Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Cheesenode 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!

SnoopyStyle Director Rodney Ascher created this film about eight people who suffer from sleep paralysis. It recreates their nightmares and examines their difficulties with a healthy dose of nightmarish movie clips. This movie is stuck in between. It's not strictly a documentary. The characters are played by regular-looking actors. With the recreations, this tries to look like a documentary but is never convincing as such. On the other end, this movie has no plot. It has no narrative. It has no thrills. It's just a series of recreations. I would rather have a straight-forward documentary or a found-footage horror. This is somewhere in the middle where nothing really works.

trashgang Okay, I have watched it and again I can't understand why this is so high rated here on IMDb. nothing against mockumentaries or documentaries going wrong but this here was a real nightmare to watch.The only thing I saw was people telling of seeing dark shadows, yawn, in their sleep. They've given some kind of, yawn, electric shock and it opens a world that not everybody sees. Gotta stretch myself before I fall asleep.And we move over more then 90 minutes from one, yaaaaaaawn, person to another all telling the same story. Can someone tell me what is the point of this ultra boring flick? The only thing I was afraid of was the fact that I should fall asleep while watching and would go into some kind of nightmare. Astral projection and stuff like that, no probs with it but being told like they are showing it here, sorry. A bit too much, yaaaaaaaaaawn Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 0/5 Story 0/5 Comedy 0/5

jamesbbaxter 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!