Mainly I was intrigued by this film because dreams and sleep have always fascinated me, particularly sleep paralysis. I found it to be such a strange and frightening phenomenon, and wanted to learn more about it. As a documentary, this film fails. No science behind anything to do with sleep paralysis is explained, the entire film is individuals recounting their experiences. Most of the film is reenactments during interviews with these people, and the reenactments are really the point of the movie. And many of these reenactments are pretty good, even though the budget was as low as $28,000. With what they had to work with, they put great effort into it and it turned out well. It definitely has passion behind it, and I think that its director (Rodney Ascher) has potential as a good filmmaker. But back to the reattachment scenes, I really think the purpose of the movie was to give viewers a taste of the experience of sleep paralysis. There are copious amounts of pov shots in beds while shadowy figures approach, usually these shots are then switched to the person having the experience, and then switched back. This is played over haunting music and the person being interviewed. Its similar to some of those bad ghost shows on the discovery channel in the way its formatted, though the stories recounted here I am sure are real, sleep paralysis is a real thing, ghosts I'm unsure of. I suppose that's what works about this movie, is it instills the fear of experiencing sleep paralysis in its viewers. Also some of the ways it maneuvered around the low budget was charming. But is it an informative documentary? Not at all. As a decent horror film, however, it succeeds.

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!

Sleep paralysis is not fun for those suffering from it. So was it time to do a documentary about it, to raise awareness for it? Maybe - or maybe not, especially considering that there is no real solution at hand. But maybe just the fact that the people who suffer had a chance to talk about this publicly helped them or their families a little bit (though don't get it twisted, cure is not in sight).This is no documentary as you come to know them. There is a lot of things that are being visualized, for the viewers benefit. So they can "feel" what the interviewees are going through. That kind of works, but also may set a horror frame, that some people were not expecting to get. So while this is not declared a horror movie, it may be seen as such by some. Be aware of that ... also this references a couple of movies, some handling sleep paralysis (even in small dialog like in the Original Nightmare on Elm Street). Still while all is sort of interesting to a point, I'm not sure there is enough to hold your attention for the whole running time ...

I've had sleep paralysis (SP) for ages, since I was a boy. It is a recurrent thing for me. Yes, SP can be a terrifying experience. It can create a very vivid and a extremely intense feeling of dread and horror.But once one learns that SP is a sleep disorder, it is only one's brain playing tricks and that it is a benign experience (no one dies of it) and that it is not supernatural and there are no devils, evil spirits involved, it gets much easier to deal with it. But in this pseudo-documentary, the producers, writers decided to use a mystical, religious bias to describe and interpret SP. There is very little science, no actual effort is made to explain SP in scientific terms.This documentary is for the folks who do not believe in evolution and still think that Earth is flat, and that SP is related to alien abductions, spiritual events or all this new age mumbo-jumbo. The Wikipedia page about Sleep Paralysis is much, much better and more enlightening than this pseudo-documentary made, it seems, in the dark ages.