The Nightmare
Director: Rodney Ascher
Music: Jonathan Snipes
Cinematography: Bridger Nielson
Gravitas Ventures
Not Rated | 91 Minutes
Release Date: June 5, 2015

Directed by Rodney Ascher (Room 237), The Nightmare is a documentary-horror film that explores the phenomenon of sleep paralysis through the eyes of eight different people.

Sleep paralysis is a transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. Those afflicted by sleep paralysis are seemingly trapped between the sleeping and waking worlds, unable to move but aware of their surroundings. Paralysis is often accompanied by disturbing hallucinations to which one is unable to react to.

Room 237
Blu-ray
Directed by Rodney Ascher
Starring Bill Blakemoor, Geoffrey Cocks, and Juli Kearns
IFC Midnight/MPI Home Video
Release Date: September 24, 2013

Even though I tend not to believe most fan theories regarding hidden details and messages in certain classic films I have to appreciate the imagination and insight that goes into their creation. It’s amazing when your love of a movie inspires you to look at it again with a modestly skewed perspective to see what you may have missed before, and then to try and interpret what it all means. I may not buy into the theory that Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon functions as an alternate soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz, but for every five people who are told that same theory for the first time at least one of them will sneak away from the others to their nearest Barnes & Noble to grab the Moon CD and Oz DVD so they can test it out for themselves.

Room 237
Netflix | Amazon | Google Play | iTunes | SEN | Xbox | YouTube
DVD | Blu-ray
Directed by Rodney Ascher
Starring Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King, Jack Nicholson, Shelly Duvall
IFC Films
Originally Released: January 23, 2012

If you haven’t checked it out yet, my fellow G.O.D. standing for the horror fans, FamousMonster, put together an awesome 31 Days of Horror list to get you all ready for Halloween this year. While running through his list, I came across one film that grabbed my consideration immediately, for I had not seen it before: Room 237.

That’s because it’s a documentary, and not a horror flick. Not that I do not watch documentaries (I like a doco thing), but I’d just never seen it before. Room 237‘s mission is simple – get in touch with as many Stanley Kubrick enthusiasts as possible and ask them to deliver their differed and in-depth interpretations of the filmmaker’s adaptation of Stephen King‘s The Shining.