Sleeping is SCARY!
Sleeping can be scary. It really can. We think of sleep as the safest part of the day: you climb into bed, turn out the lights, close your eyes and basically surrender control of your body and your brain for six, seven or eight hours. At least that's what you're supposed to do.
And that's exactly what makes it such fertile ground for horror. You are unconscious, vulnerable, unable to see what's happening around you, unable to control what your mind is showing you and, depending on the sleep disorder, sometimes unable to control what your own body is doing.
So with the release of the new Shudder movie Parasomnia, I thought this would be a good excuse to look back at some of the scariest movies ever made about sleep, nightmares, insomnia, sleepwalking, sleep paralysis, dreams, hallucinations, altered consciousness and all of the weird metaphysical stuff that happens when we close our eyes and our brains decide to start making movies of their own.
Sometimes sleeping is scary as hell.
I've always been fascinated by this stuff for some very personal reasons because I've had weird sleep patterns basically my entire life. For decades, I worked hours that most normal people would consider completely insane.
I worked the overnight shift at Jewel from 11:00 at night until 7:00 in the morning, and later, of course, I hosted an overnight radio show at WGN for many years. So between grocery stores, radio and everything else I've done, I spent more than 40 years working nights, late nights and third shifts.
When everyone else was sleeping, I was working, and when everyone else was waking up, I was usually going to bed.
That kind of schedule does something to your internal clock, and even though I don't work regular overnight hours anymore, my sleep has never really become normal. I'm a very light sleeper. A noise outside can wake me up. Somebody moving around somewhere nearby can wake me up. Something strange in the apartment can wake me up.
I rarely sleep for seven or eight uninterrupted hours and I'm much more likely to sleep for a few hours, wake up, and then eventually fall asleep again.
I've also been prone to nightmares since I was a kid. I've talked about this before on the podcast and written about it on the website, but I have a real home-invasion phobia. When I was about five years old, someone attempted to break into the apartment where my family was living and I actually saw it happening.
That stayed with me, and to this day I have recurring dreams about somebody trying to get into my apartment or house. Doors won't lock, windows won't close, somebody is standing outside or, worse, somebody is already inside. They're the kinds of dreams where you wake up and for a few seconds you don't know whether you're actually awake yet.
Alcohol affected my sleep for many years as well. Passing out because you've been drinking is not the same thing as actually sleeping, and your body isn't getting normal, healthy rest. I spent a lot of years confusing unconsciousness with sleep.
So sleep has always been slightly complicated for me, which is probably one of the reasons movies about sleep, insomnia and nightmares have always gotten under my skin.
Sleep disorders themselves are fascinating. There are entire categories of them: insomnia, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, hypersomnia, restless legs syndrome, circadian rhythm disorders, sleepwalking, night terrors, REM sleep behavior disorder and sleep paralysis. Frankly, every one of those sounds like the title of a horror movie.
Sleep paralysis might be the most inherently terrifying because your mind wakes up and your body doesn't. You're conscious, but you can't move, and some people experience hallucinations while it's happening.
They see figures standing in the room, shadow people, shapes, faces or something sitting on their chest. Imagine being awake enough to see something standing next to your bed but physically unable to move. You barely have to fictionalize that.
The 2015 documentary The Nightmare understands this perfectly. It's ostensibly a documentary about people who experience sleep paralysis, but it plays like a horror movie because the real stories are already horrifying.
People from completely different places and backgrounds describe remarkably similar experiences involving shadowy figures, strange presences and things watching them. That documentary scared the hell out of me.
Filmmakers have been fascinated by sleep almost since the beginning of cinema. One of the earliest and greatest examples is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1920. That German Expressionist masterpiece revolves around a hypnotist controlling a somnambulist (a sleepwalker) who commits murders.
The visual design of the movie itself looks like a nightmare, with twisted buildings, crooked streets, impossible shadows and distorted rooms. More than a hundred years later, it still feels unsettling.
Then you move into the 1950s and get something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which uses sleep in a completely different way. You fall asleep and they get you. The alien pods replace you while you're unconscious. Your body is still there, your memories are still there, you look exactly the same, but you're gone.
That's an incredibly effective horror idea because again it exploits that vulnerability. You can run from the pod people all day long, but eventually you're going to get tired. Eventually you have to sleep.
All four versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers are interesting in different ways, but Philip Kaufman's 1978 version is my favorite. It's one of the great paranoid horror movies ever made, and the whole idea that sleep itself becomes dangerous is central to why it works.
Then, of course, Wes Craven came along in 1984 and basically created the definitive sleep-horror movie with A Nightmare on Elm Street. What Craven did with that movie was so simple and so brilliant.
Most horror movies give you some method of escape. You can leave the haunted house, run away from the killer, lock the door, get in your car or call the police. Freddy Krueger waits for you to fall asleep, and everybody eventually has to sleep.
Craven turned the bedroom, the place where you're supposed to feel safest, into the most dangerous place imaginable. Freddy doesn't simply attack you while you're sleeping. He enters your dreams, which means he controls the world around you, and dreams have no rules. That's one of the things that makes dream movies so much fun for filmmakers.
Once you've established that a sequence is happening inside somebody's subconscious, you can do whatever the hell you want. Gravity doesn't matter. Time doesn't matter.
Geography doesn't matter. People can turn into other people. Rooms can change shape. A hallway can become a tunnel. A staircase can go nowhere. You can wake up from a nightmare and then discover you're still dreaming. That nightmare-within-a-nightmare trick has been used forever, and when it's done well, I absolutely love it.
