, which is really just too bad.More than the mode of the film causing it to be a little rough is the massive number of jump-cuts. I think that the director has watched too many YouTube videos and thinks that jump-cuts are normal and okay. Sadly, he's wrong, and his film suffers because of it. The jump-cuts are distracting for two reasons: 1. Visually they are just distracting, they look weird, and you notice them which draws you out of the story; and 2. you start wondering exactly what was cut out. Once you start wondering about this, you have a whole new level of distraction, and you start to wonder if the stories these people are telling just aren't as good as you're being led to believe.All in all, The Nightmare is pretty good, and I think people should watch it. Not only is the film informative, but wonderfully entertaining and a little scary. So, turn out the lights, look up The Nightmare on Netflix, and get your educational-horror on!

There's nothing informative or scientific in this so called "documentary". To sum up, there are demons out there trying to suck the soul out of you and the only way out is to turn to Jesus. Oh, yeah and it appears to be transmitting as an STD, pretty contagious, so beware! It's fake, scripted and they could have at least try and find more believable actors.Nothing more than Christian propaganda trying to attract more followers through spreading fear and disinformation due to it's declining influence in the recent years. If you are looking for reasonable explanations and real stories, do not waste your time.This is just laughable.Not to mention how insulting it is to medical profession and science in general.I wish i could have rated it with - 10.

A deeply unsettling exercise in empathy above all else - 'what does it feel like to suffer from sleep paralysis?' 'The Nightmare' uses the expressive possibilities and artifice of the medium to confront the viewer with a powerful insight into this terrifying phenomenon - otherwise closed off and utterly private. One of the participants mentions 'All the darkness looks alive' - a striking statement that somehow hits on the mood and ethos of the film. It captures something of the extra-temporal/spatial/personal weirdness of the experience, to which the film makers do an admirable job in bringing to 'life.' One can't help noticing that a lot of these reviews criticise the lack of a scientific perspective on top of the obviously dramatised nature of the interviews - in my opinion, kinda missing the point of the film. 'The Nightmare' doesn't try and be THAT kind of documentary; in part, it doesn't really ask us to understand, but to experience and feel, to get a flavour of sleep paralysis, expressible through the shadows and suggestion of fiction. You might also say that it acknowledges the kind of dream- logic that a lot of people tend to associate with cinema per se (traceable to the 'ghosts' and 'phantasms' of the earliest magic lantern shows) the perfect medium for such a subject. Anyway, this is very interesting and very scary stuff - just don't go expecting a PBS documentary!