An American Werewolf in London has a couple of the greatest examples ever. David wakes up from one terrifying nightmare, everything seems normal, and then suddenly you're still inside another nightmare. John Landis plays with that beautifully.
Jacob's Ladder is another great example, with Tim Robbins playing a Vietnam veteran who can't determine whether the horrifying things he's seeing are memories, hallucinations, dreams or reality. The entire movie feels like somebody slipping in and out of consciousness.
Then there's Trainspotting, which isn't technically a horror movie at all. It's a dark comedy-drama about addiction, but during the withdrawal sequences Danny Boyle creates some absolutely horrific nightmare imagery. That baby crawling across the ceiling is pure nightmare fuel.
David Lynch, of course, basically built an entire career out of dream logic, and nobody understood the cinematic nightmare quite like Lynch. Eraserhead is essentially a 90-minute nightmare. Blue Velvet feels like somebody discovered a hole underneath normal suburban America and crawled inside it. Lost Highway is full of sexual anxiety, identity shifts and nightmare logic.
Mulholland Drive might actually be structured like a dream gradually collapsing into a nightmare. And Twin Peaks: The Return contains some of the most disturbing dream imagery ever broadcast on television.
Lynch understood something incredibly important: dreams aren't frightening simply because they contain monsters. They're frightening because they almost make sense. You recognize the room, you recognize the person and you understand the conversation, but something is wrong. That's the feeling great sleep-horror movies tap directly into.
Insomnia works differently, but it's just as effective. Instead of being afraid to sleep, you're afraid because you can't. Christian Bale's character in The Machinist hasn't slept properly in an extraordinary amount of time, and the lack of sleep destroys his ability to understand reality.
He becomes physically emaciated, paranoid and increasingly detached from the world around him. Bale's physical transformation got enormous attention when the movie came out, understandably, but the performance works because you believe this guy's brain is shutting down.
Sleep deprivation can make reality itself become unstable, and that's really what all of these movies have in common: they attack our sense of control. Sleep requires surrender. You have to let go, and horror movies are built around the fear of what happens when you lose control.
Sleepwalking takes away control of your body. Sleep paralysis takes away your ability to move. Insomnia takes away your ability to rest. Nightmares take away control of your mind. Dream horror takes away the rules of reality itself.
That's why Dreamscape from 1984 is so much fun. Dennis Quaid plays a psychic who enters other people's dreams, and once the movie gets inside those dream worlds, anything becomes possible. It's science fiction, horror, adventure and thriller all at once, and it's basically a filmmaker being handed permission to create whatever bizarre imagery he can imagine.
Christopher Nolan does something similar on a much larger scale with Inception. I have plenty of issues with Nolan as a filmmaker, as anybody who has read me for a while already knows, but Inception is terrific.
The entire movie is constructed around dreams within dreams within dreams. Cities fold over themselves, gravity disappears and time moves at different speeds depending on what level of consciousness you're in.
Because it's a dream, Nolan gets to create an entire rule book that only applies inside the movie, and that's one of the great pleasures of dream cinema: the filmmaker gets to make the rules.
Then there are movies where sleep and nightmares become metaphors for trauma. Paperhouse, Bernard Rose's terrific 1988 movie, involves a sick young girl whose drawings become part of a dream world that grows increasingly frightening. The fantasy becomes connected to loneliness, fear and childhood trauma.
Bad Dreams, directed by Andrew Fleming, takes trauma in another direction, with Jennifer Rubin playing a survivor whose past begins invading her consciousness through terrifying visions.
And then you've got something like The Night House, which I think is one of the great modern horror movies about grief, death and the terror of nothingness. Rebecca Hall plays a widow whose husband has died by suicide and she begins experiencing increasingly strange things in the house he built for them.
Is she dreaming? Is she being haunted? Is grief destroying her perception of reality? Is something genuinely waiting for her? The movie never reduces those questions to one simple answer, which is why it's so effective.
Sleep and grief are connected in strange ways anyway. You dream about people you've lost and, for a few seconds, they're alive again. Then you wake up. That's heartbreaking, and horror understands that.
That's why this particular corner of the genre is so rich. You can make a straight monster movie about nightmares, a psychological drama about insomnia, science fiction about entering somebody else's dreams, a documentary about sleep paralysis or a movie about somebody sleepwalking.
You can make a movie where sleep literally allows aliens to steal your identity, or you can make a completely unrelated movie and suddenly drop in one horrifying nightmare sequence.
Filmmakers love dreams because there are no rules, and audiences understand dreams because everybody has them. We've all had that moment when a nightmare feels completely real.
We've all woken up confused. We've all had dreams where people who shouldn't be alive are alive again, where we're being chased and somehow can't run, where we're falling, or where we need to scream and nothing comes out.
The subconscious is a very strange place, and horror movies belong there.
So even though sleep and I have had a complicated relationship for basically my entire life, I remain endlessly fascinated by movies that explore it. Maybe because I understand the feeling.
I understand lying awake when everybody else seems to be sleeping. I understand waking up from a nightmare and needing a second to figure out where you are.
And I understand why filmmakers keep going back to sleep as a source of terror, because eventually everybody has to close their eyes and, once you do, you're not completely in charge anymore.
So, in honor of Parasomnia, here are ten movies that understand that sometimes the scariest thing you can possibly do is fall asleep.
THE 10 SCARIEST MOVIES ABOUT SLEEP (in no particular order):
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